OOW07 Day 2: Sessions + Benelux Party + Blogger Meetup

Update: The last days the tiredness got over me, that's why my blog posts had a bit of a delay.

On Tuesday John and I went for a coffee in the morning, I finished my blog post from Monday, read a bit the online newspapers and talk with the home front in Belgium. Apparently it's cold in my home country, only 5 degrees. Am I glad I'm in San Francisco where it's not really warm, but it's still a nice temperature (around 17°).

Before noon I went to the Hilton hotel where most of the Oracle Develop sessions are held. Some people recognized me... It's sometimes scary (but nice) when you're sitting in the lobby and people say "Hi Dimitri, how are you doing?".

After having a chat with them I went to Tom Kyte's keynote "How do you know what you know". His talk was about the changes in live... things (smart) people said a few years ago and where true at that moment, but aren't anymore. He had a series of nice examples that proved his statement. It's always nice to hear and see Tom speaking, so natural. It was also the first time I saw Tom with a beard!


In the next session Carl Backstrom was talking about "Advanced Oracle Application Express: Building Web 2.0 Applications". It was his first presentation on such a big event and he did well. He's working with Ubuntu linux and had some problems to get his laptop working with the projector and finally had to use another laptop. He couldn't do all demos, that's why he decided to do his talk again on the next day in the Unconference zone. It's nice to directly hear the person speaking who actually build a lot of the AJAX/web 2.0 things in APEX. He talked about debugging, the APEX api's and some of the new features of APEX 3.1.
I'm not going to list everything in detail in this blog post as Carl will make a video/viewlet about his presentation and put it on his blog.

After lunch I did the hands-on lab "Advanced PDF Printing" by Marc Sewtz and Marco Adelfio of the APEX development team. I already knew this material, but I wanted to see what the people had to do as my talk on Thursday was in the same area (integration of APEX and BI Publisher). The hands-on you can download from OTN here.


In the afternoon I went to the "No Slide Zone" (a place where powerpoint is prohibited) for Tom Kyte's talk about "The Top 10 --No, 11-- New features of Oracle Database 11g". It was an amazing experience! Tom just had eleven flash cards with the new feature on. He looked at it and talked about why he liked that new feature. When he finished that feature he threw the card away. Nice, but most of all, very impressive!I was a bit late as I had to come from the Hilton and this session was in the Yebuena theater, but these are the new features I picked up:

1. Real Application Testing: record the workload of your current database and replay it on your new 11g database
2. Stand-by database: improvements in logical and physical standby databases.
3. Caching: more things can be cached in 11gEncrypted tablespace: speaks for itself
4. Flashback Data Archive (Oracle Total Recall): see here.
5. Better Compression
6. Finer Grained Dependencies: objects become less invalidate when other objects change
7. Virtual Columns

Afterwards I went to the Exhibitions and demo grounds to look at the companies exposing their product and see some other Oracle products in action. In the linux boot I met Sergio Leunissen again. It was a long time I've seen him, so it was nice to have a talk with him. He's such a nice person. I also had a chat with some people of the BI Publisher development team.

In the evening I had two parties: the "Benelux Cocktail Party" and the "Blogger Meetup".

I first went to the "Benelux Cocktail Party" where I met other people from Belgium and the Netherlands. As Oracle Open World is so big, you don't popup against other people that frequently. I had some chats with customers, people of Oracle, Accenture and a lot others. On the picture I'm having fun with my colleagues of Ordina Nederland. We had some champagne and "caviar" (shrimps, tuna fish, ...). Really nice, but when a lot people where leaving I decided to go to the next party...


At the "Blogger Meetup" I met my Oracle blogger colleagues. It's always nice to meet the people whose blog you're reading. Just as last year it was again fun. Talking with Mark Rittman, Eddy Awad, Chris Muir, Laurent Snyder, Andrew Clark, Tim Hall... is always enriching. Thanks for the great night my friends!