#OOW12 - Day 1

Wow, the conference is already half over...   The past 3 days have gone by pretty fast.    4/5 of my sessions were really good on Monday.    Currently we are running OEM 11g and there has been some talk about upgrading to 12c.   So I added Upgrading Oracle Enterprise Manager to 12c, Best Practices to my schedule. I'm glad I attended because the session provided a great overview of the upgrade process and various upgrade paths you could take.   Now an upgrade doesn't seem to be as daunting a task as I had assumed.

The next session I attended was an overview of WebCenter.   We are in the process of evaluating the product and I was asked to install the product in a dev environment.   I was impressed with the editing abilities and integrated mobile support.   It appears to be much easier to use than our current solution Oracle Portal.

Oracle E-Business Suite Future Directions mostly talked about features coming in 12.2.   After Steven Chan's presentation on Sunday I thought for sure 12.2 was going to be announced this year at Openworld.  However, I haven't heard a thing yet.    Max Arderius talked about WebLogic Server replacing the 10.1.3 stack and its impact.    

Moving forward autoconfig will have a reduced role, limited to the database, EBS and part of the weblogic server configuration.   Fusion Middleware tools will handle the rest.   There is a good slide in the presentation which provides better context.    The cloning process will also change.  Now preclone on the appsTier will take longer and require 3-4GB of disk space.   If I understood correctly you won't need to copy the weblogic files, just the 10.1.2, appl_top and common_top directories.

My last session of the day was on Best Practices for Managing and Monitoring Weblogic Server.   Our WebLogic install is pretty basic and as of yet, we haven't had a requirement for high availability.   So I am not that familiar WL HA configs.   The session provided a great overview of using clustering, ideas on how to segregate applications and some of the reasons why you would want to.  For example, some applications may need to scale up more than others.  

The session also covered some of the OEM 12c features for managing WL.   A routing topology viewer which helps identify the impact of performance issues across the various components/tiers.    One issue we had is making sure our configuration from dev-test-prod are identical.  OEM 12c apparently provides the ability to compare WL domains and alert when differences are detected.  

Just as important, as the conference (well, almost) are the networking opportunities.  The provide you with the ability to meet other like minded people and talk sports and shop.

Monday night started with an awesome event at Benu with Oracle.   The entire restaurant was open to us, including the kitchen.   You could walk right in, watch the staff prepare the food and eat it.   I'm not entirely sure what some of the things I ate were but most were very tasty.   Those I wasn't sure about I made my co-worker eat first to see his reaction.

After Benu we walked over to the W Hotel for a meetup with Pythian.   We recently signed a contract with them and it was a great opportunity to meet some of their staff and of course Mr. Paul Vallee.   I'm looking forward to working with them as I have heard great things about them.

Finally, as my coworker called an early night (wuss), I met up with my manager who was at an IBM event.   The Spazmatics (sp) were providing the music and I have to say they were pretty good.   Pretty sure I won't be able to convince the guys I jam with to play NKOTB tho.    After the event we headed over to a local pub for a few more drinks before calling it a night.