I have been asked by the DBAZine group to submit daily reports from this years Oracle Open World event. My main focus is to attend some technical sessions on Oracle10g but mostly to check out the exhibition hall in search for more
training partners. My line of work is on-site training and I do contract-instructor work for various training outfits...it helps to fill my schedule.

You may have seen some of my technical writings right here on DBAZine. I am regularly published in Oracle trade journals, I have authored 2 books and co-authored 8 others on the Oracle topic. I have over 22 years working with the
Oracle database product and its related tools.

This is my 11th year of attending Oracle Open World. It has grown and changed through the years and you will read that this year is no different.

Watch for my daily reports from San Francisco!

Dan Hotka
Author/Instructor/Oracle Expert
www.DanHotka.com
DHotka@Earthlink.net

This was the single largest event that I have ever attended. Oracle merged in the PeopleSoft and JD Edwards user group events into their existing Oracle Open World event making a huge mega-event with at least 35,000 attendees. Just judging from the lack of available hotel rooms, I’d have to say that San Francisco couldn’t accommodate a much larger event. Next year, I understand, will add a second exhibition hall. This year, the speakers were by invitation only (again, I believe this was the case) as there was no general ‘call for papers’ as was the case in the past.

The coordinators of this event did a fantastic job. Lunch was handled in an orderly fashion. The presentation rooms were in various locations by track so that no single area had too many people than what the area could handle. Even getting to and from the Appreciation Party was without issue, ran smoothly, and even though there were a lot of people there, there were not long lines at any single facility (food, bar, restrooms, busses).

Next years event is again scheduled for San Francisco on October 22 through the 26th…book your hotel room early!

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.

Today was a cooler but sunny day, reaching a high of 65 degrees.

The OOW days always starts with keynote speakers. There are never any speaking sessions (concurrent sessions) during these keynote presentations. This mornings keynotes were delivered by Mark Hurd DEO and President of HP and John Wookey, Senior VP of Applications at Oracle Corp.

The attendees of this event have evolved over the years. Oracle Corp used to have a separate event for their Applications. PeopleSoft and JD Edwards also had their own events. These application-oriented events tend to have both the decision makers and the end-users themselves. The original OOW tended to attract more of the IT professional, IT consultants, and IT management and company decision makers. This combined event has all of these people! There doesn’t seem to be more concurrent sessions than in the past but there are topics for each of these original groups of people. Perhaps these will be expanded in the future? Perhaps OOW will cut back on the keynote speakers to allow for another entire track of speakers for each day? I have heard that there will be an additional exhibition hall to accommodate more vendors than this year and in years past.

Oracle Corp has always had the ‘camp grounds’ staffed with technical people typically from the development labs at Oracle Corp. These campgrounds have been a great source of information, problem solving, and idea exchange between the attendees and the staff at Oracle Corp. OOW has always had a database campground. The Applications events had campgrounds with areas for each part of the Oracle Application. This year, being a combined event, Oracle has added campgrounds for PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, and the theme of the show: Oracle Fusion Middleware. There was always a good crowd in all of the campgrounds. There was always a good crowd in the exhibition hall. One needed to arrive as early as possible for the concurrent sessions they desired to see as the sessions were closed when the maximum audience for the room size was reached. I manage this by selecting more than one session I wanted to see per time slot. This allowed me to quickly move to another if my primary selection was already full before I was able to get in.

The pm keynote was delivered by Scott McNealy of Sun Microsystems. Scott is an entertaining speaker, mixing his dry humor with Oracle/Sun technology advancements. This presentation, he outlined the ever-evolving Oracle/Sun relationship along with the results of the past 3 years of R&D at Sun Microsystems.

I took notes and I hope I get most of the facts correct.

Scott feels that the world of computing is moving towards the ‘participation age’. This particiapation age allows people to learn from information entered from other people. Examples include blogs (such as this one), instant messaging, distance learning, trading, etc. Scott says that this new age should allow people onboard to share with others information and knowledge in such a way that it makes the planet a better place, ie: planet sensitive computing.

Scott went on to describe how the ‘S’ in the Sun Microsystems logo stood for sharing, that Sun now supports more open system code, java code, and open interfaces for free or near free. These open interfaces allows Sun to easily adapt to most any computing environment. He described this as ‘Best of Breed’ (best components of various vendors that you have to assemble) versus ‘Truck off the shelf’ (has best components already assembled and integrated). He went on to describe this to include the major components of any companies IT infrastructure. If you assemble all the pieces (best of breed), it is you that has to maintain it, fix it, track the parts that need replacement, etc. If you buy the truck off the shelf, all of this work is done for you and is far easier to manage.

