Each year, since the company creation in 2010, dbi services attends the DOAG conference in Nürnberg. Since 2013 we even have a booth.

The primary goal of participating to the DOAG Conference, is to get an overview about the main trends in the Oracle business. Furthermore, this conference and our booth allow us to welcome our Swiss and German customers and thank them for their trust. They’re always pleased to receive some nice Swiss Chocolate produced in Delémont (Switzerland), city of our Headquarter.

But those are not the only reasons why we attend this event. The DOAG conference is also a way to promote our expertise with our referents and to thank our performing consultants for their work all over the year. We consider the conference as a way to train people and improve their skills.

Finally some nice social evenings take place, first of all the Swiss Oracle User Group (SOUG) “Schweizer Abend”, the Tuesday Evening, secondly the “DOAG party” on Wednesday evening. dbi services being active in the Swiss Oracle User Group, we always keep a deep link to the Oracle community.

As a Chief Sales Officer I tried to get an overview of the main technical “Oracle trends”, through the successes of our sessions (9 in total) all over the conference. The “success” being measured in term of number of participants to those sessions.

At a first glance I did observe a kind of “stagnation” of the interest about Cloud topics. I can provide several evidences and explanations about that. First of all the Key Note during the first day presenting a study over German customers concerning the cloud adoption didn’t reveal any useful information, according to me. The Cloud adoption increases, however there are still some limitations in the deployment of Cloud solutions because of security issues and in particular the cloud act.

Another possible reason about the “small” interest about Cloud topics during the conference, according to me, relies on the fact that Cloud became a kind of “commodity”. Furthermore, we all have to admit that Oracle has definitively not a leadership position in this business. Amazon, Azure and Google definitively are the leaders in this business and Oracle remains a “small” challenger.

Our session from Thomas Rein did not had so much attendees, even if we really presented a concrete use case about Oracle Cloud usage and adoption. The DOAG conference is a user group conference, Techies mostly attend the conference and Techies have to deal with concrete issues, currently the Oracle Cloud does not belong to them.

So what were the “main topics” according to what I could observe ?

Open Source had a huge success for us, both the MySQL and the two PostgreSQL tracks were very very successful, thanks to Elisa Usai and Daniel Westermann.

Some general topics like an “introduction to Blockchain” also had a huge success, thanks to Alain Lacour for this successful session.

Finally the “classicals”, like DB tuning on the old-fashion “On Prem” architectures also had a huge success, thanks to our technology leader Clemens Bleile and to Jérôme Witt who explained all about the I/O internals (which are of course deeply link with performance issues).

Thanks to our other referents: Pascal Brand (Implement SAML 2.0 SSO in WLS and IDM Federation Services) and our CEO David Hueber (ODA HA: What about VMs and backup?) who presented some more “focused” topics.

I use this Blog post to also thank the Scope Alliance and in particular Esentri for the very nice party on Wednesday Evening, beside hard work, hard party is also necessary 🙂

Below, Daniel Westermann with our customer “die Mobiliar” on the stage, full room :

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