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.
After the very welcome tradition of breakfast at Lori’s Diner, I had time to register and then get myself down to Moscone South for my first session of the day. I’d planned to listen to Paul Vallee’s security talk because I’d been unable to register for Gwen Shapira’s Analyzing Twitter data with Hadoop session but noticed spare seats as I passed the room, so switched. I love listening to Gwen talk on any subject because her enthusiasm is contagious. A few of the demos went a little wrong but I still got a nice overview of the various components of a Hadoop solution (which is an area I’ve never really looked at much) so the session flew by. Good stuff.
Next up was Yet-another-Oracle-ACE-Director Arup Nanda’s presentation on Demystifying Cache Buffer Chains. The main reason I attended was to see how he presented the subject and wasn’t expecting to learn too much but it’s an important subject, particularly now I’m working with RAC more often and consolidated environments. CBC latch waits are on my radar once more!
Next up was 12 things about 12c, a session of 12 speakers given 5 minutes to talk about, well, 12c stuff. Debra Lilley organised this and despite all her concerns that she’d expressed leading up to it, it went very smoothly, so hats off to Debra and to the speakers for behaving themselves with the timing! I was particularly concerned that we kicked off with Jonathan Lewis 😉 Big problem with putting him on first – will he actually be able to stay within the time constraints? Because he’ll get too excited and want to talk about things in more depth. He did do it, but it was tough as he raced towards the finishing line 😉
The only thing that bugged me about this was that I hadn’t realised it was two session slots (makes complete sense if I’d performed some simple maths!) but it was very annoying when they kicked everyone out of the room at half-time before readmitting them. Yes, there are rules, but this was one of the more stupid. It annoyed me enough that I decided to skip the second half and attend the Enkitec panel session instead.
What an amazing line-up of Exadata geek talent they had on one stage for Expert Oracle Exadata: Then and Now ….
Including most of the authors of the original book as well as the authors who are writing the next edition which should be out before the end of the year.
From left-to-right : Karl Arao, Martin Bach, Kerry Osborne, Andy Colvin, Tanel Poder and Frits Hoogland.
They talked a little about the original version of the book (largely based on V2) and how far Exadata had come since then, but it was a pretty open session with questions shooting around all over the place and great fun. Nice way for me to wrap up my user group conference activities for the day and head out into the sun for Larry’s Opening Keynote.
First we had the traditional vendor blah-blah-blah about stuff I couldn’t care less about but, in shocking news, I actually enjoyed it! Maybe it’s because it was Intel and so I’m probably more interested in what they’re doing, but it was pretty ok stuff. All the keynotes are available online here.
Then it was LarryTime. Seemed on pretty good form by recent standards although I can summarise it simply as Cloud, Cloud and more Cloud. There’s no getting away from the fact that it’s been quite the about-turn from him in his attitude towards the Cloud. I did appreciate the “we’re only just getting started” message and I suppose I’ve become innured to how accurate the actual facts are in his presentations and to the attacks on competitors so I sort of enjoy his keynotes more than most.
At this stage, the jetlag was biting *hard* and I ended up missing yet another ACE dinner but from all the reports I heard it was the best ever by some distance so I was gutted to miss out on it. But when you’re body is saying sleep whilst you’re walking, sometimes you have to listen to it! Then again, when it decides to wake you up again at 2:30, perhaps you should tell it to go and take a running jump!