OTN APAC 2014 : Beijing – Day 1

 

Having an extended period of sleep was really good. After a week of minimal sleep I felt vaguely human again…

On my last visit to Beijing in 2011 the conference had about 500 attendees registered and we used translated slides and live translation of the speakers. This time it was a much bigger event. Over 1000 people registered, split over 3 tracks. The keynote room held in excess of 1000 people and there were people standing. Quite impressive. Also, there was no slide or live translation for this event. I was going to use my Chinese slides from Shanghai, but the organisers said they preferred the attendees to listen to English and read the English slides. That is quite a change in 3 years.

Another encouraging sign was the number of slots for English speakers was quite limited. The aim of the Oracle ACE program is to encourage a stronger local community, so ultimately it would be good if overseas speakers were totally surplus to requirements. It certainly looks like China is moving that way, which is great. Interestingly, they do not seem to have any interest in the apps side of Oracle. It seems to be purely a tech conference.

In addition to the growth of the conference, there was also a growth in the vendors having stands at the event. It’s kind-of freaky looking at Dell’s Spotlight running with Chinese text. 🙂 I think the growth of the event is really encouraging. I hope it continues to grow.

Since most of the sessions were in Chinese, I spent most of the morning playing catch-up with some stuff for the website. I met up with Bjoern for some food at lunch time, then went to do my session. The room could hold about 500 people. Tom was in the room before me and not surprisingly he had it packed out. I had less than half that number for my session, but I was pretty pleased with that considering it was a straight PL/SQL session and I’m a foreign speaker competing against native speakers.

In the evening we went to the Hotel’s Brazilian Barbecue. 🙂 It was a meat-fest, but there was plenty of Chinese veggie stuff for me to eat and I took full advantage of it. 🙂

I was expecting a really easy night with loads of sleep, but things didn’t work out that way. More about that tomorrow…

Cheers

Tim…

Author: Tim...

DBA, Developer, Author, Trainer.

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