Openworld 2011 - Day 0

It didn't seem like long ago that I registered for #oow11 but the first day (or is it day 0?) has come and gone. I guess because of the timezone difference I was up about an hour before my alarm was set to go off, which is pretty strange for me. After a quick shower I was out the door by 7:30am and on my way to register. I expected long lines but I had my kit by 8am.

Day 0, like previous years, was a day for Oracle user groups to hold meetings. My day started with Thomas Canty's presentation titled Sysadmin 101. Thomas talked about RAID, the pros/cons of each level, NFS performance, direct NFS and various command line tips. This is a great presentation for someone new to supporting Oracle on Linux that would like to learn a few linux tips.

I take a fair bit of time leading up to the conference to go through Oracle's schedule builder and arrange my day. However, its still easy to miss good sessions. So I always keep my eye out for long lines outside a session and the TV screens showing the titles. As I was making my way to a session I happened to notice Mark Rittman's session on OBIEE 11g Architecture and Internals.

We are currently using OBIEE 10g and there has been talk of upgrading to 11g. So I went in and grabbed a seat. We currently use Oracle Fusion Middleware so alot of the concepts such as weblogic domains, system/non-system components, etc. So the session was a perfect fit to get me up to speed on OBIEE11g. I'm really glad I spotted that one as I walked by.

Next was the E-Business (EBS) Applications Technology SIG . I was a little late and walked in on an overivew of WebLogic. Afterwards Steven Chan gave an abbreviated overview of his Certification Primer and Roadmap session that he's presenting on Tuesday. I actually just realized it was abbreviated and not the full presentation while looking at his website (http://blogs.oracle.com/stevenChan/). So I just modified my schedule to include the full session which is at 1:15 on Tuesday.

I have used RMAN since 9i and its one of those features which I feel you always have to keep up on. Whats more important than being able to recover your database in the event of a failure? So I attended Kamran Agayev's session on RMAN 11g new features. One thing I liked about his presentation was the demo's and real examples/benchmarks. Alot of presentations either have slides of commands and their output or they try and do the demo live which almost always runs into some sort of issue. Kamran recorded his demo's and played them back. I found that for me personally it helped understand the topics better.

Kamran talked about new features such as compression types (ZLIB), Virtual Private Catalogs, changes to commands such as VALIDATE, etc. If you use RMAN and need to get up to speed on 11g new features then i'd check out this presentation.

Finally I attended the Sysadmin SIG. The session was dominated by a discussion on Oracle's Critical patch updates. Its nice to know that i'm not alone in finding that the documentation around this is very confusing. I'm not sure when it changed, maybe it was with release 12 but its definitely not as straight forward. I think part of the reason is that they are trying to reuse documentation. So you'll click on one note and it will reference another and you are left to fit all the pieces together. The Fusion Middleware charts list various products such as infrastructure home, middle tier home, OC4J, forms, jdeveloper, etc, The first time I tried to apply a CPU patch for R12 I had to open an SR as I had no idea which patches to apply. The state of the documentation has left me with an uneasy feeling that i'm not capturing all the patches I need to be applying.

Maybe my memory is playing tricks on me, but i'm pretty sure when I supported an 11i environment all the patches were self contained in one note and it was very easy to find the patches you needed to apply.

On top of the confusing documentation other issues such as determining if your environment is affected by the vulnerabilities, risk analysis and testing requirements also came up.

One of the benefits of coming to Openworld, in my opinion, is being able to provide feed back to the right people at Oracle and having an open discussion with them. Hopefully they will go back with our comments and improve the CPU process.

Lastly the day concluded with the opening keynote. I have to say that over the past few years I haven't looked forward to them as much as I used to. Ever since Oracle acquired Sun, Larry's keynote seems to be dominated by hardware. Not that its a bad thing because I think its a good direction for Oracle. But honestly, my organization is too small to take advantage or be able to afford any of the Exa's (Exadata, Exalogic, Exalytics). Oracle mentioned they sold 1000 in the past year and in line to sell 3000 over the next. Good numbers but that also means the vast majority of Oracle's customers aren't using it or plan to in the near future. So, to me, it doesn't make sense for it to dominate the entire keynote.

After the keynote I stopped by for a quick bite to eat and went to a few stores to take a few pictures of purses for my wife so she could do some virtual shopping.

Well, it seems that the headboard of my hotel neighbours room has stopped hitting off our shared wall, so its time to catch some sleep. I have to get up again in 3.5 hours! Please ignore any typo's or grammatical errors as my eye's aren't quite focusing. ;)