Surrounded by the scenery of the Baltic Sea, the large audience had two days to listen to their favorite masters of Oracle. Pretius was a sponsor of POUG, so the large support from Pretius APEX Team reached this place. What is more, we tried to find out if young people like we, that combining working in Pretius with learning can find something for them. This blog post is a point of view of students attending this type of conference.

Students’ perspective

First of all, we had the opportunity to see how large the global Oracle community is. POUG 2018 was visited by people from many countries and it was a good reason to start following them on Twitter – from the student’s perspective, it is very cool tool because it gives us theoretically unlimited access to Oracle knowledge. All you need to do is ask a question – directly at such an event or remotely using Twitter that is widely used among Oracle community, so if you are a student and you want to start your journey with Oracle, signing to Twitter and using it like RSS channel sounds like a good plan.

The conference was divided into three paths and most topics were focused on database administration, development and APEX. Personally, we wish that we could have more Oracle Application Express presentations, but still it was great to have a keynote delivered by APEX father Mike Hichwa!

Generally, for students like we, it could be very nice to listen less complicated lectures, but still with high level technical knowledge and inspiring topics – perfect for everyone who starts his Oracle adventure. In perfect scenario, attendee inspired by an interesting topic, could start making a deep dive into it and present his achievements on the conference next year during his own presentation. This idea is similar to NextGen initiative – young specialists focused on developing themselves in Oracle technology. What is more, POUG 2018 (hats off to the organizers!) was totally free for students, what is a big chance for every Oracle rookie. Still the question is how to engage more young people to get involved in Oracle stuff?

Presentations

We also want to mention some interesting presentations. First of them was Alex Nuijten’s lecture named “Structuring an APEX application”. Alex presented his own methodology of building applications using APEX. It is good to know that each page can have its dedicated view and package in order to keep application and database structure combined. What is more, it is better to store business logic only in the database because of performance benefits.

Roel Hartman decided to show advanced features of Oracle JET library, especially in presenting data and making it interactive. He underlined how JavaScript libraries could be useful while implementing some unconventional data visualization features, which are unavailable out of the APEX’s box. This lecture was really inspiring and encouraged us to get more knowledge about Oracle JavaScript Extension Toolkit.

It is important to mention the lectures by Przemysław Staniszewski (APEX globalization) and Bartosz Ostrowski (APEX plugins), because a well-described business use case may be more valuable than a clean theory, especially in the world of Oracle APEX programming.

And finally Mike Dietrich’s presentation about database upgrades, migrations and possible problems, that can occur after those operations. Mike mentioned about many possible ways of verification upgrade or migration correctness. Many practical knowledge and real life examples was shown on his slides, what makes his lecture really interesting. 

Of course we cannot forget about the event location and organization. Sopot is really interesting place with great views. After first day of conference we had a big fun on the beach after party. Informal atmosphere let us make a transfer of knowledge, not only about the Oracle 🙂