Preview sessions Oracle OpenWorld

This evening (and late afternoon) AMIS gave 9 speakers a chance to prepare their Oracle OpenWorld sessions for their Dutch peers. Three parallel tracks with three sessions each. You can read the official introduction for these sessions here. I decided to visit the three database oriented sessions, but some other sessions looked interesting as well. I'll check the feedback on those other sessions and maybe visit them in San Francisco. Although it is kind of odd to travel all those miles to hear a session you could have heard next door as well.

The first session I attended was Gerwin Hendriksen's "Jumping the GAPP". He presented this session during this year's Hotsos Symposium for a audience of 350 people with some of the world's leading performance experts, where it was received very well. Today he explained it in a little meeting room in front of just 4 attendees ... In short (and oversimplified), he explained a concept to do performance analysis on business processes based on past performance and utilization metrics. Data mining techniques are used to accurately pinpoint the bottleneck. Oracle has the DBMS_PREDICTIVE_ANALYTICS package to assist you with that. I can really recommend this session. You'll not get a spoonfeed implementation, but "just" a thought provoking concept. His session is at Sunday from 11.45 - 12.45 at Marriot, Golden Gate C3.

The next one was by Frits Hoogland about Automatic Storage Management. As a developer I was hoping to get some kind of introduction, but it was immediately about SAN's, OMF, spindles, AU's and the like. He dove quite deep into some of the mechanics, explaining pros and cons of ASM realistically. Frits obviously knows what he is talking about and is passionate about it. His session is on Thursday from 9.00 - 10.00, Moscone South, Rm 303. It's after last evening's appreciation event and competing with Tanel Poder's session, so it will be hard for him to fill the room. But if you are into storing mechanisms, this session is a must.

The last session was called "Real-World Experience with Oracle XML Database 11g: An Oracle ACE’s Perspective" by our national XMLDB expert Marco Gralike. He excused himself more than once for this title: he did not come up with it himself. This session is intended to be a bit of everything. He touches all kind of aspects about XML(DB) and gives his opinion about it. I have some basic XMLDB knowledge, so some parts were right for me, some were trivial and he lost me on several other parts. My guess is that this will be true for everybody, dba or developer, newbie or expert. You'll get something out of it. This session is on Tuesday 14.30 - 15.30 at Marriot, Salon 12/13. His other session on Sunday is already fully booked.