Back from Tallinn, Estonia

This morning I arrived back from a trip to Tallinn. Oracle Estonia had given me the opportunity to present my SQL Masterclass seminar at their training center in Tallinn, on Thursday and Friday. Thank you all those who spent two days hearing me. Here is a short story about my trip including some photos.

I arrived at Tallinn airport around 1PM local time on Wednesday. My hotel room was located at the 18th floor and I had this splendid view on the old city of Tallinn:



I spent the rest of the afternoon taking a city tour by bus, learning a few things about the history of Tallinn and strolling for an hour or two through the old city. Here are a few of the photos that I took during that stroll:












The seminar itself was on Thursday and Friday. I had spent a huge amount of time preparing the seminar. One of my goals was to present as many recognizable situations as possible that the attendees can apply at their daily job, so I was very pleased to receive some feedback that they indeed found several immediately applicable queries. There is still room for improvement though as a few parts were too short (I had planned one-and-a-half hour per part) and I had an error or two in my scripts that I had overlooked. Hopefully I will get a chance to fix those and present my seminar again somewhere. The feeling at the end was very positive though. The powerpoint and the scripts can be found at the "Presentations and papers" page.

This is a picture of the building where Oracle Estonia and its training center are located:



PS: As expected, during the preparation of the seminar I learnt a couple of new things. A bug with partitioned outer joins and something about connect-by-filtering. I will blog about them soon.