Having now had several days to recover from, and reflect on, my trip to beautiful San Francisco for Oracle OpenWorld 2009, I wanted to follow up with a blog post describing my experience.
First, before anything else, I went to In-N-Out Burger where I had my usual Double-Double with fries animal style; oh, how I missed thee.
Next, with the exception of Larry’s keynote on Wednesday, I skipped the rest of keynotes. While I wanted to attend Michael Dell’s, I was hungry and decided on breakfast at Mel’s Drive-in instead. Out of coincidence, I ended up sitting next to Mark Prichard, Senior Principal Product Manager for WebLogic at Oracle; we ended up discussing Tuxedo and some of the features Oracle has been adding to it since the BEA acquisition. A bit later, I visited the Tuxedo booth to learn more and was quite happy to see Oracle putting more resources into developing such a great product as Tuxedo.
Day-By-Day
On Monday, I attended a couple sessions, including one on TimesTen caching for Oracle, as well as the OTN Night event. At the event, I had a great discussion with several cool Oracle users and, with the exception of a few incorrect answers to questions for “Oracle Jeopardy”, it was a great night.
Tuesday was a busy day. Surprisingly, during my session I saw former EnterpriseDB colleague, fellowPostgres developer, and new Google employee Greg Stark. We discussed several different database-related topics during lunch and then attended the Hybrid Columnar Compression session given by Bill Hodak and Amit Ganesh. Based on the simplified diagram displayed in the session, my guess is thatHybrid Columnar Compression is implemented using some of the in-block table/row directory functionality with the compression unit header containing the number of blocks in the unit as well as pointers to which block(s) within the compression unit contain which fields. More to come on that topic in a future blog post :-)
Tuesday night, I attended the Pythian Bloggers Meetup event and met fellow bloggers Alex Gorbachev,Markus Eisele, Robyn Sands, Arjen Visser, Fuad Arshad, Raimonds Simanovskis, Vít Špinka, Steve Lemme, and many others. Unfortunately, I was unable to meet up with Justin Kestelyn, Doug Burns, and Tim Bray. After the meetup, a few of us went over to Chevy’s and talked shop for awhile.
Wednesday was similarly busy. Fortunately, before I left, I was able to meet long-time online friend and colleage Jonathan Gennick. Jonathan invited me to meet him at one of Mogens Nørgaaard’s Oracle Closed World sessions where I was also able to meet Graham Wood and several other well-known Oracle/OakTable guys. It was at OCW that I was able to watch one of the best, non-marketing-oriented Cloud Computing presentations given by Jeremiah Wilton. After the OCW session, I enqueued myself to see Larry’s keynote which I enjoyed.
All in all, I spent a great deal of time talking to some of the developers and technical guys at the Oracle database DEMOgrounds including Stephan Haisley, Mark Williams, Advanced Security developers, Advanced Compression developers, Optimizer guys, some of the BerkeleyDB guys, and several members of the Data Access group. While I primarily visited the Exadata exhibit hoping to meet up with Kevin Closson and Greg Rahn, I was able to have a few great discussions regarding the architecture of Exadata as well as watch that machine perform an amazing amount of data processing in a very short amount of time.
In short, OpenWorld was great! If you didn’t attend, I would suggest that you buy access to Oracle OpenWorld On Demand, there’s a ton of great content in there and it’s definitely worth it.
Lastly, I’d like to thank Oracle for inviting me to speak and I hope to be back next year!