Oracle Open Week – Wednesday September 21, 2005
Another sunny day in the Bay area, reaching a high of 70 degrees.
Today’s morning keynotes were delivered by Thomas Mendoza, President of Network Applicances, Inc on Simplifying Data Management-Doing More While Spending Less and Chuck Rozwat, Executive VP Server Technologies of Oracle Corp on Middleware and the Grid: The Fusion of Modern Architectures.
The afternoon keynote was from Larry Ellison himself, CEO of Oracle Corp. I thought I would get a seat in the conference room to watch Mr. Ellison speak. Larry was to start at 1:30pm. I drifted over towards the conference room D in the Moscone Center to find the line was about 5-people wide and extending over 3 city blocks! San Francisco has long city blocks too! There had to easily be 10,000 people in just this line alone. I watched the keynote in a nice beanbag chair on a remote monitor in the Moscone West building (where the book store and more speaking rooms are).
Larry spoke for about a half an hour then took questions from the crowd. Larry highlighted 7 areas of focus:
· Open standards – that gives customer choices
· Fusion Middle ware with hot-plugable components – allows Oracle to support your chosen components such as IBM Websphere
· Service Oriented Architecture or SOA that will support non-Oracle apps that are built or purchased to co-exist with Fusion apps
o Many speakers spent time explaining the benefits of this direction at Oracle.
· Security – Larry pointed out Oracle RDBMS’s strengths are security from the beginning stemming from their original clients: CIA and the NSA.
o Encryption at the database, network (SQL*Net), and in the backup facility.
· Business Intelligence – automated purchasing process for example…does this purchase put us over our budget?
· Industry Functionality – apps will do more core functionality
o An example would be fuzzy matches for the bio tech industry, implemented at the database level
· Automation – storage management, automatic paching grid machines
In closing, Larry discussed how Oracle Corp is not just in the software business but the software and service business. He then said he would take questions as long as the question involved sailing! The second question asked was indeed about Larry’s competitive sailing.
After this, I attended a meeting of the Publishers Group. I typically get invited to this meeting specifically designed for those who write and publish Oracle manuscript. There were just over 50 folks in the room, including several well-known publishers. The meeting started promptly at 3pm with VP Oracle Technology Marketing Bob Shimp welcoming us and reviewing the agenda.
Ken Jacobs was first up, Dr. DBA himself, VP Oracle Product Strategy. Ken spoke of the importance of Grid processing and how it relates to SOA (Service Oriented Architecture). Ken did a fine job outlining the complexities, integration, business intelligence, and trends of developing new products at Oracle. Ken outlined a series of possible book titles based on Oracle technologies.
Andy Mendelsohn, Senior VP Database Server Technologies was next up. Andy spoke of current products, new features being developed, and mentioned newly aquired products like Times10 (in memory database) and where and how these products will be utilized by Oracle technologies. Andy discussed automatic patch management. Andy discussed new features in security such as Relm (which is like a firewall around a set of schema’s and rules/privileges are then granted to this Relm). Relm will allow people with a lot of privileges to only see certain parts of a database, at certain times of the day, not on weekends, what ever the rules dictate. Andy also discussed “Project Audit Vault”, which collects all audit type information and is in compliance with many government regulations. Greatly assists in the auditing as everything (including redo log information) will be in 1 system (not necessarily 1 location). This audit vault will have dirlldown capabilities and standard reports. There will also be adaptors to accept data from other sources. Andy discussed “Project Raptor”, IDE for development. The group teased him about it being like TOAD. Andy then wrapped up with a conversation about the latest release of HTML DB.
Frank Knifsend, Senior Director Application Server Strategy outlined Fusion and SOA.
Rakesh Dhoopar, Senior Director of Product Strategy and Business Development explained Oracle’s collaboration Suite 10g. He explained the 3 areas it if focused on:
· Capabilities – content, types of docs, issues with everyone doing work but not stored centrally, version control, etc
· Communication – rights to share, check in/check out
· Context – all related information stored in 1 context (docs, email, etc)
Oracle Appreciation Party – this was a grand event held at Pier 30 & 31. There were at least 7 bands – 3 playing at any one time (feature band was Counting Crows). There was a magnificent fire works display that went on for more than 30 minutes. There was plenty of food/wine/beer for general consumption. A good time was had by all.
This was my last day at this event. This was also the last day for the exhibition hall. Thursday was just conference sessions from 9am till 5pm with a conclusion party in the Marriott from 5pm till 7pm.
