Openworld 2009 – Wednesday Summary

Today was off to another rocky start.  Unfortunately I received some bad news from home and spent part of the morning trying to make travel arrangements.   I was hoping to attend an unconference session by Paul Vallee and Alex Gorbachev from The Pythian Group about the pressures behind support a 24x7 environment.

While I was waiting for my next session I stopped by the exhibits and went to the fun zone to play some guitar hero and basketball to clear my mind.  I lost track of time and almost missed my next session so I hurried off to find it. 

Sessions I attended:

Meeting Name:Implementing an Advanced Architecture for Oracle E-Business Suite

Excellent session!  I would say the best one I attended at the conference. Elke Phelps, co-author of the Applications DBA Field Guide (which by the way I always carry), covered all of the HA features particular to the E-Business Suite and injected personal experiences, tips from working in a large environment which upto 65,000 concurrent users (correct me if i’m wrong).

I have implemented alot of these features but I received the most benefit from the section on external clients, which discussed methods to secure internet/external access to the E-Business Suite.     I haven’t done this year but I may have to in the next few months for a project I am currently working on.

The reason tho why this session was so good was the audience interaction at the end.  Once the floor was opened for questions quite a few members of the audience participated.  It even spilled out into the hallway after.    For me, this is what Openworld is about and I find not enough sessions have this level of discussion.  Most people scatter to leave as soon as the presentation is over, if not before.

As well, I finally introduced myself to Steven Chan, who’s blog I follow quite a bit.

Quick Tips for Database Performance Tuning

I really didn’t stay too long at this session… The presenters spent alot of time showing the SQL Monitoring and Tuning features of Enterprise Manager.   I was sitting pretty close to the back and the projection was pretty small.. I heard on twitter that people were lining up to see Larry’s keynote so I decided to head over there and try to get a good seat.

On the way over to the keynote area they had the hallway shutdown between Moscone South and North.  I am not sure why they do this but i’m guessing its because of the early access for press/bloggers/gold club members.

I showed the security guard my blogger pass and he let me through the door which i’m sure a few people behind me weren’t too happy about.  Its the first time I took advantage of the perks during the conference.

Larry Ellison Keynote

The Infosys keynote started first and was probably the driest one I have seen and I was afraid the guy next to me was going to fall out of his chair or get whiplash from dozing.  I can’t really say I listened to the full keynote but it seemed to be about IT driving innovation.

What can you say about Larry?  He’s a very charismatic speaker and it wouldn’t be an OpenWorld for me without going to see his keynote.  He talked about Linux and how OEL and VM Server uptake has been better than they expected.

The audience laughed when he mentioned that IBM was contesting the performance stats of the Exadata 2 saying it doesn’t run 16x faster but only 6x faster. “They may be right.”, he continued with a chuckle.

He continued with a review of Exadata V1 which is the fastest machine for data warehousing, being 10-50x faster than other DW systems.  Customer stories included queries which took 24 hours were now taking less than 30 minutes, performance was 10x-72x better and a query taking 30 minutes was now only taking 1 minute.

Exadata V2 is the worlds fastest machine for OLTP with extreme performance for random IO and 3x faster than V1 for data warehousing performance.

A few surprise guests were here today.  Roger Daltrey and no other than the Terminator himself, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger!  I have to say, i’ve been a big fan of his movies and I was really impressed with his speech.  I’m sure its up on youTube by now. 

After Mr. Schwarzenegger left the stage Larry continued and once again challenged IBM to enter the 10 million dollar contest. The next topic was about their Unified Support System in which My Oracle Support will be integrated into Enterprise Manager.  Customers will be encouraged to upload their configurations so that information can be processed and scanned for potential problems.

The last topic was Fusion.  Larry re-iterated his commitment to the unlimited application support program and even tho EBS, Siebel, PSFT are all based on outdated technology, Oracle will continue to support them.  Until customers are ready to upgrade to the next generation of middleware which is based on open standards to ensure interoperability.

The keynote ran late, so I missed the last session of the day.  By the time I managed to get out of the keynote area is was well past the start time and it would have taken another 10 minutes to get to the room.   I headed back to the hotel to get ready for the appreciation event.


I had hoped to be on the first bus out so I could get a good seat at the concert but just as I was about to leave the hotel I heard a ton of fire trucks.   They were stopped in the intersection by my hotel and I could tell immediately that this wasn’t a false alarm as the air was hazy with smoke.     A couple of blocks in the area were shutoff or restricted by police so it caused alot of issues for the busses.  We finally managed to get a bus and headed out to treasure island.




 
Shortly after getting some food and beverages the concert started.   Aerosmith were simply amazing and it was a great concert.  Once it was finished we headed over to the carnival games and I tried to win my kids some stuffed animals.   At this point the amount of beer I had consumed had a detrimental  affect but I managed to win one toy.




However, having two children I couldn’t simply leave with just one stuffed animal.  I tried a few more games and came close to winning but in the end I was toyless.   I struck up a conversation with a fellow attendee, who was carrying quite a few stuffed toys.  He seemed like a good person to get some tips from.  A short time later he found me and gave me one of his stuffed animals, which thankfully ended my fruitless attempts at trying to win on my own.

By this time it was around 12:30 and having my first session at 9am the next day I took the bus back to the hotel.