For the last day of the show, I was in meetings all morning, afternoon, and evening. So I missed out on the conference, but from the Oracle OpenWorld daily newspaper, let me list some figures quoted in Lisa Palmer’s “OpenWorld Fun Facts”
· > 2,850 network connections
· At peak demand, the Oracle OpenWorld network handled 45 Mbps
· 3,423 caffeinated and 816 decaf gallons consumed.
· > 30,000 cookies and 17,000 brownies consumed.
· > 37,000 cans of soda consumed
· > 3,500 Krispy Kreme donuts consumed

At 8:30am Chuck Rozwat gave his keynote. It started with a “Safe Harbor” statement to humorously show the level of legalities Oracle (or any public company) has to comply with lately. He introduced Tom Mendoza, President of NetApp. Oracle is 28 years old, and led the industry with Intel and Microsoft. NetApp is in the storage paradigm, with $1.6 billion in revenue. The three main storage players are NetApp, EMC, and Hitachi. The 90’s was “do more with more” – get your project out the door and don’t look back. After 2000 it was “do more with less” based on changing economic times. So what does NetApp do? Well, an office may have 10 storage devices from vendor A that are 50% full and 1 storage device from vendor B that is 100% full. If you need to increase storage for server B you need to buy more storage from vendor B. NetApp allows you to share storage across vendors. Their three business benefits are: consolidate your information, share your information, secure your information.

NetApp duplicated the success factors that Cisco did: 1) don’t base infrastructure on one protocol. They can share Unix and Windows systems to share storage. 2) don’t make hardware – they outsource their manufacturing and pass the savings along to the customers. So they are a software-centric company.

30% of their business is tying with the database. Oracle is their biggest customer. NetApp bought Spinnaker about 2 years ago. 50% of leaks of data is from behind the firewall (inside jobs).

Chuck Rozwat came back out to talk about Oracle’s Fusion initiatives. In the past three technologies have been part of fusions: Applications (Service-Oriented Architecture), Information (Enterprise Information Architecture), Infrastructure (Grip Computing Architecture). These three combine to the Oracle Fusion Architecture.

This week Oracle is announcing Oracle Application Server Release 3. Some new features:
- Java Server Faces - rich web-based standard user interfaces
- EJB 3.0 and J2EE 1.4 – sophisticated business applications
- Enterprise Service Bus
- Enterprise Identity Management – provisioning, federation, identity management

Thomas Kurian came onstage. He showed Oracle JDeveloper 10g and the new modeling capabilities. Excitingly, Oracle made a contest – Brian Emmet, Sr. Software Developer from Stryker Endoscopy, won a TRIP INTO SPACE! It will be in 2008-2009 and have 10 minutes of weightlessness. Then Thomas went on to show the Enterprise Service Bus. What’s new in security? Oracle offers 2 new capabilities with 10g: first is identity management – credentials and permissions . virtual directory, federation to share information across companies, and so on. The 2nd part is securing the information among the services themselves. Oracle Web Services Manager is a new product (10g release 3) to non-intrusively apply operational policies. Thomas showed a demo of this. You can set policies and introduce it into whichever step in the execution you want – it secures the services without actually changing the services themselves. For monitoring and managing, BAM (Business Activity Monitoring) allows you to monitor business events and processes in real-time. New Enterprise Manager features in 10g release 3 include topology-based monitoring, automatic patching, service-level monitoring, tracing. Thomas demonstrated the Oracle BPEL Monitor software.

What are the products in Fusion Middleware? Collaborative Enterprise Portal, Development Tools, Composition and Process Orchestration, Information Aggregation & Analysis, Management, Enterprise Application Server, Security, Grid Computing.

Andy Mendelsohn then came out (whom I wrote about our discussion yesterday). What’s new with 10g release 2? Transaction Processing – on a cluster RAC has world-record on clusters. 13,284 QphH for TPC-H 300GB. Nearest competitor was IBM with only half the number. 10g R2 is 59% faster over 10g R1 with the same hardware. They rewrote the basic sorting and aggregate algorithms in the database to get this result. The example they showed was just on sorting it was 5 times faster from 9i to 10g R2. New security: authentication and authorization, encryption, auditing. He showed “transparent data encryption” which is new in 10gR2 with a demo of protecting credit card information. The first SELECT showed credit card numbers in clear text. The next SELECT showed a non-authorized user but they did not have access to the table. The next was a hacker editing the file and could see the information. With the new Oracle security, you can see the data with the SELECT but it is stored encrypted in the file so the hacker can’t read it.

