The annual conference of the Croatian Oracle User Group: four days on Red Island near Rovinj, 14 to 17 October 2026, with 88 sessions from 64 listed speakers on Oracle Database, APEX and AI.
HrOUG 2026 is the annual conference of the Croatian Oracle User Group (Hrvatska udruga Oracle korisnika), held on Red Island off Rovinj, Croatia. The published programme runs from a Wednesday evening opening on 14 October to a closing and prize draw on Saturday 17 October, with 88 sessions on Oracle Database, Oracle APEX, AI and agents, performance tuning, cloud and analytics. It is a small, community-run conference (focus: Oracle technologies, database architecture, and AI and machine learning in Oracle environments for the Croatian and regional Oracle community).
14 to 17 October 2026. Maistra Select Island Hotel Istra, Red Island (Crveni otok, also called St. Andrew Island), Rovinj, Croatia. The opening is on Wednesday 14 October from 7:00 pm, sessions run on Thursday 15 and Friday 16 October, and a final morning of seven sessions on Saturday 17 October ends with the closing and prize draw at 11:30 am. The organiser's conference page says the opening is at 18:00 and describes the closing as after breakfast on 17 October; the live agenda, which the organiser says is always the current state, shows the times above.
HrOUG (Croatian Oracle User Group, Hrvatska udruga Oracle korisnika), a non-profit association founded in 1995 in Zagreb and registered at Travanjska ulica 3, Kerestinec, 10431 Sveta Nedelja. The organising committee is led by president Davor Rankovic, with David Rankovic as event manager. Tickets are sold by Monera d.o.o., hotel booking and transfers go through the travel agency ONE4Travel, and the same association runs the JavaCro Java conference.
500, an organiser figure for the three working days; the 2025 site gave "more than 450" and the 2023 closing page "over 400 participants" (all organiser figures, none audited). The audience is Oracle database administrators, Oracle and APEX developers, data and enterprise architects and IT managers, with participants described by the organiser as coming from Croatia, the region and the whole world (no country breakdown is published). Accompanying persons can register for the social programme but cannot enter the sessions.
Compared with HrOUG 2025 (15 to 18 October 2025, same island hotel, billed by the organiser as the 30th edition): the dates move to 14 to 17 October, the organiser's headline figure rises from "more than 450" to 500, Oracle is listed as general sponsor where the 2025 site named OPN Business Solutions as gold sponsor, and the programme leans on Oracle APEX 26.1 and Oracle 26ai: 31 of the 88 session titles mention AI, agents, vectors, semantic search or 26ai. The agenda and mobile app run on Sessionize. The 2026 edition is not numbered on the official site; by the organiser's own count it would be the 31st.
88 sessions of 45 minutes in five halls (the call for speakers lists ten topic areas, from Database and Infrastructure to Strategy and Innovation). The first session, on Wednesday 14 October at 7:40 pm after the opening and a welcome talk, is Dominic Giles of Oracle, "AI: The Journey So Far, Where Oracle Database Is Today, and What Comes Next"; he returns on Thursday at 12:50 pm with "What is Oracle Database Development up to?". Other sessions include Kamil Stawiarski on performance tuning as math, Dani Schnider on "The SQL Horror Show", Martin Klier on "Cat Pics and Kill Chains: AI in Modern Warfare", Christian Rokitta (Oracle) on APEX 26.1, and Hans Viehmann (Oracle) on graphs, vectors and agents. About 20 titles are APEX sessions and seven are in Croatian. Thursday and Friday carry 40 sessions each. The full agenda is at https://2026.hroug.hr/eng/Agenda.
Published roster, 64 speakers on the official speakers page as of 10 October 2026, with affiliation as listed there:
Parallel 45-minute talks in five halls: A (Main), B (Club), C (Restaurant -1), D (Apartments, a separate building about 150 metres from the hotel) and E (Marie). The call for speakers allowed double-length 90-minute lectures and 2 to 3 hour workshop slots, but the published agenda shows only 45-minute sessions. Breaks of 20 minutes sit mid-morning and mid-afternoon, with a 90-minute lunch at 1:30 pm. Speakers bring their own laptops; rooms have HDMI projectors and the organiser does not supply laptops. Sessions are mostly in English, with seven Croatian titles.
