Three intensive and exciting days at the DOAG conference in Nuremberg are over. Once again an impressive event with many presentations, good discussions and a lot of socializing. Here a short summary of my impressions and my presentations.
The yearly DOAG conference, organized by the German Oracle User Group (DOAG), always takes place in November in Nuremberg. With around 400 sessions in 20 parallel tracks, 60 exhibition booths and additional forums and events, it is an excellent place to exchange knowledge about Oracle and to meet a lot of interesting people.
My Impressions
In addition to my own presentations (see below), I attended several sessions about the subjects I’m especially interested in: Data Modeling, DWH Automation, ETL Performance and SQL Optimization. But I also looked over the fence and joined some presentations about database administration, Cloud, Java, APEX, project management, blogging and Twitter analysis. Most of these sessions were really good, some of them even excellent. From my point of view, the quality of the presentations at DOAG is getting better every year.
Two highlights were the keynotes of Gunter Dueck (about the difference between dogs and cats, respectively managers and techies) and Sascha Wolter (about Internet of Things).
Gunter Dueck talking about managers and techies.
Photo: Twitter (@dani_schnider)
Another important part of the conference is the conversation with other people. During the breaks, in the exhibition and at the evening events I chatted with colleagues, former colleagues (and probably future colleagues?), with competitors, customers and with folks I knew only from blogs or books. And of course it was a pleasure to meet the “usual suspects” at the Swiss evening organized by the Swiss Oracle User Group (SOUG).
This year, I had the pleasure to give two interviews for DOAG.tv. Actually, there were three interviews, because one of them we had to record twice because we dived into detail questions in the first take. Anyway, I’m curious about the result on YouTube that will hopefully be published soon.
An informative discussion we had in the Data Vault Forum, a one hour session during the conference. It was interesting to hear about the experience of other people working in this area, and what benefits and challenges they see with Data Vault modeling. I also joined two of the “unconference sessions”, spontaneously organized sessions that are open to everybody. In one of them we discussed about different options to migrate OWB projects, in the second one, Jonathan Lewis and Christian Antognini talked about… – you guess it – yes, about the Oracle optimizer.
My Presentations
I had the opportunity to present two sessions at the DOAG conference:
Das Ende von OWB – was nun? Migrationspfade für OWB-Projekte
Together with my Trivadis colleague Stanislav Lando we presented a session about possible migration paths for OWB projects. Because Oracle Warehouse Builder is not supported anymore after Oracle 12c Release 1, existing projects must be migrated to other technologies. We explained several options with Oracle Data Integrator, pure PL/SQL, Data Warehouse generators and ETL tools of third-party providers.
Download Presentation | Download White Paper (both in German)
Modellierung agiler Data Warehouses mit Data Vault
In my second presentation, I talked about Data Vault modeling. Because this modeling method for Enterprise Data Warehouses is getting more and more popular, but is not well-known for many people, I started with an overview of the Data Vault concepts and its basic elements. Then I explained how data model extensions, data integration and historization can be handled with Data Vault. Finally, I showed with a little live demo how dimensions can be loaded from a Data Vault model into a dimensional Data Mart.
Download Presentation | Download Article (both in German) | Explanation of Live Demo
Photo: Twitter (@ChrisAntognini)
Data Warehousing with Oracle 