What is coming from Oracle with regards to security? “Project Data Vault” lets you create a “realm” which is a collection of schemas. It solves a problem around consolidation of multiple databases into one database. “Project Audit Vault” stores audit data which can be aggregated and reviewed for compliancy.

Then he showed how easy it is to get RAC up and running.

Next Kevin Kettler, CTO of Dell came out. Dell and Oracle worked on “Project Mega Grid” which is a large RAC system based in Oracle’s Austin Data Center. It’s a 100-node cluster, managed with OEM.

Andy Mendelsohn came out again to demo Project Raptor. This is what we talked about yesterday, and today he demonstrated it for the keynote audience. Raptor is client-based (not web-based). HTML DB release 2 came out last week. It’s for creating a simple application and deploying it to the web in a matter of minutes. You do not need to know SQL – you just drag-and-drop from a query builder. And you can pick out “themes” for styles.

I was unable to attend Larry Ellison’s keynote, but heard about it from those that did. Security was a key priority of Oracle. Other priorities of Oracle include automation, open standards, business intelligence.

Some Q & A with the audience:
Q: What will you acquire next?
A: Want to get me in jail?

Q: Will you guarantee if there is a security hole Oracle will fix in 3 months?
A: No, next question (he then explained that no one can make such a promise).

Tonight was the big bash at the Pier. It was the largest such event ever at an Oracle conference. Three tents and a stadium, with lots of food (Chinese woks, carved meats, buffalo wings, desserts, etc) and drinks (wine, beer, sodas, water). There were 3 stages for bands, which included Counting Crows (“Mr Jones and Me”, “Right Here”), Bow Wow Wow (“I Want Candy”), Berlin (“Take My Breath Away” from Top Gun), Stung (Sting cover band), and karaoke. Great fireworks – two sets – one traditional and one labeled “dancing Chinese fireworks”. Busses were easy to get on/off and pretty quick (not much waiting).Safra Katz (Oracle CFO) and Tom Mendoza of NetApp addressed the crowd and introduced Counting Crows.

Larry Ellison’s BMW Boat was displayed outside the keynote hall. It looked to be over 100 feet and people were impressed with it.

In the morning I was involved in IOUG activities. Breakfast was with the Fusion and Product Enhancement councils of the IOUC. Then was our IOUG BOD meeting where we discussed our strategic direction as well as short-term benefits and values that we provide today. We also reviewed our finances, trends in the industry, changes within Oracle (such as Siebel), and what IOUG should do to meet the changing needs of the Oracle community and what is relevant to our current members and potential members.

Several of our BOD attended the IOUC luncheon. It was nice to meet user groups from around the world, and great that Oracle brought us all together. I met with many people from the APOUG (Asia-Pacific), most from Australia. I also met with many of my friends from the ILOUG (Israel) and the Mexico user group. There were about 150 people there so I imagine many other countries were represented. Jeb Dasteel gave a nice welcome address, and I was pleased to hear him promote the upcoming Collaborate 06 conference April 23-27 in Nashville.

I went to the IOUG booth for a while. All the user group booths (IOUG, OAUG, ODTUG, Quest) were busy with attendees. The user group pavilion was in Moscone West where many presentations were happening in the 3-story building. There was also registration on the first floor, so you can imagine traffic was strong. I enjoyed talking to existing IOUG members, potential members, regional user group leaders, SIG leaders, and everyone else. It was exciting to see the very positive response to the changes we’ve made in the past several months – from our rebranding to our co-located Collaborate 06 event to the reinvigorating of the SIGs (and almost double participation in SIGs), strong additional benefits to our RUGs, and the new member directory. I also received lots of good feedback on ideas of what IOUG is NOT doing but should (or should be doing better). Many of the ideas were very good and we hope to implement them soon. That is the best way for IOUG to stay with the times – listen to the members and affiliates for ideas and concerns and then act on the relevant feedback.

Next I headed over to the exhibit hall for the first time. It was fairly large, and this year the Oracle campgrounds were split up into different functional areas and around the 4 corners of the large hall (in the past the Oracle campgrounds were all together). I stopped by several areas: Enterprise Manager, Security, Application Server management, Deployment manager, clustering, application development, ASM (Automatic Storage Management), high availability, Oracle Lite 10g.

For Oracle Lite 10g, I found out what is new since 9i. Better device management – you can remotely delete databases on the handhelds. The scalability is better – one customer has 100,000 users in a push-only model. Also they have a mobile database workbench, which is a java-based GUI tool to define schemas and test the application before deployment.

