Happy New Year 2019 to all of you!

Happy New Year 2019 to all of you! And thanks for reading the blog. And thanks also for the warm feedback you gave me in the past 20 months since I started this blog on a new platform.

Photo by Trent Szmolnik on Unsplash

I wish you all a very good start into the new year. If you wonder why I post this while the year is already 7 days old, we Germans have a lot of holidays – and this season it was pretty attractive to take two weeks off with just spending 5 vacation days. Hence, my working year 2019 starts more or less today.

What happened in 2018?

For me, 2018 was a really busy year. I saw my flight statistic for 2018 – and despite the fact that I planned to cut back on travel, the opposite happened. Lufthansa tells me that I spent quite some time up in the air.

This equates to 3.75 times around the earth or 0.39 times of the distance to the moon (to the bright side of course). My carbon dioxide is terrible for sure. It doesn’t help much that I don’t do cruises (way more terrible than flights for many reasons) except for the Norwegian User Group conference. Or don’t drive much with my car. And even hike and walk whenever possible.

This number is a bit more scary:

Well, that doesn’t include the time going to and from an airport, waiting there in security or immigration lines, having a layover. But at least I had no flight delays with United Airlines and no pilot or cabin staff strikes this year. Even taking the train several times worked out well. Overall, travel wise 2018 was a pretty good year. And I had years with way more airtime involved.

I attended a good number of conferences. Of course, OOW is a must. And I’m so happy that we’ve had so many people coming to our talks – and having such great folks on stage with us. Thanks again for your hard work, Daniel, Soner, Kamran and Julian! And there were also RMOUG, OUGN, OUG Ireland, AOUG, POUG, DOAG and UKOUG to name a few. Please always keep in mind how much work and free time these people spend putting those conferences together. I would like to thank all of them. It’s a tough job – and attendees expect a lot. You guys have my full respect. Please keep up the hard work. And I look forward to the 2019 events already such as the OBUG conference.

What else happened in my area in 2018? Of course, Oracle 18c got released. And lately also on ports such as AIX and HP-UX. I spent a lot of time working with customers (and still do) on their go-live projects with 12.2.0.1 and 18c. And our team will release an awesome tool, the AutoUpgrade tool soon, which allows you unattended database upgrades. I’m pretty excited.

Overall, 2018 was an awesome year. I met so many great people, I attended excellent conferences, I saw many impressive talks – and it always puzzles me how good Oracle experts out there are. And how cool many of them are as well.

I learned a lot new things in 2018 – but I looked also into more SRs than since my days in Oracle Support a while ago.

Yes, and 2018 was also my “10th anniversary” in April working for Roy and Carol in the Database Upgrade team. A team which is spread out between Nashua, Redwood Shores, Guadalajara and Munich – and believe me, it’s an awesome team.

What do we plan for 2019?

Since we switched to a yearly release model, you can assume that we will release Oracle 19c this year. To be a bit more precise (see MOS Note: 742060.1), it is planned to be released in the first half of calendar year 2019.

As Oracle Database 19c will be the terminal release of Oracle 12.2 with recently an extra year of Premier Support already announced, there will be a lot of demand for workshops and customer projects in the upcoming months and years.

We, that’s Roy, Bill and myself, for will still do conferences such as OBUG, RMOUG, IOUG and of course DOAG, UKOUG and OOW. My schedule until April seems to be pretty full already. And I look forward to another exciting year in the upgrade and migration area.

Hope to see you soon again!

Have a great start into 2019!

–Mike