OOW07 Day 3: Keynote + Party

After a good night, my first session of the day (Wednesday) was "Consolidate Your Third-Party Databases with Oracle Database 11g, Using Oracle's New Migration Tools" by Barry McGillin of Oracle. This session was about the new features of SQL Developer for accessing other databases like MS Access, MySQL and SQL Server and migrating them to Oracle. SQL Developer now has almost everything what the Migration Workbench had before. Barry showed how a migration works and what we can expect in the future for ex. support for Sybase.

At noon there was the big keynote with Michael Dell and Larry Ellison. I thought there would be a big announcement, but no... earlier at OOW there was already the announcement of Oracle VM (Virtual Machine). Michael Dell showed some new nice products they released or are going to release, but some of the audience didn't like all that "Dell publicity".

There was a nice "coming" product, sort of tablet pc with touchable screen like in an iPhone.

Larry gave an update about linux, with the new VM software they brought out and an update on Fusion Applications. Normally I don't read that much about the Fusion applications as I'm more interested in the technology under need it. Nevertheless I found it nice to listen to and I was impressed by the Fusion demo they gave. A sort of Sales forecasting system which could search all files and for ex. take one slide from one file another slide from another ppt etc. so you basically could create your own ppt from within the Fusion app. The sales forecast app was a "complete" system for sales people, the developers thought at almost anything. Also the visuals were really impressive! (see screenshot)

In the afternoon I had a chat with some other people and then went back to the hotel to fresh up for the big party.

The party is always impressive... San Francisco is colored in red, a lot of buses are going to Cow Palace, which Oracle booked for the "Appreciation Party".
I'm not sure you know Cow Palace, but it's a *big* place. At the opening speech they said this party is the biggest company party in the world, which I'm happy to believe. The "names" Oracle announced were again impressive: Billy Joel, Lenny Kravitz and Stevie Nicks!

We went in with a group of people, but after a while we lost each other. Everybody was searching for food and drinks, going from left to right (there are so many places in Cow place)...

Billy, Lenny and Stevie were all playing at the same time, so I decided to start with Billy and after 30 minutes I left to have a look at Lenny, to finish with Stevie. I liked Billy Joel the most. He's a real entertainer! The food and drinks we got were good, but last year I found it better. There was no chocolate tower, which I really liked last year. At the end it was a nice night.