Saturday, September 27, 2014

Arrived at SFO and registered for OOW

After around 5 hours flight, I arrived at San Francisco at 12pm local time today (Sept.28). One of my colleague took the same flight. The plane was fully loaded, but we didn't know if it was because of Oracle OpenWorld.

To our surprise, we didn't see any crowd in the airport as well as taxi line. Traffic from airport to the down town hotel was not bad at all.

After check-in and having a late lunch, we walked to Moscone center to do our OOW registration. Again, we didn't see lots of attendees for registration. We were joking where those 60K+ people. Since we had our advance check-in QR code ready, we spent less 2 minutes to get our registration done. So efficient:-) Also we got our OOW package fast (no line).
Walking around Moscone West, South and North, the workers and exhibitors were still working hard to prepare the event.

The weather was really nice in SFO. Sunny and warm!

You can follow my Twitter @wliu211 to see my update and pictures.

Thursday, September 25, 2014

OOW14 tips

I have been searching the tips to maximize my Oracle OpenWorld experience. Finally I found one from Alex Antonatos - This year’s OpenWorld expect 70000 attendees, 10 tips to maximize your conference experience.

I like the following tips particularly.

  3) Bring comfortable shoes. You can expect lots of walking and uncomfortable shoes can put a damper on energy very quickly.

  5) Bring business cards for the many drawings that are often offered in the exhibit areas.

For those have attended OOW before, do you any other tips to offer? I am leaving soon.

Update on Oct.11, 2014 after coming back from OOW14:

While I checked the news and blogs about OOW14 at home, I found an article First-timer tips for Oracle Open World written by the OOW14 attendee . I wish she could write it before the event, so I could benefit from it:-)

Wednesday, September 24, 2014

Oracle Database Cloud Service vs. Aliyun RDS

Since I have known (learned)  what Larry is going to talk about, I started to search the information about Oracle Database Cloud Service (ODCS).

From Oracle website about ODCS, "Oracle Cloud provides several Oracle Database offerings giving you the option of a single schema based service, or a virtual machine with a fully configured, running Oracle Database instance". The last option (below) is the "future direction", which Oracle will sell the most.

Database as a Service - Managed
  • Essential management by Oracle
  • Complete access to dedicated Oracle Database instance
  • Full SQL*Net access
  • Oracle managed backup with point-in-time recovery
  • Oracle managed patching and upgrades

Recently a company named Alibaba is very hot so his founder Jack Ma.  By comparing Oracle's ODCS with Aliyun  (Alibaba's company) RDS (Relational Database Service), they are pretty much same in term of their offerings. The main difference right now is that Aliyun RDS only supports MySQL and MS SQLServer.

With those money getting from largest IPO in the history, Jack Ma can make the RDS business bigger and bigger in China and then compete with Oracle and Amazon directly outside China.

Larry, do you know Jack?

Tuesday, September 23, 2014

Numbers about OOW 2014

I have been wondering how big the Oracle OpenWorld will be.

According to Oracle OpenWorld 2014 official site, there will be
  • more than 60,000 business and technology professionals from around the world
  • more than 2,500 business and technology sessions, covering cloud applications, such as marketing, social, service, sales, and HCM as well as big data, database, middleware, and engineered systems
To better support and understand the above numbers, here is another Oracle official fact sheet about Oracle OpenWorld 2013.

There is also a 2011 article from NYTimes described how Oracle OpenWorld brought the impact on the city of San Francisco even 3 years ago.

" Commuters driving into this city on Monday morning will discover major downtown thoroughfares closed. More than 129,000 square feet of tents will have sprouted around the city’s convention center, where 4.25 miles of power cables, 300 miles of phone and Internet wires and enough beer trucks to sate 45,000 people are in place."

"The production, which runs through Thursday, requires a quarter-million cups of coffee and 14,700 hotel rooms, filling the city’s supply and spilling down the San Francisco peninsula past Redwood Shores, Oracle’s headquarters. "

Monday, September 22, 2014

What will Larry talk about in his keynote speech at OOW 2014?

Still as Oracle CEO, in his keynote speech at Oracle OpenWorld 2013, Larry Ellison, announced "Oracle Database 12c In-Memory Database and M6 Big Memory Machine".  In the Content Catalog for OOW 2014, there will be lots of sessions talking about in-memory option like the one (Top Five Things to Know About Oracle Database In-Memory) by Maria Colgan.

To go back one more year, at OOW 2012, after telling the crowd about Oracle Cloud 2012, Larry announced Oracle Database 12c and next generation Exadata Database Machine.

On September 18, Larry stepped aside  as Oracle CEO. As a Chairman and CTO, what important announcement will he deliver to the world in this year's OOW keynote speech?

From Forbes'article "Larry Ellison Is Still Here And 7 More Things About Oracle" written by Michael Hickins, a director of strategic communications at Oracle, we can get the taste of Larry's coming speech.

"... the company will roll out its new Database Cloud Servicea new multi-tenant database-as-a-service offering that will let customers migrate their existing apps and databases to the cloud “with the push of a button,” said Ellison. Data will be compressed ten to one and encrypted for secure and efficient transfer to the cloud, with no reprogramming. “Every single Oracle feature — even our latest high-speed in-memory processing — is included in the Oracle Cloud Database Service,” Ellison said. “Hundreds of thousands of customers and ISVs have been waiting for exactly this. Database is our largest software business and database will be our largest cloud service business.” "

Thursday, September 18, 2014

Prepare for Oracle OpenWorld 2014

Oracle OpenWorld 2014 is fast approaching. This will be my first time to join this event. I will fly from Toronto to San Francisco on September 27.

Except the registration, hotel and flight booking, the most important preparation work was to schedule the sessions to attend during the event by using Schedule Builder.

There are 2027 sessions (by 3214 speakers) listed in Content Catalog. Which sessions should I choose? A big headache. I don't know how other attendees normally pick the sessions, but I chose the sessions mainly by speakers who I am interested in. As you can also see from the topics, they are mostly relate to Oracle 12c or performance tuning.

Here are some of those speakers and their sessions:
  • Using Oracle Multitenant to Efficiently Manage Development and Test Databases by Alex Gorbachev - CTO, The Pythian Group Inc.
  • Near-Zero Downtime Database Migration by Arup Nanda - Database Architect, Starwood Hotels  
  • Adaptive Query Optimization by Christian Antognini - Senior Principal Consultant, Trivadis AG  
  • Reading an Automatic Workload Repository Report by Jonathan Lewis - Sole Proprietor, JL Computer Consultancy  
  • Top Five Things to Know About Oracle Database In-Memory by Maria Colgan - Master Product Manager, Oracle  
  • How to Upgrade, Migrate, and Consolidate to Oracle Database 12c by Mike Dietrich - Senior Principal Technologist, Oracle  
  • The Best New Oracle Database 12c Features by Rich Niemiec - Executive Advisor to the International Board, Rolta International Inc.  
  • Expert Oracle Exadata: Then and Now by Tanel Poder - Technology Evangelist, Enkitec  
  • What’s New in Oracle Database 12c Release 12.1.0.2? by Tom Kyte - Architect, Oracle  
For sure, I will watch the keynotes by Larry Ellison and Mark Hurd.