Euromnis 2025: Some example topics

[Doug Easterbrook]

hi $all.  

Just a reminder that Euromnis is October 5 -10 2025, in Armhem.  

I’m beginning the process of sending out topic emails to those I’m aware of in a nice/pretty format.   I’ll also copy them to the list and the omnis forum in briefer format so that everybody has the chance to see the bare essentials.

Hope to see you this year.



Doug Easterbrook
doug at artsman.com
Phone (403) 650-1978

these are the first two topics - both of which I’ll be presenting.   The detaild link is below
https://www.omnisworld.co.uk/speakers/doug-easterbrook/
Topic 1: Time Zone Awareness

Businesses, their customers, servers and infrastructure may operate in multiple time zones around the world.   If so, this often requires time zone awareness in applications, calendaring, sales, customer analytics, collaboration, exchanging data with external systems, accurate log synchronization for security & problem solving, and more.   For these reasons, it is better to be explicit about time zones everywhere you have timestamps.

Omnis does not support time zones natively, but your database likely does.   This session shows how to use Postgres features to implement explicit time zone awareness across your systems.   The techniques can be adapted to some other databases like SQL Server, mySql or Oracle.

It will be far easier than you might think.

Topic 2: Text Search & AI Options
There is a clear business case that eliminating duplicate customer records in any CRM has benefits and saves money.   A single view of the customer improves marketing, sales, consumer analysis, response to customer queries, and more.

This session walks through implementing multiple search strategies.   This can be used to find data, provide surprising results and help your employees find that needle in a haystack.  <https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/needle-in-a-haystack>  It will start with the SQL for basic character equality searches that we all know & love and build upon them to enable a single simultaneous search using one or more of: semantic, phonetic, similarity, plurality, root word, synonyms, some language independence, phraseology and full text search.

For example, combining multiple techniques like word roots, phonetics, semantics and similarity, a search provide results like:
'Dug Estrbruk' finds 'Doug Easterbrook'
'Joe Uhrbach' finds 'Joseph Auerbach'
Other techniques can improve and prioritize online search results to give a list of best matching products.   For Euromnis 2025, Doug hopes to include AI search features using PGAI extension in Postgres.