SQL Saturday Oslo
By Rob Litjens
Last weekend it was The-day or D-Day for me. It was the first in person event where I am presenting.
My wife and I flew to Oslo from Dusseldorf. That was a breeze, sure if you know that we had the intention to take the boat from Emden to Kristiansand. See this link why… For me and my wife it looked like it had to be. When investigating traveling options end of May, we should pay only 535 for a single boat trip. End of may it was 835, excluding a cabin on board.
From the airport we took the train to Oslo. 20 minutes on high speed and you are in the middle of the city. A 10 minute walk to the Hostel was the following. I would not recommend Anker Hostel anymore to anyone. After dropping the luggage we went to visit the city. You may have seen some pictures of it on BlueSky (the better X).
Friday I had booked a training day on Fabric. For me it was quite interesting, especially how it is constructed and how it differs from all the other products. The idea of how it works is great. I will keep it to my self until I have prepared some presentation for my employer.
The evening we had an excellent speakers diner at a Japanese restaurant. 15 dishes with Fish, meat and other nice Japanese tasting food. Really liked it.
Saturday morning early out of bed. Next to speaking I am also volunteering at the establishment. We moved the furniture out of the Aula and made sure the sponsors could take their room. After that it was time to look at my presentation and the Network connectivity. All seems good. Added some extra tests, and it seems to be doing very well.
At 10:45 I needed to moderate the session of Roni Vered. She is a senior DBA helping customers at AWS migrating to the Cloud. She explained the options you have on AWS. It consists of RDS, RDS Custom and EC2. It is interesting that they offer redundancy by not using AlwaysOn, but by offering block level duplication in the same zones. Nice lessons learned when using AWS for your SQL workloads!
At lunch there was the Women In Technology meeting again. This consisted of merely women who are working in the Nordic countries, but also Rie Merritt (IrishSQL). Still “interesting” to see that women still are not being accepted as (technology) experts. Why dont we accept anyone based on their knowledge?
After lunch it was my time. I was a bit nervous because it was my first presentation at an Event like this, so in person. They booked a small room for 15 people, but there were chairs outside for when needed. It was not needed. I had 10 really interested people there who looked at my session about Defender for SQL on Premise. Questions came from the public and it seems interesting to find a way on how I can do a presentation on how we implement this within the bank. So with Ansible, an inventory, and API’s. Let me know on LinkedIn if you want to see this.
After the Presentation it was time to rest a bit and go for the last moderating session. The name of the session was “SQL Server 2022 Contained Availability Groups” by Brandon Leach. The presentation and knowledge he distributed on this session is great, despite he just killed his homelab and that the VPN to his homelab was not functioning. Great session overall!
After the sessions I helped a bit to cleanup the rooms and move the furniture back. Next to that there was an After Event drink planned at the Duckpin. My wife and I decided to eat and drink something there and next to that, to take a rest.
Sunday morning was a traditional Oslo SQL Saturday Evaluation event. With the ones still present in Oslo and who want to go to visit a Lake and eat something at a camp fire we sat together and looked back. Interesting talks about how sessions gets selected. Even one of the guys went for a traditional swim in the lake which was only 15 degrees celcius…
After all these “official” events, my wife and I went back to the city center. There were harbour days. We decided to take a boattrip round the isles of Oslo. Really beautiful.
On monday, we flew back to Dusseldorf. End of event. End of a nice experience. I love this!
And then, finding this lovely note next to the Orchids….
Thank you Rune Ovlien Rakeie, Johan Ludvig Brattas, Emilie Ronning, Marthe Moengen, Magnus, Magne Fretheim and Bjorn Wang