openworld

Only a week after Oracle OpenWorld concluded and I already feel like I’m hopelessly behind on posting news and impressions. Behind or not, I have news to share!

The most prominent feature announced at OpenWorld is the “In-Memory Option”  for Oracle Database 12c.  This option is essentially a new part of the SGA that caches tables in column formats. This is expected to make data warehouse queries significantly faster and more efficient. I would have described the feature in more details, but Jonathan Lewis gave a better overview in this forum discussion, so just go read his post.

Why am I excited about a feature that has nothing to do with Hadoop?

A familiar morning. Up at silly o’clock, went to the gym, then read in my room for a while…

The plan for Wednesday was pretty much the same as Tuesday. Most of the day was spent at RAC Attack. I thought we were meant to be helping people install RAC on their laptops, but I quickly came to understand this was a cover for watching Yuri take photos of people jumping in the air…

A big thank you to all the people involved in making RAC Attack happen again! A lot of people helped in making the new 12c install notes. Lots of people dedicated two days of OOW2013 to this, rather than watching presentations or swanning off to the boat racing. Thanks also to the OTN crowd for giving up so much space to us.

Another “groundhog day” morning. Up at silly o’clock, went to the gym, then read in my room for a while…

Tuesday was the first day of RAC Attack proper. We had 3 tables at the OTN lounge, all of which were full. There were a few teething problems with the new set of instructions, but we muddled through. In some ways, this is more fun than if things go too smoothly. RAC Attack took pretty much the whole day. I hoped to go and see my adopted dad (Graham Wood) in the Real World Performance Group session, but that never happened.

Monday started in a similar way to Sunday. I woke up at silly o’clock, went to the gym, then read in my room for a while.

Monday morning was spent flitting between the demo grounds and the OTN Lounge. I also filmed a short interview for OTN, which will probably appear at some point. It was a one-take thing, so it will annoy the hell out of me when I watch it back 75,000 times.

Later in the day I went to the Real World Performance Group session, then it was back to the OTN lounge to for some more networking/chatting.

I arrived in San Francisco on midday Saturday. I basically lost a nights sleep, all but 1 hour, so I was not feeling on top of the world. I got some food and went to bed for the rest of the day. I started Sunday at 00:30, so Sunday was going to be a looooonnnnggggg day.

After getting breakfast at 03:00, hitting the gym and reading for a while, I ventured down to the conference.

I’ve been challenged by Doug Burns to find the most stupid exhibition freebie as a present for Andy Cowling. I am of course going to cheat as much as possible to win this challenge, so if you see something particularly stupid, can you let me know so I can snag one. Needless to say, keep it a secret from Doug too.

If you are an exhibitor and you happen to have a particularly stupid exhibition freebie, feel free to contact me. Once again, make no attempt to contact Doug Burns…

Cheers

Tim…

PS. Anything really cool, like a free Exadata, might accidentally get kept for myself…

Here’s a quick summary of my Oracle OpenWorld 2012 experience. First of all, a list of the posts I made during my stay:

Day 5 was a presentations day for me.

I tried to make as many motes as I could, but you will see the quality and accuracy of the notes tail off as the day went along…

Tom’s Top 12 Things About the Latest Generation of Database Technology

My bullets don’t quite match Tom’s, which is why I have more than 12 things listed.

My RAC Attack session was pretty early, so I headed straight there for the morning.

The OCP lounge always has drinks and food, so regular pitstops there are the norm for me at OOW. If you have OCP or above, it’s really worth dropping by on the first day and getting your ribbons, so you can do regular refreshment stops during the week.

After RAC Attack it is was back to the demo grounds to do another quick tour. Basically, I was looking for new faces to speak to and quizzing people further about stuff I had discussed on previous days. Sometimes you have to let this stuff stew a while before you can think of more questions.

Day 3 was similar to day 2 for me. I spent a lot of time hanging around the RAC Attack sessions. A lot of people pass through, so in addition to helping people set up virtualized RAC, there are always interesting people to talk to.

I did some serious demo grounds cruising again, including: