OOW 2009 - Wednesday

I always had Wednesday and Thursday in mind as rest days, compared to the first three days and it almost worked out that way. There was certainly even more socialising although whether that was truly restful is debatable

I kicked off Wednesday by attending "HA DBA Roundtable: How Do You Make DBA's Highly Available?" at the Unconference, hosted by Alex Gorbachev and Paul Vallee of Pythian. A bunch of DBAs sitting around trying to work out the good and the bad of organisational approaches to managing databases without being constantly on the pager. It was interesting stuff although the danger of having me and Tim Hall in the room is that you can't shut us up! I'll leave it to Paul and Alex to blog about it more. I'm not sure they will, but I think they should.

Next I'd ear-marked another visit to the OTN lounge where I knew I would be able to catch up with Tom Kyte before his OTN 'Heavy Hitters' Q & A session. Compared to other conferences, people are so busy at Openworld and particularly the Oracle employees that you have to grab every opportunity or you'll go through the whole week without seeing friends. Of course, as soon as I said hello and settled on the settee to start blogging, he berated me (I may be exaggerating a little) for walking out of people's presentations half-way through! I had no idea what he meant at first because I'd really enjoyed the Oracle Develop Keynote last Sunday. Then I remembered he was the host of the DBA 2.0 session too. Ooops! Must blog more carefully. It was fine and he was only kidding.

I was then torn between heading over to Oracle Closed World or staying for his OTN 'Heavy Hitters' Q & A session in the lounge. I stuck around and was glad I did. Unlike some of the Heavy Hitter sessions that I won't mention, his was full of people although, as usual, people were a little reticent to ask questions so I piped up with a few to keep things going and the interviewer (Tom Haunert?) was excellent.



One piece of news I was delighted to learn is that Oracle have been working on revamping the Concepts manual which has become unwieldy in the hope of getting it back down to a 400 page book that we might have seen in the past and could be read on a plane from New York to California. In the end, they managed to get it down to around 440 pages by removing some of the ancillary features and fixed some issues such as recommending seperating your tables and indexes into seperate tablespaces Tom's recommendation is to read the latest Concepts guide where possible, particularly as many of the most fundamental concepts haven't changed much over the years. I think I'm due a re-read of Concepts, so might dig out that 11.2 version. I think this is it, but I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong. (Certainly looks like it, though, with "Primary Authors: Lance Ashdown, Tom Kyte".)

After lunch I had to decide where to watch Larry Ellison's keynote and took what turned out to be the very sensible option of watching it in bed on my laptop. That way I could try and move on my cold recovery by having an afternoon nap. I was glad there was some Exadata talk because I'd missed Sunday night's keynote, then Arnie came on. As I was saying to someone later (APC and Tim Hall, I think), you can spot the difference between an actor (yes, yes, I know. Let's stick to professional entertainer) and politician and IT leaders. They might *think* they're swish presenters, but very few seem at ease in the way the big guy did ... and, yes, he did say 'I'll be back'. The keynote went on and on and on and as soon as Larry mentioned Fusion Apps, I switched my laptop off and fell asleep. Before anyone thinks I'm on a anti-Fusion rap again, I was just waiting to hear if he would be talking about them as everyone predicted and, once he did, that was enough for me. Oracle didn't leave me much time for sleep, though!

Mmmm, enjoyed the sleep, though, and it set me up nicely for the Appreciation Event. It seemed really quiet this year which was a) a reflection of the far lower number of attendees and b) me not having the same intense desire to see Aerosmith as others.

The company was good. Here's Marco, Jacco and Tuomas



There was a little Whack-A-Mole this year but, after selecting my favourite Cuddly Toy prize, that determined the main activity which was darts!




You can decide for yourself whether we were successful or not here.

I was impressed by Roger Daltrey. On the one hand, I grew up in an era when the thought of a 65-year-old rock guy playing to sad IT
types for stack-loads of money would make the stomach churn, but I'm quite a big Who fan and it was better than the alternatives that might have been served up. He was good, too, and there were plenty of old Who numbers.

Back to the hotel at a reasonable time, though, to set up some demos for Thursday morning's presentation. Another late night

Disclosure: I'm attending this year's Openworld Conference at the invitation of the Oracle ACE Director program, which is paying my travel and accommodation expenses.