COLLABORATE: Keynote

I attended the General Session Keynote this morning.

Thanks to my "press" pass, I got to sit in the first (second) row, right next to Floyd Teter. I even got to say hello to Jan Wagner, whom I interviewed last year.

Started off with the 3 presidents from IOUG, OAUG and Quest. That would be Ian Abramson, David Ferguson and Sue Shaw respectively.



They welcomed everyone to the event and introduced Charles Phillips.

Charles Phillips - Bio
Mr. Phillips must have been caught by the ash cloud too, as he spoke via satellite.



He talked quite a bit about the integration of all the Oracle products from the storage layer up to the application layer. (I actually attempted to record his presentation then my camera battery died on me...I'll put what I have up on YouTube as soon as humanly possible). The integration theme naturally took him into the acquisition of Sun and what the future holds in this regard.

With Sun now under Oracle's umbrella, the ability to tune the SPARC chip for specific purposes will allow them to do so much more. Apparently the engineers from both Oracle and Sun are chomping at the bit to be able to work together. Ideas for this "fusion" are plenty which means more goodness for many of us in the future.

I think the main point he tried to hammer home was Synchronization; the ability to build, test, configure and deploy a complete solution from the hardware to the software. Many customers are asking for this type of thing so that they don't spend as much time on integrating disparate products. Of course, this doesn't mean that it will be a closed system, the ability remains to plug and play your desired components.

Thomas Kurian
I've heard Mr. Kurian's name before but I hadn't actually seen him. According to his Oracle Bio, he is the Executive Vice President of Oracle Product Development and reports directly to Larry Ellison.

COMPLETE.

OPEN.

INTEGRATED.

That's the main theme Mr. Kurian followed.

He echoed many of Mr. Phillips' talking points and provided a couple of pretty cool demos. One in particular was a...a business process thingy (outside my scope of knowledge). Basically he used Outlook and Excel on top of the Universal Content Management in a very seemless way. Drag an email from the Inbox to the UCM folder for a given customer and you can then see the presentation that you gave to the customer and any other relevant materials. Very cool stuff.

He also talked about their upgrade to EBS 12.2, back in August (has this even been released yet?). I love it when companys use their own products. Even better, there is supposedly a single EBS Global instance. That's impressive (but should be expected from Oracle). Back in 2002 Mr. Ellison mentioned that Oracle had over 500 database instances throughout the organization and his goal was to get that down to a single instance. I followed up a short 7 years later here.

I know there was more to his talk, but that's what I got out of it. If I find any others that summarize the keynote, I'll link them up here.

COLLABORATE: Oracle ACE Dinner

Twitter to the rescue again.



I was at the OAUG 20th Anniversary Party where I consumed my usual 2 beers (albeit larger than normal beers), when I noticed this tweet by Brian "Bex" Huff.



With the help of a couple of very nice conference attendees, I was able to locate the establishment. They warned me that the restaurant might not allow me in as I was in my travel attire (flip flops), but they did. Pretty casual everywhere around here.

Anyway, this was my very first Oracle ACE gathering. I got to meet, among others, Iggy Fernandez, Sunil Ranka and Bex. I also met Vicki who is the Oracle representative who runs the program. She actually went to high school near me in Denver.

Although I may or may not have had too much to drink, I had a good time. Floyd Teter has introduced me to just about everyone in the world and I'm struggling to remember everyone's name. If my phone or camera would work, I could probably take a picture and quickly tag it with their name. I need a system.

Anyway, I had the steak which was delicious.



Looking at that picture though...the presentation doesn't look too appealing...I can't think of a couple of disgusting things that it looks like. But I was plyed with beer and didn't care much. Like I said, it was delicious.



I also got to meet Arup Nanda, who's New Features guides/tutorials I've used a million times to learn something new. Not really sure I belong with that crowd...but I'll take full advantage of the opportunity. :)

COLLABORATE: So Many Problems

Just a detailed list of FAILs on my part. Maybe some WINs too.

1. Left cell phone charger at home. Consequently borrowed one from a nice hotel staffer (even if she looks over every 2 minutes to make sure I haven't absconded with it).
2. Tried to record all of Charles Phillips presentation on camera. Battery died. Charger left in room.
3. Unable to get a decent wifi (I keep typing "wife" there for some reason, like wifeless...) connection anywhere. You'd think they would be abundant in a city like this (or I would have thought them abundant). No go.
4. Organizers are working diligently to add wireless access recently adding it to Level II. The official wireless SSID is COLLABORATE. Use others at your own peril.
5. My room, while decent in appearance, sucks. Holes in the sheets. Bathroom lights don't work. Cables strewn (including ethernet) behind television. I would name the hotel but fear the negative attention would bring La Cosa Nostra into my world. :)
6. I am apparently an Oracle employee. At least that's what my badge says.



7. They still don't know what to do with me. I am on the press lists of course...but I think they're still trying to figure out how to handle me.
8. Did an interview with Billy Cripe and gave a shout out to my Ash friends...I'm pretty sure I looked and sounded stupid, but what can you do?
9. Oracle ACE Dinner was cool. I'm never one to turn down free food...but I thought I had my limit of beers at the OAUG event last night. Ooops.
10. Woke up at 7:15. Love that I'm still on EST.
11. While looking for a phone charger at 7:20, saw people stumbling around from last night. Very amusing. Hopefully I'll get pictures tomorrow. I do remember what that was like, but those memories are fading.

COLLABORATE: Exadata

During the keynote my camera died...which meant that I had absolutely no way to take pictures because it joined my phone which died last night. Naturally I left the charger in the room...id10t.

Anyway, I ran to the Press Room in the hopes that I would find someone who could charge the phone, the camera and I could get a decent wifi connection. On my way there one of the session signs caught my eye, "Exadata" something.

Parked everything in the Press Room (Reef A) and went old school bringing a pen and a notebook to the presentation.

How Exadata Will Dramatically Change the Role of DBAs and Developers
by Juan Loaiza

I would put a picture of him in here...

He talked about the use of Flash technology and how the implementation of it has moved the bottleneck to everything else. Basically, none of the other hardware components can keep up.

(Please remember, I don't even resemble a hardware dude...so if I misspeak or something, don't yell).

Also, the Flash technology has been implemented as PCI cards, not as "fake" disks so that they can be closer to the processor.

The other point he tried to drive home is Role Consolidation, which is where the real savings will come in from a resource perspective.

Let's see if I can do this justice.

Competency	Tradtional Role
External Networking	Network Admin
Hardware	Sys Admin
Infiniband Network	Storage/Net Admin
Linux	OS/Sys Admin
ASM/External Storage	Storage Admin
Oracle DB/RAC	DBA

Mr. Loaiza arguing that much of this stuff can now be managed by a DBA thus consolidating resources and saving you money.

I did miss the part about how it affects a Developers life...but I should be able to figure that out on my own.