Disclosure: I’m attending Openworld at the invitation of the OTN ACE Director program who are paying for my flights, hotel and conference fee. My employer has helpfully let me attend on work time, as well as sending other team mates because they recognise the educational value of attending. Despite that, all of the opinions expressed in these posts are, as usual, all my own.
The first day of the ACE D briefing was a bit of a wipe-out for me as I had so much catching up on bits and pieces of work and personal email to do, having arrived very late the previous night, although I still managed to spend some valuable time catching up with friends of the Oak and non-Oak variety as well as hearing some useful info from various Product Managers. I was gutted to have missed Thomas Kurian’s briefing session because, as I heard later, it was as splendid as usual. I think some of the enjoyment comes from people’s fascination with how on top of things he is, talking at all sorts of technical and non-technical levels over a very wide portfolio. That’s pretty much how I remember the last few briefings.
Despite the inevitable arrival of jet lag screwing up my sleep, I’ve been able to enjoy day two much more (once I’d absorbed some light-hearted wind-ups about my disappearing act). Today was always going to be the most enjoyable for me anyway as the agenda was more database-centric.
It kicked off with a session on the current state of play of MySQL which I must admit I’ve almost forgotten about (conspiracy theorists will enjoy that) but seems to be ticking along quite nicely with incremental performance and functionality improvements although the presenters were keen to point out that MySQLs forte is not it’s functionality so much as it’s ubiquity in the web area, given it’s part of the LAMP stack. Like a lot of the presentations, it might not have been about something I use day to day but was very enjoyable keeping in touch with other technologies.
Next was an informal conversation with Bob Evans, the Chief Communications Officer, which covered a wide variety of subjects with the usual direct and critical approach I’ve come to expect from the ACE Directors in attendance (you might be surprised!), raising concerns about the interface between Oracle Sales and their shared customers. I was disappointed to hear that there seems to be a pattern of scheduling local sales events at the same time as Oracle ACE tour events. Seems pretty daft to me. (Another one for the conspiracy theorists, I suppose.)
Then Gene Eun gave us an update on the Oracle Database Cloud Service. Although I still feel Oracle are way behind the curve on this, I don’t think that necessarily means they can’t make up ground, as they have in the past, but I think the most important message for me was a reinforcement of an answer to a question I asked last year. There’s no reason why people can’t use the same technology to run their own on-premise cloud and, working in Finance as I seem to have done for a while, the most realistic implementations I can imagine are hybrids of onsite and offsite infrastructure to cope with regulatory requirements whilst still gaining the benefits of offsite deployment where that makes most sense.
I didn’t spend so much time drinking coffee in the Oracle canteens this year, but I did manage to have an enjoyable catch-up with Uri Shaft, a true development geek who always has interesting thoughts both on those technologies he is or has been involved with, but also other development areas that he has nothing to do with! Never a man short on opinions on software and a truly nice guy. Sadly, the regular JB catch-up no longer exists and that Maria Colgan moves in entirely different circles these days! (That would be a joke, folks, and I’m looking forward to light refreshments and chat when she’s in Singapore soon.)
Speaking of Maria, she was part of the presentation team for the two hour Oracle Database Development Update, which is one of the key sessions for most attendees. Penny Avril and Maria Colgan kicked off with an all-too-short session discussing release plans and a little about In-Memory Option but I was left with the feeling that, having put so much work into getting the In-Memory stuff ready, it’s now a case of consolidating the work and delivering product. i.e. I didn’t notice any earth-shattering announcements in the database area but I suppose last year made up for that!
So most of the session was focused on two non-RDBMS areas. George Lumpkin on documents in the database and JSON stuff which was one of those – interesting but not something I’m likely to work with for a while presentations.
Dan McLary was almost certainly the speaker of the day as he delved into Oracle’s BigData/Hadoop offering in good detail but with passion and a refreshing honesty about where Oracle fit into this field which still managed to be very positive about where Oracle are taking it. As he pointed out, the combination of being able to query anywhere (different data sources and technologies) with the functional richness of Oracle’s SQL implementation is likely to be a pretty compelling offering.
It was an afternoon full of good presenters likely to keep the jet-lagged awake (although both Connor McDonald and I were struggling badly by this stage) like David Peake who covered Apex and a new website – Learning SQL – to help people, erm, learn SQL. I think we’ll be hearing more about this in the upcoming week.
Wim Coekaerts is always popular with a small chunk of the ACED crowd and was again with his usual Linux and VM update, an informal conversation delivered without notes or slides which hit mainly on the areas that the attendees wanted to discuss. In a neat piece of agenda symmetry, he pointed out the presence of DTrace probes for MySQL running on OEL, as he discussed in his recent blog post.
By now we were running late and beers were beckoning, so Steve Feuerstein did a great job of just about keeping people going with his discussion of Oracle’s attempts to reengage and energise the traditional Oracle SQL and PL/SQL technologies we know and love with a new (and quite possibly younger!) audience – YesSQL! Keep an eye out for what is likely to be a fun and different session with Steven and Tom Kyte and other special guests at 18:30 on Monday in Moscone South 103.
… and with that all wrapped up, it was time for beers and the bus into the city. The hotel check-in wasn’t the car crash it usually is, but by the time it was all done and dusted there was just time for a few more drinks and since then it has been sleep, sleep, sleep for me 🙁
The usual thanks to the OTN team for putting together a varied and interesting briefing, which must be a really tough task when the Dev folks are all up to their eyebrows preparing for next week. Great work!
I’m hoping just an hour or two more and I’ll be bright and breezy for Sunday, the first proper conference day. With my apparently new-found energy and dashing good looks (courtesy of Singapore), I’m expecting the week to be a good one!