Wednesday 14 October: dinner at 8:30 pm and socialising in the hotel lobby from 9:30 pm to midnight, with a caricaturist, an illusionist and board games. Thursday 15 and Friday 16 October: a party at the castle building, 9:00 pm to 1:05 am on Thursday and 9:00 pm to 2:00 am on Friday, with live music (a band on Thursday, a DJ and karaoke on Friday), a Texas Hold'em poker tournament on Thursday, table football, darts, billiards, cornhole, a Magic: The Gathering corner, Paint & wine sessions that need booking at the accreditation desk, and two photo booths on Friday. The organiser provides a limited quantity of free drinks during the evening socials and free drinks with lunch and dinner. Conference-rate spa treatments are offered, and guests staying at the hotel use the pool and saunas free. A prize draw closes the conference on Saturday.
The ticket shop on 10 October 2026 shows one product, the full conference ticket, at the late bird price: EUR 989.60 excluding VAT, with EUR 900.00 shown struck through beside it (presumably the regular price, unverifiable information). The ticket includes access to all lectures and workshops, meals and drinks during meals, evening entertainment, boat transport to Red Island or Katarina Island and back, conference materials and a gift. The price tiers on the tickets page are blind bird 1 to 30 June, early bird 1 July to 15 August, regular 16 August to 30 September and late bird 1 to 15 October; the shop itself says the late bird ticket is available until 17 October 2026. HrOUG member companies get one free ticket, or two with the partner membership; members get 10% off all tickets except the accompanying-person ticket; companies that pay for 10 tickets get the 11th free. Hotel rooms at the venue cost EUR 159 per night for a single and EUR 129 per person per night in a double, booked through ONE4Travel. Payment is by card (HT PayWay) or bank transfer, in euros. Speakers pay no event fee.
The call for speakers on Sessionize opened on 1 March 2026 and closed on 1 June 2026 ( closed), so no submissions are possible for 2026. Speakers pay no event fee. Accepted speakers had to send slides at least seven days before the conference and must send a PDF, ZIP or RAR afterwards for publication on the conference site. For the next edition, watch https://sessionize.com/hroug-2026 and the organiser's site; the 2026 call was announced for selection by 15 June 2026.
The official site invites companies to fill in a sponsorship form (https://forms.office.com/e/ht01sxFphN) or write to the organiser, who offers several packages and says it will build a custom package if none fits. Package prices are not publicly disclosed. Sponsors are listed by tier (general, silver, bronze, venue, media) and no separate exhibition hall is described; the programme and ticket pages mention no stands.
Published sponsor list on the official site, 10 October 2026:
Oracle, TC2 and Dbvisit also have staff on the speaker roster.
No delegate company list is published, so this reads from the 64 listed speakers. Eight speakers are Oracle employees, and two are from silver sponsor TC2 and one from bronze sponsor Dbvisit. The rest are mainly independent Oracle and APEX consultancies and service firms (Accenture, Pythian, Qualogy, Miracle Finland, ORACON, United Codes, ORA-600, Performing Databases) plus a handful of end users such as HEP, BSS Bohnenberg, Orsted Polska and Kindred Group.
Not publicly disclosed. The official site has no press or accreditation page. General enquiries go to info@hroug.hr or +385 91 148 76 78. The two media sponsors, Mreža (media partner) and Računalniške novice (media partner), are the organiser's listed media channels.
None found in independent sources for the 2026 edition. The only third-party mentions found are listings: Oracle's ACE programme blog lists the 14 to 17 October 2026 conference among October community events, and Sessionize and event aggregators carry it. Mreža (media partner) and Računalniške novice (media partner) are listed as media sponsors; no article from either was found.
Nothing to rank yet. The only coverage found is listings (Oracle's ACE blog, aggregators), which repeat the organiser's dates; the two media sponsors would count as placed coverage, not independent reporting. The attendance figures (500 for 2026, "more than 450" for 2025, "over 400" for 2023) are all organiser claims, and the Sessionize call page quotes yet another undated pair of figures, 80 lecturers and 400 participants.
Anyone outside the Oracle stack, and anyone who wants a multi-vendor expo floor: the sponsor tiers show a handful of vendors and no exhibition hall. Speakers cannot apply for 2026 because the call closed on 1 June. Budget-conscious buyers should note that the late bird ticket at EUR 989.60 excluding VAT is the dearest tier, and that a hotel night costs EUR 129 to EUR 159 on top.
