My company sent me to Oracle OpenWorld in November, held annually in San Francisco, CA at the Moscone Center and other large venues about town. I stayed at the Hotel Bijou several blocks away but spent most of my time in sessions, doing work-work on the convention's wireless network, and talking to peers and arguably the most excited vendors in the world.
This is, after all, a very large event. About 50,000 people large, from what I'm told. And Oracle is the largest database and middleware vendor in the world, citing the richest and most successful organizations as clients (read: sets of disciples). There were some great presentations (about five that I attended) and some real bombs (wow, I saw a lot of those, too), but it was all-in-all a good experience. So much money was being influenced there, I have no way to express.
I think I'll spare some details for later posts, but here are one high- and low-light each. The session names were butchered, I'm sure, but are representative.
Visual Studio Integration with Oracle Data Provider (ODP.NET)
This has GOT to be a highlight, right? Well, it would have been. Granted, I've seen this functionality specification and know how slick it is to have only tablespace and user creation over the DBA side of the house and everything else on the developer side in your IDE. That's awesome.
Want to know what's not awesome? Your presenter - an alleged product manager - installed the Visual Studio 2008 Beta the night before the presentation expecting everything to work seamlessly. Forget that the latest and greatest is hitting the streets in a couple of weeks as a free oracle.com download. Hard to displace, but try for me. The night before, people. Needless to say, virtually nothing work but that which did work was really cool. It was nothing I didn't expect it to do, and will be great when it's done, but the demos, as they were, weren't. It was a tense hour in a packed room.
Building Applications That Rock with ApEx
One of the execs from Washington Mutual (WaMu) card services presented their approach to deploying Application Express (formerly "HTML DB", now adoringly called "ApEx") in multiple business units. It started with a proof of concept that turned 24 disparate Excel, Access, and other manual processes into 13 (or so) ApEx applications. In eight weeks, including UAT. That's the amazing part.
(Full disclosure: The part that was scary to me was running the database - a single instance for every app that's being built and migrated to production - on the same box as the Web-serving Apache components. &%$^# EEEK. That's an easy fix for my environment, though.)
What do I see at my company? I see business cases that would save a couple thousand a year get serious consideration. But replacing 24 processes in the field with something extensible, faster, and supportable that would equal thousands per instance? That is strategic, and I really, really look forward to doing something like that. Even if it means more of these crazy-arse weekend hours and all-nighters I've been pulling to do it, I think that it would ultimately be a win-win for the business units and IT, and potentially free up some time in the business units to conceive of more strategic projects.
Needless to say, I walked out ready to propose that to my directors. When I have a working model out at apex.oracle.com, of course. :)
There were two other presentations on designing with ADF (AWESOME presenter) and Scaling Your PHP App to 10,000 Connections using the new OCI8 extension and multithreading, but I think I'll give each of those their own posts.
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