Going to Oracle OpenWorld

Last Friday I finally got approved to visit Oracle OpenWorld as a blogger. It came as a surprise, because I had to wait 5 weeks for the approval. This can be fine if they had said in advance that an approval process can take up to 5 weeks. But without such a notice, it's hard to imagine why judging that a blog is indeed about Oracle and is not brand sparking new, can take that long. During those weeks I thought I had messed up my registration. Especially since I didn't fill in the blog's URL anywhere initially. Turned out you had to use the "Company name" field for the URL. But all is well now; I saved my company 2000+ dollars for a full conference pass. Which is still like some 100 euros nowadays :-).

The flight and hotel are booked as well. The hotels nearby the Moscone Center were already booked, and the closest one available was 14 kilometres (9 miles) away. It is not even called San Francisco anymore, but Brisbane. I think it must have a nice view at the San Francisco Bay though. On the other hand, this photograph makes me a little worried about being able to sleep if airplanes are flying this close. So if you see me yawning, it doesn't necessarily mean the presentation is boring...

It's hardly possible that a session is boring. There are just so many good sessions to choose from. At any time I will have a hard time choosing between several interesting ones. I filled up my entire schedule with presentations. At the end I realized that I completely missed all Oracle Develop sessions. And these are - most of the times - even better than the regular ones. And then there's the unconference. This will likely lead to some rescheduling as well. So I have decided to pick out only a few sessions I don't want to miss. At other time slots I have not decided anything yet. If you have some good tips about sessions or activities you think I am or should be interested in, I'd like to hear about it.

The sessions I will definitely try to attend:

• Sunday 11.45 - 12.45
  All About Encryption
  by Thomas Kyte


• Sunday 19.00 - ?
  Blogger's meetup at Thirsty Bear's Restaurant and Brewery


• Monday 14.30 - 15.30
  Performance Fundamentals for Oracle Database 10g and Oracle Database 11g
  by John Beresniewicz, Uri Shaft and Graham Wood


• Monday 17.30 - 18.30
  Web 2.0 Development with Oracle Application Express
  by Carl Backstrom


• Tuesday 9.30 - 10.30
  The best way ...
  by Thomas Kyte


• Tuesday 14.30 - 15.30
  The Power of the Oracle Application Express Repository
  by Patrick Wolf


• Wednesday 11.30 - 12.30
  Oracle Application Express and Oracle XML database: a match made in the database
  by Mark Drake


• Thursday 9.00 - 10.00
  The Danish Experiment: Oracle Database 11g Shock Upgrades
  by Mughees Minhas and Mogens Norgaard


• Thursday 15.00 - 16.00
  Oracle Performance Management: Real-World Case Studies
  by Gaya Vaidyanatha

What a crappy software by the way, this schedule builder. It's Oracle unworthy. In my opinion, the user interface should be such that we can choose a time slot and then the software provides a list with the available sessions. Now you just get a huge list where titles don't fit into the box. To see the entire title of a session - and more importantly: the speaker - you have to double click the line. A popup box then appears which you cannot close, because the title is on top of the close button most of the time. You have to enlarge the box to separate the title from the close button. To be able to enlarge the box, it's possible you'll have to move the box a bit to the left. Oh well, it's better than having no such facility at all.

Enough whining, I'm going to OpenWorld for the first time and I am really looking forward to it!