Oct 11: OOW 2009 Begins
That's my first couple of sessions done and dusted, both pretty good ones too although I'm going to have to admit defeat now and try to catch some sleep in the hope it will pay off over the rest of the week.
First, though was a nostalgic trip to Lori's Diner for some breakfast. Although not the greatest hotel, The King George is my usual haunt and has three distinct advantages for me :-
1) It's cheap.
2) Smoking Rooms.
3) The 24-hour Lori's Diner next door.
The diner delivers what I'd think of as classic American breakfasts and just watching the short order cooks is interesting. Right up my street.
So how do you get people to attend a presentation at 9am on Sunday? Get Tom Kyte to present it
His Oracle Developer Keynote - 'What are we still doing wrong' - was a light-hearted tour of the same old mistakes we see time after time. I recommend you take a look at his slides if you can because they contain a bunch of links to articles, forum threads and blog posts he's discovered on the web to reinforce his arguments. In fact, as there was a large camera at the back of the room, I think you'll be able to watch it online soon, as suggested by Tom's post. (I know a few people back at work will be pleased about that.) Good easy-going stuff which was just what I needed when I was feeling a bit tired and low. Oh, but I'm not entirely sure you can't send Euro symbols via SMS. My phone seems to be able to, but maybe I'm missing something?
Next up was supposed to be "Oracle Database Machine and Oracle Exadata: Best Practices and Customer Considerations" as part of the IOUG's Exadata Special Interest Group Stream. In fact, it turned out to be a panel Q & A with Dan Norris chairing and a bunch of smart guys from Oracle's MAA (Maximum Availability Architecture) team. As I expected, the questions varied from the interesting to the slightly bizarre but there were a few about what gives Exadata V2 an OLTP or mixed workload advantage or V1 which could be simplified to the Flash technology. There were also a few interesting questions about support and management issues around something that is sold as an appliance but clearly has a lot of vanilla Oracle components in there. Can you change the configuration of those to suit your enivronment. The answers generally seemed to be yes, but that this would take you into custom configuration territory and Oracle would probably prefer that you didn't go there. It was a pretty interesting discussion all round, but about half-way through, I got a call from a friend who wanted to meet for lunch, so bailed out early.
Oh, one important thing to mention is that Oracle have a full rack Database Machine in Moscone North and will be running demos there from 4pm today through the rest of the week. So lots more opportunity to see Exadata and talk to those involved in customer implementations.
[Intermission]
Just woke up, have had some sleep and now feel worse. Mads had a cold all week before I came out here and we kept wondering why I hadn't got it. Well I have. Sigh. I'm supposed to be going to a party tonight that I've been looking forward to. I suppose it's time to take some drugs and hope it's not too bad.
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. The time off work is my own choice.
First, though was a nostalgic trip to Lori's Diner for some breakfast. Although not the greatest hotel, The King George is my usual haunt and has three distinct advantages for me :-
1) It's cheap.
2) Smoking Rooms.
3) The 24-hour Lori's Diner next door.
The diner delivers what I'd think of as classic American breakfasts and just watching the short order cooks is interesting. Right up my street.
So how do you get people to attend a presentation at 9am on Sunday? Get Tom Kyte to present it
His Oracle Developer Keynote - 'What are we still doing wrong' - was a light-hearted tour of the same old mistakes we see time after time. I recommend you take a look at his slides if you can because they contain a bunch of links to articles, forum threads and blog posts he's discovered on the web to reinforce his arguments. In fact, as there was a large camera at the back of the room, I think you'll be able to watch it online soon, as suggested by Tom's post. (I know a few people back at work will be pleased about that.) Good easy-going stuff which was just what I needed when I was feeling a bit tired and low. Oh, but I'm not entirely sure you can't send Euro symbols via SMS. My phone seems to be able to, but maybe I'm missing something?
Next up was supposed to be "Oracle Database Machine and Oracle Exadata: Best Practices and Customer Considerations" as part of the IOUG's Exadata Special Interest Group Stream. In fact, it turned out to be a panel Q & A with Dan Norris chairing and a bunch of smart guys from Oracle's MAA (Maximum Availability Architecture) team. As I expected, the questions varied from the interesting to the slightly bizarre but there were a few about what gives Exadata V2 an OLTP or mixed workload advantage or V1 which could be simplified to the Flash technology. There were also a few interesting questions about support and management issues around something that is sold as an appliance but clearly has a lot of vanilla Oracle components in there. Can you change the configuration of those to suit your enivronment. The answers generally seemed to be yes, but that this would take you into custom configuration territory and Oracle would probably prefer that you didn't go there. It was a pretty interesting discussion all round, but about half-way through, I got a call from a friend who wanted to meet for lunch, so bailed out early.
Oh, one important thing to mention is that Oracle have a full rack Database Machine in Moscone North and will be running demos there from 4pm today through the rest of the week. So lots more opportunity to see Exadata and talk to those involved in customer implementations.
[Intermission]
Just woke up, have had some sleep and now feel worse. Mads had a cold all week before I came out here and we kept wondering why I hadn't got it. Well I have. Sigh. I'm supposed to be going to a party tonight that I've been looking forward to. I suppose it's time to take some drugs and hope it's not too bad.
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. The time off work is my own choice.
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