The first two sessions I attended were from Tom Kyte (ask Tom) titled, All (Well, a Lot) about SQL.

Over the years it seems like I get busy working on this critical project or that show stopper bug. New stuff comes out and I skim the titles and decide “I’ll come back and dig in in a few days.” Somehow I rarely go back and dig in. The new features I pick up mostly come from things others put in the code or internet searches to fix an immediate issue.

Watching Tom go through feature after feature it seems like he was reading straight off of my “I’ll get to it” list. Of course, his explanations of the examples are so good that I came away with a better understanding of the things I still don’t know, but at least now I know more about what I don’t know.

Next, I went to Team Development in the Cloud: Introduction to Oracle Developer Cloud Service, by Brian Fry.

Brian gave a great overview of the tools available in the Development Cloud offering. I’ve been using some of them for about a month but like I mentioned above, there were a few that I plan to get too soon. Now, thanks to Brian, I’ll have a head start in figuring them out. But it looks like there’s enough in there, that my list just grew a bit more.

One thing I would like to see is an option to use Gradle, I’m not a big Maven fan, but given everything in the suite I’m sure I can make do with it.

It is nice to just pop an entire development environment up as a service, I can see this saving me so much time.

I’m really looking forward to the IDE in the cloud feature when it comes out. Maybe I can scale down what I require in a laptop.

For my last session of the day I attended Galo Balda’s presentation, Getting Started with Row Pattern Matching in Oracle 12c.

Another thing on my list. I really need to take some time an work on that list.

Galo had several great examples and use cases that really showed me how MATCH_RECOGNIZE can be much more useful than I previously thought. He set a good pace throughout the presentation; fast enough to keep it interesting but it allowed enough time to absorb each example.

I look forward to more from Galo.

I floated in and out of each community event in the evening.  Met quite a few people and had a great time.