OOW - Wednesday - Sessions and APEX meetup

The sessions I followed on Wednesday...

Recent Enhancements in Oracle’s Cost Based Optimizer (by Jonathan Lewis)
This was the first time I followed a live presentation of Jonathan. Before I already read some of his work and I heard so many lovely words of him. He makes also part of the Oaktable, a group of people I respect for 200%! Jonathan describes Oaktable as "old men drinking club", which can be true after I saw the pictures of the DBF 2006. ;-)
I was really pleased with the presentation! I first thought it would be to difficult for me, as Jonathan's knowledge is so much higher than mine, but he explained very well, so everybody could follow. Maybe it's because he was a teacher before? ;-)
The content of the presentation can be found in his book about the Cost-based Optimizer.
Again, if you've the change to see a presentation of him, don't hesitate! Together with Tom Kyte, he must be one of the best persons knowing what's talking about.

Next-Generation Oracle Database Performance and Scalability: A sneak Preview (by Oracle)
This was a nice presentation about the performance improvements and scalability we can expect in 11g. Some of them they mentioned were:

• Server side connection pooling: like with a webserver, but than for the database
• Query results caches
• Cache fusion
• Enhanced native compilation
• Faster Backup & Recovery
• Secure Files

Recent Advances in Automatic SQL (by Jonathan Lewis)
As I really liked the first presentation of Jonathan, I went also to his second. I found it again a high quality presentation. It was about the automatic SQL tuning features in 9i and 10g and the pitfalls you can encounter when using them.

APEX meetup
As you could see previously on my blog, we arranged a meeting for all APEX enthusiasts.
So, At 7 pm in the bar across the Moscone Center, called "Fourth Street Bar & Deli", John and I arrived... of course our friend Steve Howard did already arrive as also Mike Hichwa, VP Oracle APEX! I find it wonderful that Mike took the time to join us. You should understand that being a VP doesn't necessarily mean to meet with a bunch of APEX lovers... but I think for Mike, APEX is his baby, and he treats it "special". As I also said before, Michael Hichwa is really motivated to let APEX succeed and he also wants to listen to the people!
But Michael was not alone, a lot others of the APEX Development team of Oracle joined us!
I really enjoyed being with the people who built the application I like most. It's nice to get to know the person who're working behind the scenes.
Next to having fun, we discussed about the APEX SIG... A communication about that will be made on the IOUG website in the near future. One thing is sure: Michael Hichwa and Joel Kallman really want to support us! If you would like to join the APEX SIG, feel free to do so, by going to the IOUG website and become a member (register).
Thanks again to all the people of that night and especially to Michael Hichwa, who also paied our diner! You're the best, Mike!
Anton Nielson and Sergio Leunissen were also present in the beginning of the evening, but when the picture was taken, they were already gone. And... Raj didn't want to be on the picture, so he took it ;-p
On the picture, from left to right, standing: Joel Kallman, Jason Straub, John Scott, Steven Howard - sitting: Marco Adelfio, Dimitri Gielis, Marc Sewtz, Doug Gault, Michael Hichwa