It is a regional Oracle user group conference in mid-October, listed by Oracle's ACE programme among October community events. Within the Developer AI calendar it is a database-and-AI niche: Oracle 26ai, AI agents, vectors and APEX 26.1 account for a large share of sessions, but this is vendor-stack content for Oracle practitioners rather than a general AI engineering conference.
No edition found outside Rovinj. HrOUG is annual (two editions in 2022, spring and autumn) and the 2016 to 2026 conference sites place it in Rovinj, on Red Island in the recent years. The same association runs JavaCro, a separate Java conference sold through the same shop.
The call for speakers names Croatian and English as the official languages. Of the 88 session titles, 81 are in English and seven in Croatian. The official site is available in Croatian and English.
No livestream or recording offer found. The ticket is an in-person pass, and the organiser requires speakers to send slides, which are posted on the conference website after the event. Session content is available through the Sessionize mobile app and the online agenda during the conference.
If participation is cancelled by 30 September 2026 the organiser refunds 80% of the ticket price; if cancelled from 1 October 2026 it refunds 50%. A participant can be replaced, so the new person receives the accreditation, until 10 October 2026. The organiser's terms also reserve the right to change the venue, timing and programme, and to postpone the event for legal or public health reasons; participants cannot claim losses from pandemic-related changes.
Not publicly disclosed by the organiser. The venue is an island hotel reached by a 15-minute boat from Rovinj, parking is about 1 km from the pier with a shuttle, and Hall D is in a separate building about 150 metres from the hotel. Third-party hotel listings mention a step-free entrance and wheelchair-accessible restaurant and registration desk (unverifiable information); ask the organiser at info@hroug.hr before booking.
Take the 15-minute boat from the Delfin pier near Hotel Park at the entrance of Rovinj marina. It runs from 5:30 am from Rovinj to 1:00 am from the island, every 30 minutes, and is free for participants who show their accreditation. Free hotel parking is about 1 km from the pier near Hotel Eden with a shuttle bus; allow about 30 minutes for parking and the return shuttle. The nearest airport is Pula (PUY, 30 km, about 30 minutes by car), then Trieste (150 km), Ljubljana (180 km) and Zagreb (250 km, about 2.5 hours). Check-in is from 3:00 pm and check-out by 11:00 am.
It puts the vendor, its users and independent consultants on one island for three nights: Oracle is general sponsor and has eight speakers, while 56 of the 64 listed speakers come from consultancies, partners and end users. The Oracle APEX and Oracle 26ai content is current (APEX 26.1 sessions, with 31 of 88 titles on AI), and the programme committee includes well-known community figures such as Kim Berg Hansen, Alex Nuijten and Kamil Stawiarski, who also speak.
Every number in this fiche about size is the organiser's own: 500 attendees for 2026, "more than 450" for 2025 and "over 400" for 2023, with no audit or registration count published, and the Sessionize call page still quotes 80 lecturers and 400 participants. The 64 speakers and 88 sessions are the only countable facts, and they are countable because the speaker and programme pages list them one by one. Eleven of those 64 speakers work for Oracle, silver sponsor TC2 or bronze sponsor Dbvisit, which is normal for a user group conference but means the sponsor tiers and the speaker list overlap.
Official site: https://2026.hroug.hr/ (English version at https://2026.hroug.hr/eng/). The agenda is at https://2026.hroug.hr/eng/Agenda, the speakers at https://2026.hroug.hr/eng/Speakers, the tickets and policies at https://2026.hroug.hr/eng/Tickets, and the ticket shop at https://shop.hroug.hr/. The association's site is https://www.hroug.hr/. General contact: info@hroug.hr, +385 91 148 76 78. Organising committee: Davor Rankovic (president) and David Rankovic (event manager). The programme committee is Leo Mršić, Mirela Ardelean, Kim Berg Hansen, Heli Helskyaho, Morana Butković, Alex Nuijten, Ljiljana Perica, Davor Rankovic, Sandesh Rao, Branko Mihaljević, Velimir Srića and Kamil Stawiarski. Updates: LinkedIn group at https://www.linkedin.com/groups/4364683/ and X account @HrOUG_Croatia.