Final day of IDUG EMEA 2013 and I was largely preoccupied with my own presentation. As it was my first time up at the front, rather than sitting and watching a presentation, I was concerned with not making a mess of it. I tried to keep it lively; it’s very hard to concentrate on a presentation delivered in a monotone and accompanied by little more than dozens of syntax diagrams. Especially on the last day of a very busy and technically demanding conference like IDUG. It seemed to go OK: no-one threw any furniture at me and I had 3 or 4 questions at the end which suggests that at least some of my audience had managed to stay awake.
The closing Key Note speech was a witty and detailed appreciation by Marcel den Hartog, on Big Data and to what extent it is going to take over the world and to what extent it is just hype. Then it was time for final hand-shakes, best wishes and promises to meet up next year, before jumping in the taxi and on to the plane home. I’m typing this at 35,000 feet over Northern Spain and looking forward to getting home and then trying to collate and maybe use some of the huge amount of DB2 tips, advice, warnings and new features that we’ve gathered over the last 4 days. There’s enough info from those 4 days to last 4 weeks, if not months.