Slow day for me. I did not attend a single session. However, it was no where near dull.

First stop, the Oracle Press room. May I go to Oracle OpenWorld this year?

Finished writing up my post on Billy Cripe's session following that.

This is my 12th post for the conference. I've posted about 200 tweets over the last 4 days. I've done a lot of writing. It's not as easy as I thought it would be. For instance, I spent about an hour and a half on my interview with Jan Wagner. I think the longest non-technical post has taken about 15 minutes, because it's usually just a rant straight from the brain. The reason the post took so long is that I was trying be as professional as I could. OAUG provided me with a free pass to the event so the least I could do was take my time and get it right. So far the feedback has been good.

Back to the story. I went into the exhibit hall to finish up some work and up walks Mr. Cripe. He sat down and we chatted for awhile before he went into silent mode to finish up his upcoming presentation (or was it his book signing zone?). I then see @jtdavies reply to @cpurdy. I wonder if that's Cameron Purdy, formerly of Tangosol and now with Oracle? The only reason I know his name is because of this post from last year, Application Developers vs. Database Developers. I click through and it is him, so I follow him.

I then get up to go to lunch and end up at the table right next to my previous one. I start talking with the people (there were 3) at the table, then tell them I am there as a blogger. Sure enough, the guy to my left is on the Board of Directors for IOUG. I met the President of the Board last night. Weird.

When I mention my blog, the other guy chimes in, "Hey, I've read something from your blog...App dev vs. Database Devs". Turns out he is an engineer on the Coherence team. Wow.

So we get to talking, and talking, and talking. I then ask for a demo of Coherence...around 2 o'clock, my legs and back had had enough and I had to finish up some other work, so I left, reluctantly. It was so nice to have an intelligent discussion without the religiousity (is that a word?) usually involved in such discussions. We talked about those that say a database is no longer needed and perhaps why and also about some who don't use databases or decide to roll their own in a flat file or something. I certainly came away with a much better idea of what Coherence was/is. I wanted to see a GUI or something, but it's really just a set of libraries (I also asked if I could load it into the database :).

Small freaking world isn't it?

I spent the rest of the (short) day catching up on email, twitter and other writing. Wifey and LC came and picked me up and then we were on our way back to the Roller Coasters.