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Archive for August 10th, 2018

ODev Yathra Tour 2018 – discovering Incredible India

Posted by Kamran Agayev A. on 10th August 2018

Last month, after long brainstorm, I decided to take my chance and accepted my participation at Indian Oracle ODev Yathra tour. Despite the fact that I’ve visited India (Hyderabad) 2 times in the past for the Sangam conferences, I wanted to discover India more and decided to take 4 cities out of 7.

For the Yathra Tour I submitted 2 papers:

The first one was about “8 ways to migrate your On-Premis database to Oracle Cloud” where I was talking about different ways to migrate the database based on the downtime and the migration requirements to the Oracle Cloud.

The second session “Create, configure and manage Disaster Recovery in Oracle Cloud for On-Premises database” was about creating, configuring and managing DR on the Oracle Cloud using different techniques as well as configuring high level database, backup and network security.

When the agenda was published, I got a lot of messages from the DBAs of the cities at which I was not supposed to participate – that they are looking forward to meet me. So I talked to Sai Ram, the organizer of the Yathra Tour and he managed to put me into the agenda of the rest cities and I accepted one of the hardest decisions of my life and took all cities. I was having (and still have) a lot of ongoing projects in my company and had health issues that were blocking me to travel a long distance for two weeks. But I decided to push my limits and go beyond it.

So, finally, the travel started. I took my first flight to Abu Dhabi, and from Abu Dhabi to Chennai. Landed in Chennai, took a cab to the hotel, have some rest and was in the lobby at 7.30 AM next morning. Yes, this time was the common checkout time from the hotel every day :) I met Oracle Fusion expert Basheer Khan, Machine Learning PM Sandesh, Exadata PM Gurmit in the morning and we had a breakfast together. Then we took a cab and went to the venue.

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So the daily routine for the conference was 7.30AM checkout from the hotel, cab drive to the venue, registration, introduction speech of Sai and other AIOUG members, then delivering presentations, having launch (most of the time spicy Indian launch :) ), closing ceremony at 6.00PM, driving to the airport, flying to the next city, bunch of security checks and etc., driving to the hotel, check-in and off to bed at 1.00AM and then checkout at 7.30 AM and off to the next venue again. Scary, right? :)

The next city was Bengaluru. As we had one extra day there, I decided to have a lunch outside in a random restaurant. The place was near the hotel and I ordered biryani as always :) Although I asked for “less spicy” biryani, I was served with the spicy one. My tongue was burned out and I was hardly drinking the tea for the next 2 days :) But it was very delicious. In the evening I took a small trip to MG (Mahatma Gandhi) road. It was too crowded, fascinating place and I was hardly got rid of a man who was chasing me and trying to sell a chess for 1500 Rupes (which originally was for 600 Rupee) :) He didn’t know I train JiuJitsu :)

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The next city was Ahmedabad. And I was not the only person who was visiting this city for the first time. Actually none of us (mostly Indian speakers) visited Ahmedabad so far :) The roads of this city were wide, and I was told that the Ahmadabad guys are coolest guys in India )) My session was after the launch and I managed to sleep a little bit more and attended the venue later. But unfortunately didn’t manage to visit the barber in the open air whom I was filming with curiosity. He yelled me with his hand and invited me to try his service, but I was late to my session

 

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Next city was Hyderabad and the airport was very familiar to me. I already visited Hyderabad 2 times before. Again, was fortunate to have only one session after the launch and attended the venue a little bit later, met lot of friends that I met in my previous visits and all of us were off to the airport right after the conference.

 

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And we headed to the Pune. I was happy, because we had an extra day in Pune. We arrived to the city in the evening, and the next day after having launch in the hotel, I missed city tour with speakers who were more energized than me :) and found a Starbucks coffee shop and spend few hours reading book (Ikigai – Japanese concept that means “a reason for being.”)  and relaxed a lot. The next day, we checked out from the hotel early in the morning and went to the Oracle office that was bit far from the hotel, and fortunately did a city tour in parallel )) The venue was huge and beautiful and there was a coffee machine that I used a lot to drink a coffee to stay alive. We had a very interactive sessions and after the conference the bus was waiting for us to take us to the Mumbai! It took approximately 4 hours for us to reach to Mumbai, but we enjoyed the travel a lot. In the following link you can see part of our trip in Connor’s video shoot :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUkQqj6oDZw

 

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Mumbai meetup was awesome. I got more questions in just a single session than the rest of the tour J and it ended up finishing the 45 minute session in 1.30 hour! But it was not just a presentation, because of those questions the session was like a discussion which I liked a lot!

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And after the conference, we headed to airport to take the last city – Gurgaon! The next morning I was extremely tired, barely was walking and standing straight. But got a lot of positive energy from the attendees and did 2 sessions successfully. As my flight was on the next day at 4.00 AM, I returned back to the hotel, had some rest and headed to the airport and returned back to my lovely country, Azerbaijan.

 

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So overall, the trip was awesome! It was hard, but it was worth it. I made a new friendships, met online friends that were using my blog posts for years and got a lot of positive feedback, listened stories about how my blog posts saved their lives and etc. :) and it motivated me to write more blog posts in the future. I also attended sessions of other speakers and learned a lot both in terms of presentations and technical skills

I would like to thank to the ODev Yathra Tour organizers, especially Sai Ram for all he had done to make us feel like home, to AIOUG staff, to ACE program – especially Jennifer and Lori for supporting us, to all attendees for taking time and attending our sessions. I love India and the community a lot and looking forward to visit the amazing and incredible India again!

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