UKOUG Northern Technology Summit 2018

The UKOUG has run something called the Northern Server Day for several years. Northern because they were held in a northern part of England (but south of Scotland) and Server because the focus was the database server. Over the last couple of years the day has had several streams, covering Database, High Availability and Engineered Systems. So primarily a day for DBAs and their ilk.

This year the event has expanded to let in the developers. Yay!

The Northern Technology Summit 2018 is effectively a mini-conference: in total there are five streams - Database, RAC Cloud Infrastructure & Availability, Systems, APEX and Development. But for registration it counts as a SIG. So it's free for UKOUG members to attend. What astonishingly good value!¹ And it doesn't affect your entitlement to attend the annual conference in December.

The Development stream

The Development stream covers a broad range of topics. Application development in 2018 is a tangled hedge with new technologies like Cloud, AI and NoSQL expanding the ecosystem but not displacing the traditional database and practices. The Development stream presents a mix of sessions from the new-fangled and Old Skool ends of the spectrum.

• The New Frontier: Mobile and AI Powered Conversational Apps. Oracle are doing interesting work with AI and Grant Ronald is king of the chatbots. This is an opportunity to find out what modern day apps can do.
• The New Frontier: Mobile and AI Powered Conversational Apps. Oracle are doing interesting work with AI and Grant Ronald is king of the chatbots. This is an opportunity to find out what modern day apps can do.
• Building a Real-Time Streaming Platform with Oracle, Apache Kafka, and KSQL No single technology is a good fit for all enterprise problems. Robin Moffat of Confluent will explain how we can use Apache Kafka to handle event-based data processing.
• Modernising Oracle Forms Applications with Oracle Jet Oracle Forms was< - still is - a highly-productive tool for building OLTP front-ends. There are countless organisations still running Forms applications. But perhaps the UX looks a little jaded in 2018. So here's Mark Waite from Griffiths Waite to show how we can use Oracle's JET JavaScript library to write new UIs without having to re-code the whole Forms application.
• 18(ish) Things Developers Will Love about Oracle Database 18c Oracle's jump to year-based release numbers doesn't make live easier for presenters: ten things about 10c was hard enough. But game for a challenge, Oracle's Chris Saxon attempts to squeeze as many new features as possible into his talk.
• Modernize Your Development Experience With Oracle Cloud Cloud isn't just something for the sysadmins, there's a cloud for developers too. Sai Janakiram Penumuru from DXC Technology will explain how Oracle Developer Cloud might revolutionise your development practices.
• Designing for Deployment As Joel Spolsky says, shipping is a feature. But it's a feature which is hard to retrofit. In this talk I will discuss some design principles which make it easier to build, deploy and ship database applications.

Everything else

So I hope the Development stream offers a day of varied and useful ideas. There are things you might be able to use right now or in the next couple of months, and things which might shape what you'll be doing next year. But it doesn't matter if not everything floats your boat. The cool thing about the day is that delegates can attend any of the streams. ² .

So you can listen to Nigel Bayliss talking about Optimisation in the Database Stream, Vipul Sharma: talking about DevOps in the Availability stream, Anthony talking about Kubernetes in the Systems stream and John Scott talking about using Docker with Oracle in the Apex stream. There are sessions on infrastructure as code, upgrading Oracle 12cR1 to 12cR2, GDPR (the new EU data protection law), the Apex Interactive grid, Apache Impala, and Cloud, lots of Cloud. Oh my!

The full agenda is here (pdf).

Register now

So if you're working with Oracle technology and you want to attend this is what you need to know:

• Date: 16th May 2018
• Location: Park Plaza Hotel, Leeds
• Cost: Free for UKOUG members. There is a fee for non-members but frankly you might as well buy bronze membership package and get a whole year's work of access to UKOUG events (including the annual conference). It's a bargain.

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<sup>1. The exact number of SIG passes depends on the membership package you have↩
2. The registration process requires you to pick a stream but that is just for administrative purposes. It's not a lock-in.↩</sup>