Today is the day that I have had little time to really mentally prepare for as my trip to the European Commission. I still find it amazing that I have this opportunity to speak as part of the government process to complete this multi-billion dollar deal. Somehow I am now in the middle of it and today is the day that I finally fly to Brussels.
The entire trip to Brussels is a first for me, I have been many places and seen many great things. I find that breathing in a great city from its architecture so important when I go to places with great history and Brussels seems to have held onto its ancient roots. As for my presentation. Another first, I have spoken in front of many audiences in my day but for most of those talks it has generally alright to open with a joke. I expect that after the team gets through reviewing my content they may decide to pull the joke and go with the more serious stuff.
I am actually very exciting to present some preliminary information about the types of databases that people are running. The IOUG along with Unisphere Research we have been conducting a survey on virtualization and we have some results already that are interesting. Turns out that of the people who took the survey close to 90% run Oracle as their enterprise database and of that almost 90% of those companies also run MS SQL Server and then 44% use MySQL. The results are interesting and deeper than this but some of it will form the basis of some of are existing arguments. I together with Ronin Miles, the Chairman of the UKOUG, will present the position of the user communities and it all begins in just a couple of days.
On the lighter side I was thinking about some of the great adventures and places that I have been part of my life already. And in no particular order:
- Discovering Israel (wow….that’s history)
- Exploring Rome
- Living in London for 6 months
- Exploring the ruins of Pompeii
- St Petersburg
- Dubrovnik, Croatia
- Attending the 1976 Olympic in Montreal
- Meeting Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau
- Being at the 1994 NY Rangers Game 7 win in the conference finals
- Nos Expos (enough said)
- Attending 3 Stanley Cup parades
- Being there as my home province of Quebec was considering separation; I heard one of the greatest speeches in Quebec history as Rene Levesque called on Quebecers to rally after the loss for the separatists
- Seeing the kids grow up….that’s the greatest adventure
- And now on to: Speaking at the EC
I am sure there are many others……it’s amazing to look back and see where we have been and how much we have already done. Of course there is still so much to go.
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