Oracle OpenWorld 2009, the last three days

Tuesday was a very rainy day. I decided to take the shuttle bus to the Moscone and was therefore a little late for the first session. The sessions I visited this day were:

Dan Morgan - What's New in Eleven ... Dot Two (that Oracle won't be talking about)
In every release there are like two types of features. On the one side there are features that are picked up by marketing and which are given catchy names. On the other side are the features that are not picked up by marketing. Dan talked about those. Some I recognized because they are mentioned in the New Features Guide, but he also mentioned a few others. Dan is involved in the beta program, so he has already worked with 11g Release 2 for a year now.

Richard Foote - Oracle Indexes: Q & A Discussion
Richard had only two slides which he showed in the first minutes, and then it was time to throw questions at him. About indexes of course, and David Bowie. Jonathan Lewis was also in the room, so they kind of answered the questions together. One of the things that was nice to hear, is that neither Richard nor Jonathan had seen a useful use for the skip scan. Which was something I already suspected.

Steven Feuerstein - Coding Therapy for Software Developers
Another great presentation by Steven. His presentation skills are simply awesome. The subject of the presentation helps of course. However, there were a few statements here that I strongly disagree with. Statements like "SQL statements with 3 table joins, or 7; that's crazy!" or "It doesn't make sense for developers to have to learn the ins and outs of tuning SQL!". Then who is going to write that transactional API or that PL/SQL interface or batch program? I suspect that Steven had some other context in mind when making those statements.

Raj Mattamal - Giving Your Oracle Application Express a Web 2.0 Face-Lift
Raj talked about how to make your APEX application cooler for the end user. With so much jquery code out there, it's easy to do more than just the standard APEX stuff. It makes a big difference in how you interact with the application. Raj did a live demonstration, which I always like. And, man, does Raj talk fast!

Andrew Holdsworth - Current Trends in Real-World Database Performance
This seems to be an annual session, but it was the first one I attended. It's nice to hear from the people who do performance stuff only, what they encounter most. It seems bad SQL is still number one.

Blogger Meetup
Alex Gorbachev organized the annual bloggers meeting this year. And he made it a special one with t-shirts saying "I met more bloggers than you", where everybody was writing their names on the t-shirts. The wearer of the shirt with the most names won a HP Netbook. This is a great event for meeting the people behind the blogs you read (or don't read yet).


Wednesday I really tried to get some more sleep. Again I was awake at 4 AM, about the same time as every morning here in San Francisco. But unfortunately just staying in bed until late in the morning did not help. The sessions I followed were:

Arup Nanda - Upgrade Case Study: Database Replay, Snapshot Standby, and Plan Baselines
This session mainly outlined the use of new technologies you can use for upgrading your database to 11g. Unfortunately for me, the technologies themselves were not explained here; it was about when to apply which technology.

Rory McLean - Using Row-Level Security with Oracle Application Express
Last year I swore not to enter sessions anymore when I don't know the speaker, but this session was only 30 minutes and there wasn't anything more interesting to choose from at that time, so I decided to give this one a shot. And I wasn't disappointed. Rory McLean gave a nice and well-prepared presentation, including a demonstration of VPD within APEX. I didn't learn much new though, but that's because I'm already familiar with the subject.

S. Gopalakrishnan - Keynote: Seven Game Changing Trends: How Prepared Are You?
I realized too late that, to have a good press/analysts/blogger seat for Larry's keynnote, you'd have to be in the room before this one started. When Andrew Clarke and I arrived at Moscone North's hall D, the room was already full, except for some seats at the side. So we ended up behind a giant pillar just watching the big screens. This first keynote was aimed at managers to give some high-level overview about the strategic challenges they are awaiting. Nothing much of interest to me.

Larry Ellison and others - Keynote
Larry's keynote did not have a big new introduction, as expected. He first mentioned the success of Oracle Enterprise Linux. Then he went on to talk about Exadata V2 for OLTP databases. Some impressive numbers were there. I think my current client should definitely check this one out. After they have migrated to 11g Release 2 of course ... And he repeated the $10M challenge and the attack on IBM, which he also did at the Sunday keynote. The third part was about introducing pro-active Oracle support. If you give Oracle all the data about your configuration, then Oracle will inform you about which patches you should run to avoid running into the same problems as other customers did. The fourth part was about the new Fusion Applications. This software is still not ready to ship, but it looked they are well on their way. Fusion Applications will be the successor of E-Business Suite, Siebel, Peoplesoft, JD Edwards and the like. Oracle will support those applications for a long long time, but they just offer an alternative based on modern technologies like SOA.

The highlight of the keynote was of course the appearance of the governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger. He did a very funny talk about the importance of technology. How it had helped him in his career and how important it is to reduce global warming.


The keynote was a long show that should have ended at 16:30, but ended at 17:20. I therefore missed "SQL gone wild: Taming Bad SQL the Easy Way (or the Hard Way)" by Benoit Dageville about tuning SQL with some automated tools.

Appreciation Event
Andrew invited me to join him and Marco Gralike, Jacco Landlust, Anjo Kolk, Tim Hall and Doug Burns to the Appreciation Event on Treasure Island. An evening with music performances by Aerosmith, Roger Daltrey and the Wailers and two other bands I did not see. Normally I don't fancy Aerosmith's music that much (with the exception of "Dream On"), but I thought they gave a great show. Roger Daltrey played a couple of songs I did not recognize, but when he played some of The Who classics, the enthusiasm of the crowd -and mine- was greatly increased. After losing everyone of the original group and having a peek at the Wailers, I called it a day.


I was back at the hotel at 1AM. And again awake at 4AM. My own Unconference session started at 10AM (more about that in a separate post). After my session I returned my laptop to my hotel and went back to see "Real-World Database Performance Roundtable" by five people, among whom Greg Rahn, Graham Wood and Andrew Holdsworth. It was a really nice Q&A session with some interesting questions from the audience. But I was so tired that when I closed my eyes for a moment, I actually started sleeping. Some internal mechanism woke me up instantly and I decided I had to leave before I started disrupting the session with some loud snoring ... I grabbed a lunch, had a quick talk with H.Tonguç Yılmaz and Husnu Sensoy (DBA of the year!), and took some photographs to include in a presentation about Oracle OpenWorld for my department. I went back to my hotel and slept from 2PM to 7PM. Finally ...