Oracle Open World 2014 in Review
Oracle Open World was such a blur. This conference completely shuts down a section of San Francisco to the residents as 60,000+ attendees descend upon the Moscone Center. The logistics and planning behind this event are phenomenal. Hey Oracle, can you offer a behind the scenes pass next year? Again this conference was amazing, and I year after year, I get so much out of this conference. I will encourage everyone to attend at least one of these. It is impossible to articulate the intangible benefits of this conference. The networking and renewal of relationships between customers and colleagues is invaluable. Let’s just say lots of opportunities for “free” consulting services. Visits to the DemoGrounds, conversations with fellow attendees at networking events, and of course the information you get by just sitting in on the sessions. Just check out the list of presentations given by fellow Oracle ACEs.
For those interested, here is a recap of my week.
Day 1: (Sunday Symposium)
Galo Balda showed some cool stuff with his talk on: Getting Started with SQL Pattern Matching in Oracle Database 12c. Prior to that, I was able warm up the crowd with an Introduction to Regular Expressions 101 presentation. Several attendees said they learned something. For my first Oracle Open World I think the turnout was great. Now to wait on the surveys …
Networking Event: Oracle ACE Dinner. What a show!
The remainder of the week was packed with sessions.
Day 2:
Monday started off with an OOW tradition by swimming in the San Francisco Bay. Afterwards, it was back to business. I visited the DemoGrounds, and was able to confirm that we can use DDR or better yet, BI Publisher within OBIEE for transactional reports. That’s a quick win right? Of course my buddy Oracle ACE Associate, Christian Berg (@Nephentur), BI expert reminded me that I should build a correct data model, and incorporate that stuff into the RDP. He’s right you know. I’m sure Kent Graziano (@KentGraziano) would agree. So we will get to that. I promise!!
In that same vein, there was some not so good news coming from Oracle. While I’ve known for at least a year now, OBIEE has moved away from Informatica to ODI for ETL. This means that certain customers have some work to do. My hope is to get something going in this area soon. It’s a good move, but …..
If you know me, I’m gonna try my best to get some SQL Developer sessions. I only made it to one, but it was great. I am very excited about what Jeff showed us and where this tool is going. We got a quick review of 4.0.3
- Big Data comes to SQL Developer with Hive Connectivity
- SSH Tunnel Support
Then on to SQL Developer 4.1:
- Block Text Editing
- SQL Logger (Can this be used in Auditing? Hmmmm)
- Instance Viewer – Database “Monitor” as I believe it’s a snapshot in time and not continuous. Even better, I don’t need to license the Performance Pack to get at it, and it’s all pretty with visualizations.
At the end of the day, I WANT A COPY!
Networking Event: ODTUG Reception and Pythian Appreciation Event
Day 3:
Tuesday was kicked off by doing and submitting homework. I’m taking a Technical Certification course in Database and Linux Administration. I did something different today. I spent some time at Oak Table World (OTW). If you really want to get under the covers of the technology, this is where you want to be. I was really impressed with Tanel Poder’s presentation “Hacking Oracle 12c”. ASH is a goldmine of data if you know how to read it. While examining CPU utilization got an unexpected peek into In-Memory functionality when a table was cached. This is where you get into the meat and potatoes of the Oracle Database. This is where you get the recipes to the secret sauce and Coca-Cola.
Networking Event: APEX Meetup – Dueling Pianos
Day 4:
What? The midterm is today!! I thought it was on Thursday? Anyway, I get set and take this midterm exam. I got a 96 because I did not make the answer plural: “line” vs “lines”. I need to have a discussion with someone about this class anyway.
On to the Open World stuff.
The day was rounded off by a slew of ERP and the Cloud sessions. Again, I like what I see from the offerings, but as a customer, you will need to have your act together.
- Migrate clean, accurate, and relevant data
- Document your testing procedures
- Be prepared to relinquish some administrative control
- Patching timetable may no longer be under your control
- Eliminate Customizations
- Standardize on integration points
- Take an incremental approach – no big bang
In other words, have your stuff together because everything will not be at your convenience.
Oracle Appreciation Event: Can you say Aerosmith. Great concert
Day 5:
Officially the last day of Open World and most people are heading back home, the diehard were back at it. Fellow Atlanta resident and Co-Founder of Red Pill Analytics, Stewart Bryson gave us a demo of a new tool from Oracle enabling Metadata management across a variety of technologies such as OBIEE and ODI.
Then back to the podium for me to present on Database Migration using my favorite tool SQL Developer. I was even prepared to demo the process. You can check out the presentation here. After answering a few questions from the 50 or so participants, I made my way over to hear Kyle Hailey from Delphix give a talk on ASHMasters. Yes this is the same ASH that I mentioned earlier. Again, this was eye opening at the amount of information that can be gathered. This really raises a lot of questions.
Next for me was to catch a plane back to Atlanta and get ready for the upcoming week.
But before I go, it was good to see:
Jeff, Kellyn, Tim, Tim, Galo, Kent, Kris, Lillian, Vickie, Monty, Dave, Osama, Crystal, Lori, Dave, John, Erik, Bobby, Barbara, Leighton, Paul, Samantha, Alex, Stewart, Kevin, Kyle, Cameron, Julie, Natalie, Mia, Sarah, Debra, Bjoern, Yuri, Henning, Michael, Mark, Joel, and Heli.
Apologies for anyone I have forgotten.