Scott went on to point out some of Sun’s larger customers and their importance to the participation age. Again, forgive some of the facts here if I did not record them accurately…Scott spoke quickly. He claims that Goodle handles over 2 million search requests per month and that this single application might be the most important single app. He indicated that Yahoo collects over 10 terabytes of information per day (roughly the size of the Library of Congress!). Ebay handles 1.4 billion auctions per year and as many as 15 million concurrent auctions at any one time. Using these as examples, he said applications for the participation age are on a bigger scale, at a bigger cost of failure, and that failure affects more people.

Inovation matters. Standards matters. Scott spent time with what you do with a hair dryer that runs on 220 volts but your house is only wired for 110 volts. Google just requires a Java-based browser. It is the standards within the browser and Java that allows for any computer to use Google.

Scott spent time with the latest innovations at Sun…hot swappable memory/processors…the fact that you can mix processor types/speeds, and that it all is smaller and takes less energy (he kept referring back to his original theme of ‘making the planet a better place’…using less energy/giving off less heat is good for the planet. He used this example again to explain how the typical technology has a shelf life of 18 months, cost of ownership is considered, cost of running it, as well as the ‘cost to exit’, or change to a different computing environment. To quickly sum up what he was saying: Scott pointed out that the new technology at Sun could co-exist with existing technology from Sun (longer shelf life, lower cost of ownership), newer technology took less energy (planet friendly), tape storage took no energy at all (to have archived data sitting on a tape on a shelf), and partnering with various other IT vendors, the cost to change platforms (because of Sun-supported binary code compatibilities).

I completed my research in the exhibition hall today. I did spend some time in the Discoverer campground, working with the staff at Oracle to show me the finer features of the web-based Discoverer tool.

The Oracle Open World event is again at the Moscone Center in beautiful downtown San Francisco. The weather is a pleasant 75 degrees with sun.

Oracle Corp has included in this years venue the People Soft group and the JD Edwards group (purchased by PeopleSoft while Oracle was purchasing Peoplesoft). Oracle President Charles Phillips told a user group session that there were 35,000 attendees at this combined event. Based on the crowd and total lack of available hotel rooms, I believe it.

This year’s theme is Oracle10g and Grid computing. Oracle is calling the integration between their applications, PeopleSoft, and JD Edwards Fusion…which is also the theme of the event appreciation party to be held this Wednesday evening. Oracle has adjusted their acronym OFA to mean Oracle Fusion Architecture.

I arrived on Monday at noon. The event actually started last Saturday, the 17 with SIG meetings (special interest groups), Oracle X-Treme Sessions (workshops on Grid computing) and a movie night. Sunday’s highlights included more SIG meetings and the welcome reception sponsored by EMC Corp…featuring comedian Dana Carvey.

Oracle President Charles Phillips started today with a welcome keynote followed by a keynote address from Paul Otellini, Intel Corp President and CEO. Sessions started today at 11 am and ran thru 5:30pm. The concurrent sessions included Oracle database tracks, Oracle Applications tracks, PeopleSoft tracks, and JD Edwards tracks.

I spent the majority of the afternoon in the exhibition hall. There were the usual vendors I am used to seeing at OOW (the training firms, the hardware firms, and the vendor tools firms) along with new vendors to OOW such as PeopleSoft vendors and consulting firms, and JD Edwards vendors and consulting firms. The Oracle Camp Grounds were broken into at least 5 groups: Oracle Database 10g, Systems Management and Security, Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle E-Business Suite, and Peoplesoft/JD Edwards. I find these camp grounds particularly useful as you can find your area of interest and work one-on-one with the Oracle experts, typically from the development labs themselves. I find this is a good place to network with people who can answer my questions.

I also visited the bookstore where I saw a couple of my books for sale! I purchased myself a new Oracle baseball cap and a new Oracle jacket. There was a variety of Oracle stuff for sale…even stuff for the little ones called ‘Oracle Kids’.

I have regularly attended this event since 1995. The past 6 or so Open Worlds have been at the Moscone Center. Oracle used to host these in various parts of the country (my first one was in Philadelphia). I always bump into many people that I’ve met through the years.

My evening was spent with friends on Fisherman’s Warf, enjoying Ghirardelli chocolate.