After arriving back at home in Pennsylvania an hour or so ago, I thought I’d write up my experience at the Virginia Oracle Users Group conference held October 9th and 10th at the Omni Richmond Hotel.

In short, it was awesome. Not only did I get to see ex-coworker Lewis Cunningham, but I also got to meet well-known APEX guru Scott Spendolini of Sumner Technologies, John Krahulec (promoting a nice PL/SQL AJAX toolkit called TURBO Enterprise Web 2.0), April Sims (an editor for IOUG’s SELECT Journal), Bathula Ganga of GIT Services, and many other professional Oracle developers and DBAs. I also sat in on the Oracle Exadata presentation, which appears to be a fairly beefy (yet expensive) hardware/software bundle; I can’t wait to see a TPC-H for it.

Unfortunately, I missed Steven Feuerstein’s keynote, though I’ll probably be able to catch it at another conference. Likewise, because I had to leave early, I missed several of today’s interesting afternoon presentations.

Lastly, I’d especially like to thank Shannon Beckerich and all the other administrative members of VOUG for inviting me to speak and for putting on a splendid conference. In my opinion, the hotel was an excellent venue, and I found the session content well-rounded and applicable to many of the challenges facing today’s Oracle developers and DBAs.  I look forward to visiting VOUG again in the future.