SQL*Wizard Joins Oracle Open World in SanFo

 Learning, Fun, and Key Announcements at Oracle OpenWorld 2008

 by Charlton H. Lopez, OCP DBA, RHCE, Novell CLP

OpenWorld is Oracle's annual event for business decision makers, IT managers, end-users, technologists, consultants, and partners.  This year, it was estimated that around 43,000 attendees from across the world flocked to Moscone Center, San Francisco between September 21 to 25.

 

THE LEARNING PART

The bulk of OpenWorld are technology and solutions-oriented sessions from Oracle and their partners covering databases, middleware, applications, vertical solutions, and complementary products and services.

 The exhibition halls of Moscone Center have been filled with booths of Oracle's partners – independent software vendors, system integrators, technology consulting firms, and OEM vendors alike.  Attendees had the opportunity to ask product experts directly, such as those from Oracle, EMC, Dell, Red Hat, and VMware, a range of questions from enhancing disk I/O performance, resolving disaster recovery issues, and improving data warehouse performance, among others.

 HP introduced the attendees to the innovations they were doing for their own data centers and for their customers', as well, to make data center operations greener and less costly to deploy and manage.

 The Oracle Bookstore showcases books in business, management, and Oracle technologies.  Those vying for Oracle certifications were gleeful to find certification exam reviewers and hard-to-find books from Apress, Wiley, Oracle Press, and Sybex sold at 20% discounts!  Oracle souvenirs, such as shirts, jackets, pens, notebooks, laptop bags, mugs, towels, and dolls, among other merchandise were also sold in the bookstore.

The Oracle Technology Network Lounge had been a wonderful place to sit down and have coffee, bagels, and a casual talk and an informal product demo from Oracle technology specialists.  Shirts, Oracle software/development licenses, and documentation were being given away. 

 

THE FUN PART

On September 21, Sunday, Oracle held the Welcome Reception for the attendees in the Howard Street Tent and Yerba Buena Gardens.  It had been a chilly night of good food, cool drinks, and entertaining reggae music.

 On September 22, Monday, Oracle hosted Oracle Technology Network (OTN) Night at the Hilton San Francisco.  Again, it was a night of good food, cool drinks, and classic dance music!  The dance floor was hit by grooving bodies and Marvel superhero She-Hulk joined the party!

 On September 23, Tuesday night, the Green Event takes place at the Temple Bar!  Gorgeous models clad with fashionable outfits made from environment-friendly materials do the catwalk. OpenWorld attendees get free entrance and drinks – and hit the dance floor!

On September 24, Wednesday night, OpenWorld Appreciation Event was held in Treasure Island! OpenWorld attendees had a great treat -- free food, free drinks, free rides at the carnival, and live performances from  Elvis Costello, Seal, UB40, Alan Jackson, The Psychedelic Furs, and The Gin Blossoms.

 

KEY ANNOUNCEMENTS

Oracle Beehive was launched.  Beehive is a platform for communications and integrated collaboration.  It provides conferencing, instant messaging, calendar, e-mail, calendar, and team workspaces.  Beehive incorporates the open source Zimbra Collaboration Suite.

Oracle emphasized their thrust into data integration, business intelligence, and enterprise performance management through the Oracle Business Intelligence and Hyperion products.  In addition, Oracle also introduced their solutions for identity management and web content management through Oracle Identity Management and WebCenter Suite products.

Oracle launched Exadata, the HP-Oracle database machine, designed to provide enhanced performance to data warehouses.  Exadata packages a database-optimized storage and server hardware from HP with Oracle's Enterprise Linux and Oracle Database Real Application Clusters.  HP-Oracle's Exadata competes directly with database machine products from Teradata and Netezza.

Oracle heads for the clouds and partnered with Amazon Web Services.  Oracle software, particularly Oracle Enterprise Linux, Oracle Database 11g, Oracle Enterprise Manager, and Oracle Fusion Middleware can be deployed in the cloud computing environment of Amazon, the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

OpenWorld is truly a worthwhile experience for business decision makers looking for solutions to their business problems... for IT managers looking for innovations... for developers looking for technologies to leverage on... and for end-users looking for better ways to do their work.