Openworld 2009 - Day 1 Summary

With a reported 37,000 attendees this year one assumption you could make would be that registration would be a long process.  I registered Saturday afternoon and there wasn’t even a line up at Moscone West.  As you ride the long escalators you get a birds eye view of the registration and over my multiple trips today the lineups were at a minimum.   A number of twitter updates have also mentioned how seamless registration was.

My first session of the day was OUG: Demystifying Oracle Real Application Clusters Workload Management with Alex Gorbachev of The Pythian Group.  Its pretty easy to determine he knows his stuff and has really taken the time to understand how everything works beneath the surface.   I briefly supported a RAC environment but most my my experience with it is experimenting in a VM environment.  This session provided an excellent overview of how workload is distributed in a RAC environment.

Another session I attended was Oracle Database 11g Best Practices for Using Partitioning in HA Environments and VLDBs by Ami Aharonovich.  If you missed this presentation, download the materials and demo source.   It was an excellent overview of the new features and effective demos which solidified the concepts.

At the OAUG Database SIG Meeting there was mention of a utility called Trace File Event Timeline which analyzes a trace file and creates a graphical event timeline. There are a number of blog posts which provide more information about the utility, why it was created and how the script itself works.

The next session I visited was the OAUG E-Business Suite Applications Technology SIG.   Steven Chan, Senior Director in the Oracle Applications Technology Integration group at Oracle, posted a summary of his presentation (and the slides) on his blog.  Using his words, “summarizes our latest techstack certifications, desupport notices, support policy updates, and other important topics from the last year in a single, cohesive presentation”.    Very useful to have all of this information consolidated into a single presentation.   If your an E-Business Suite admin, I highly recommend you review it.

My last session of the day was a hands-on lab, Oracle Weblogic Suite 11g for System Administrators.  I have to say I was disappointed by this session…  I followed the steps listed in the guide but being new to Weblogic I really didn’t have any idea of what or why I was doing them.

Finally the day ended with a keynote by Scott McNealy of Sun and Larry Ellision.  Scott started the evening with an entertaining top 10 list developers out of control, which included the gas mask bra, windows and the Java ring.  On a more serious note he also talked about the top 10 innovations from Sun including NFS, Solaris, Java, ZFS and their Open Source contributions.
Each time a company is purchased, its competitors launch an aggressive marketing campaign trying to exploit the air of uncertainty around the merger.  In this case, what will happen to Sparc, Solaris, Java and MySql?     In short, Oracle promises to spend more money on these products than Sun did.

Before he left the stage there was one new product announcement, the Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array which as its name states is a 2 TB array of flash storage.  The benefits compared to disk were discussed such as performance and energy savings.   As Scott said at one point of the presentation, “I think Larry is going to enjoy playing with his new toy.”

Larry took the stage and the first item on his agenda was to reinforce their commitment to SUN Customers.  They promise to spend more money developing SPARC, Solaris and MySQL than Sun did. 


To improve the performance of Oracle products on Sun hardware and to have twice as many hardware specialists selling and servicing Sparc/Solaris systems.

Larry transitioned from his commitment, to how together Sun and Oracle will outperform anything on the market today, primarily focusing on IBM.   In addition to the performance gains of 25% more throughput and 16X better responsive time, he also talked about how much greener their product was.  IBM’s offering requires 6X more power 8X more floor space and on top of that isn’t even fault tolerant.   He finished with a challenge for anyone to prove that their database application doesn’t run twice as fast on Sun hardware as it does IBM, with the winner receiving 10M$.