Category: OpenWorld

Turns out, I apparently had more fun than I should have last night at the ACE Dinner. So, I woke up this morning not feeling very well. That combined with the time zone adjustment left me waking up a little groggy this morning.

Starting the day today was the announcement regarding Oracle VM as described in the keynote by Charles Phillips. I missed seeing the keynote, but caught the announcement from Justin’s tweets. Popular theories is that this was done similarly to the Oracle Enterprise Linux launch in that Oracle took open source Xen and re-rolled it into binaries. We’ll see when it is released for public consumption on November 14th. Continue reading “OOW, Day 2 (Monday)”

Sunday was a great day at OOW with lots of IOUG activities for me as well as seeing a lot of old friends that I never manage to see except at these events.

My day started at breakfast with reviewing presentation materials for a co-presentation with Matt Topper. More about that in a minute.

After breakfast catching up with Matt and quickly reviewing our slides, I headed over to Moscone West where I gave my first presentation of the week titled “High Availability Options for Oracle Database”. The session was surprisingly well-attended and, as usual, I rushed through the first several options (exp/imp, data pump, RMAN, replication) and all the discussion and questions started around data guard, failover clusters, and, of course, RAC. If you attended the session, thanks for coming! Please don’t hesitate to drop me an email with your comments or suggestions (positive or negative)–I’m always looking for ways to improve the sessions!

After that session, I grabbed a quick lunch and headed to the IOUG SIG Council meeting. We had a relatively brief meeting as I think everyone had a lot on their minds and there is a lot to be done. This group is responsible for helping IOUG chart the direction of the SIG program and I can tell you that everyone is very interested in making the SIG successful. I’m excited to be involved in this great group and I know we’ll do some good things in the coming year.

After lunch, it was time for Matt and I to present our session titled “Is that really you? Prove it!” The session was all about Oracle Adaptive Access Manager (OAAM) which is the new name for the product acquired with Bharosa in early October. We had a lot of good discussion among our relatively small audience confirming that there is enough interest to kickstart this product in the community.

After that session, I dashed to the 11g Database beta testing panel session where I was a panelist with John King, Plamen Zyumbyulev, Charles Kim, and George Trujillo. We scrambled a bit to assemble the content and panelists, but I think it was a good session where attendees got to learn about some of the key 11g new features in an interactive way instead of the usual death by powerpoint.

Following the panel, I was back on stage for the RAC SIG Birds of a Feather session at 4pm. We had a short presentation describing the RAC SIG and its history as well as our usual pleas for volunteers. Following the presentation, we had a little more than an hour of Q & A that was all done by audience members. I’m not sure how the format was received by everyone, but I do think we got a lot of questions answered and we also gave good opportunity for everyone to answer questions and be involved. We have the expert panel session later this week, so if you have more questions, stop by then and lob them at the panel (I’ll be moderating that one too).

After the RAC SIG session, I wanted to see the Sunday Night Live event which I anticipated to be entertaining and funny as some Saturday Night Live cast members were on stage. Turns out I was wrong–was not entertained and endured a long monologue by Larry recounting how Oracle got started 30 years ago. There were also two deaths mentioned either by Larry or on screen in one of the videos they showed that really made for a fun mood-killer. I bailed out before the band started and headed to the final resting place for the evening.

The Oracle ACE dinner at The Fly Trap was the next and final stop on this long day. I enjoyed meeting many of the people I’ve followed through their blogs and reuniting with past acquaintances as well. Some of the ones I remember are: Matt Topper, Mark Rittman, Mogens Norgaard (I can’t type the special keys to spell his name properly), Justin Kestelyn, Jake Kuramoto, Dan Morgan, Arup Nanda, Michael Armstrong-Smith, Eric Marcoux, and I’m sure many others I forgot to mention. Good food, good conversations, and a nice way to kick off the week for sure.