The Quest conference, Blueprint 4D 2023 was at the Hilton Anatole in Dallas, Texas this year. This was my first time attending a conference that I had to travel to since before Covid. This was also my first Quest conference after the very last Collaborate 2019. Collaborate was originally the annual conference of three different Oracle user groups, OATUG, Quest, and IOUG. In 2019, IOUG joined Quest. Since then, OATUG and Quest have had separate conferences.
Sunday – Arrival
Sunday morning, I woke up to check my boarding passes for my flight to and from Dallas only to discovered that I had none! After more than an hour on the phone with American Airlines, we had the issue rectified. When I had booked the tickets in March, I was experiencing issues with their website. It took me several tries and then it finally booked. I think what happened was a system glitch on their end and it possibly got double booked. Then someone or some process canceled my legitimate reservation. Persistence paid off to get my air travel plans back on track.
My wife dropped my off at the airport and I arrived in Dallas by late afternoon. I was staying at the hotel across the street from the conference. Check in was a breeze and I dropped off my suitcase in my room. Then went across the street to get checked in to the conference and get my badge. I met Opal Alapat for dinner as we hadn’t seen each other since KScope 2019. We went to a nearby BBQ place called Ferris Wheelers Backyard and BBQ. The food was good but the conversation was better. After dinner, I headed back to my room to prepare for my first of three sessions of the week.
Monday – Day 1
Monday morning started early for me. Fellow ACE, Sean Scott and I had the Maximum Availability Architecture – Special Interest Group session at 9:00 AM. We had a decent turnout with some interesting discussions.
At lunchtime, we all converged into the large ballroom. The areas were split up by tracks so I joined some folks in the Database and Technology section. The food was very good.
In the afternoon I attended some more sessions. One my favorite sessions of this day was “Performance Tuning Using the Advisor Framework” by Oracle ACE, Roger Cornejo.
In the evening we had the Oracle ACE dinner hosted by Sean Stacey. We went to a place called Delucca Gaucho Pizza and Wine. This place was interesting as servers keep coming around with different types of pizza and asking if you’d like to try it. At the end they even brought dessert pizzas! My favorite pizza was the truffle four cheeses pizza. It was nice to attend and converse with everyone after such a long hiatus.
Tuesday – Day 2
The keynote session, Minding the (Talent) Gap was the first session in the morning. This had moments that were really interesting and portions that were not so interesting. I prefer the keynotes to be something inspirational. This was not it.
Lunch was in the vendor hall so it provided us with an opportunity to speak with various vendors.
Once again the sessions were good and two of my favorites of the day were:
- Oracle SQL Plan Management (SPM your imperative performance tool by Gary Gordhamer
- Cloud Migration — Oracle on AWS/OCI/Azure by Valli Ramanathan
Later that evening, Viscosity and Quest had a private party on the rooftop of the Te Deseo restaurant. It was good to see and chat with a bunch of people I hadn’t seen in a while. I left around 10 PM. At my hotel, I spent a few hours working on my presentation that I had to give the next day.
Wednesday – Day 3
I had another early start and rehearsed my presentation one more time. Then I attended some sessions. My favorite ones of the day were:
- Architecting Oracle on Azure for Success by Kellyn Gorman
- Build and Deploy an OML4SQL AI to Predict Rain by Craig Shallahamer
Lunch was in the vendor hall again. Lunch consisted of pizza and meatball sliders. Of the three days of lunches, this one was not so good. The food was just bland.
In the afternoon I had my presentation, “How to be a Superhero (Using the Oracle Cloud Free Tier)”. This was the last time slot of the day at 5:00 PM right before the appreciation party. Surprisingly, folks showed up and there seemed to be a lot of interest in the topic.
Later that evening, we had the option to take a complimentary bus ride to AT&T stadium for the appreciation party. This was about a 25 minute ride each way. The AT&T Stadium was pretty awesome. We had the place to ourselves. Self guided tours were allowed so you could see the tunnels, locker rooms, and the press room. The food was really tasty and everyone received two complimentary drink tickets. By 9:30 PM, I was ready to get back to my room and catch up on my sleep.
Thursday – Final Day
The last day of the conference had arrived. I went to a couple of sessions in the morning before joining the panel, Stump an ACE! We had some good questions from the audience. My favorite was the question I asked of the ACEs at the end, what do you like to do for fun that isn’t technology related. We learned quite a bit about our ACEs. 🙂
Right after this, I had to leave to meet my work colleagues for lunch. While I was in Dallas, I had the opportunity to meet my teammates in person. We had a wonderful lunch at Mexican Sugar. Afterwards, we headed to our office in Irving. I worked for a few hours before leaving to catch my flight home. My flight was delayed about 90 minutes. It was good to finally get home.
Summary
Overall, this was a fantastic conference. The Quest team did an awesome job with everything. No issues with scheduling, food availability, or anything of that sort. The appreciation party at AT&T stadium was awesome and no issues with transportation. The mobile app worked very well too. The sessions on the Database and Technology track were all top notch. I would definitely recommend this conference!
