The last OpenWorld I attended was back in 2009, when I was still in my twenties, prior to my several-year-hiatus from the speaking circuit. At that conference, Oracle had accepted my submission to present “The Life of an Oracle Query.” It was fun to present at an actual Oracle conference. What was even better, in addition to the Pythian/OTN blogger meet-up, was attending Oracle Closed World at ThirstyBear, thanks to an invite from Jonathan Gennick, who I’d finally met in-person after communicating with him for several years. This invite also enabled me to meet and talk to several of my long-time idols of the Oracle community, including Graham Wood, Jonathan Lewis, and others. Five years later, while many things have changed, many also remain the same.

This year, Oracle, to the surprise of many, accepted my submission to present, “Demystifying the Oracle Database Network Protocol” and, in an even more awesome turn of events, Kyle Hailey invited me to give a 10 minute TED-style talk at OakTable World on the network protocol work I’ve been doing lately. While there were a few good OpenWorld sessions, I spent the majority of my time at OakTable World, where I’d get to see some of the awesome Oracle hacking and research my colleagues, including friend and fellow enthusiast Tanel Poder, have been up to. It was great to see so many non-OakTable members attending OakTable World as well. After talking to a few, it seemed they were having a great time and learning a ton. Likewise, in his “office,” I finally met Mogens Nørgaard, Kevin Closson, Debra Lilley, and Doug Burns.

In my opinion, the MySQL presence at OpenWorld was also very positive. I even had the chance to catch up with InnoDB/Oracle/Twitter MySQL hacker and former EnterpriseDB colleague, Inaam Rana.

All in all, it was a great time and I hope to be back for Oracle OpenWorld 2015!