AUSOUG Perth conference - from 45k down to 350

Day 2 of the Australian Oracle User Group (AUSOUG) conference in Perth is before me, and I thought I'd pen a very quick note about how the event is going.

I can't say my trip back from OOW was as bad as Babette Turner-Underwood's, but then as an Aussie I can pretty much say I blank the 19hrs of flying out of my life. Yes the flights are horribly long, yes the customs queues are annoying, but I did score a pair of socks from Qantas, so that made it all okay.

As Babette noted in a separate post, the move from OOW with ~45k attendees down to around 350 seems funny. So much so that in the opening keynote by Martin Power we were actually told where the bathrooms are. I don't remember Larry telling the delegates at OOW where the bathrooms were; Larry was rambling something about 30 years of innovation or something..... I guess it's the little things that make a great conference.

This year's Perth conference is up 100 on last year which is great growth over the 50 additional attendees in 2006. And a point I'd like to make is that I always think that at the small conferences, attendees get as much out of it as the larger ones. Presentations are a hit and miss affair, and you can only meet so many people in a day, so basically the end result is the same, though the tickets to the local event are far cheaper. In addition at a small conference like Perth's the atmosphere is much more friendly and far less corporate, which is the way we like it down here.

I can't say I caught too many presentations day 1 as I was hanging out with the SAGE crew, and also introducing speakers. I did sit in on my boss's (Penny Cookson) APEX presentation, where she demonstrated taking APEX to the extreme, and accused me of spending most of OOW at the pub. Strictly not true let me assure you ;) They don't have "pubs" in San Fran Penny, they're called "bars" :P

I also introduced and sat in on Duncan Mill's two JDeveloper presentations. Definitely numbers were up in these sessions this year, and I can see some people looking at the new feature set, particularly the new ADF Faces RC web pages with all the cool AJAX additions, and MDS customisations, and thinking "wow!".

Anyway, onto Day 2 of the conference. Today I present my Load/Stress testing paper "Take a Load Off!" which I presented at the OOW Unconference. Hopefully I've ironed out all the bugs this time. And finally I'll be participating in the "Great Oracle development tools debate" panel session where I'll be defending JDeveloper by tooth and nail.... should be good fun.

Next week is the Melbourne leg of the conference which will be bigger, but with better coffee, so all in all an event worth going to. I hope to see you there.