I ran into Andy Mendelsohn in the Oracle campgrounds. First, to have someone like Andy (SVP of the Database Group and 20-year Oracle employee) hang around and open to meet attendees in a low-key fashion is pretty amazing. Andy has been the technical leader for the core Oracle database through some of its best times (I believe since version 7) and still leads technology for the database. I asked Andy what is coming soon from his group. First is what they call “Project Raptor”. It will be Oracle’s “TOAD” For about 20 years, SQL*Plus has had a command-line interface. Project Raptor is a rich GUI PL/SQL and SQL editor, which Oracle is showing this week. Andy also mentioned that they are introducing .NET development capabilities with SQL and PL/SQL integration.

After Andy I had a few press interviews and the IOUG BOD dinner, which was a nice way to relax and catch up in the middle of a busy week.

This morning was the keynote from Oracle President Charles Phillips. The next few paragraphs are highlights of his presentation, with my blog continuing after:

There are 35,000 people attending OOW, which is a small city. Oracle is the largest enterprise software vendor in the world. Some interesting figures he mentioned was $11.8 billion revenue FY05, 275,000 customers, 50,000+ employees, operating in 145 countries. 75% market share in Linux. 26,000 application customers: #1 in HR, #1 in SCM, #1 in CRM (with Siebel) 1.6 million active developers and DBAs.

Charles had a “15 second” overview of Oracle. Their GOAL is better information at a lower cost, their RESOURCES are innovation, scale, and persistence, and HOW they will achieve this is protect, extend, evolve. Oracle’s top priorities from customer input are getting feedback on product quality and roadmap, cost and maintenance, and relationship management.

Juergen Roettler is the new (1 year ago) EVP Oracle Support and On-Demand.

Oracle Fusion Architecture is achieved with SOA architecture. Business Process Management (BPM) is model driven, direct link from process design to system change, process transparency, inter-enterprise, continuous re-engineering, modeling… but within reason.

OFA: Oracle Fusion Architecture: model driven, service and event enabled, standards-based, information centric, grid ready. The Fusion Service Bus is the multi-protocol routing, message transformation, services and event mediation. The Fusion Service Registry is application integration services, process integration services, data and metadata services.

There are two “Fusion” initiatives within Oracle Corp. 1) “Project Fusion” is to build a single suite of applications over time. 2) “Oracle Fusion Middleware” is the Oracle middleware platform, including Java container, portal, identity management, business integration, business intelligence, management tools, developer tools, directory.

Today Oracle is announcing that Fusion Middleware works with IBM’s Websphere.

Charles Rozwat, EVP Server Technologies, and John Wookey, SVP Application Development came to the stage. Chuck announced in the last year 10g R2, with new security features, high-availability features, performance, and increased grid control. Fusion Middleware – single sign-in, and will be announcing release 3 this week. Collaboration suite – instant messaging, email, content management. John: Oracle applications use materialized views that other vendors do not. Project Fusion is both Oracle and Peoplesoft joining together but Oracle applications and Oracle technology coming together.

Raj Joshi, Managing Director of Infosys came onstage. They have 40,000 employees (10,000 Oracle-focused) and 500 clients with $2 billion revenue. Worked with Oracle e-business Suite and Oracle Fusion Middleware for their customers.

Paul Otellini, CEO of Intel then came out. Laptops with mobile CPUs (Intel Centrino) went from 15% in 2000 to 35% in 2005. The “new normal” is Wi-Fi hotspots, and San Francisco had a huge surge from 2003 to 2005 in hotspots. Going from single core chips to dual-core chips provides better performance. Google was spotlighted (and their cool “Google Earth”) relies on Intel dual-core servers.

After the keynote, I had meetings with several Oracle employees – from the Application Server group to the Identity Management group. After Oracle acquired Oblix, there has been some really important identity management, single sign-on, and other functionality that any DBA or architect would want to know about.

For dinner several IOUG BOD members met with high-level executives to discuss how IOUG is growing our value to executive-level professionals. Andy Flower, one of IOUG’s new BOD members, is heading up this program for IOUG. This is targeted to executives that need to understand how Oracle technology will solve their business problems – from data center consolidation to web services to compliancy issues to security and beyond. This is for the CIO, MIS Director, DBA Manager, VP of IT, and so on. At Collaborate 06 we will have a day for the executive management program. Great learning and discussion for the nearly 4 hour dinner – after which I chose to go to the hotel and call it a night (aside from writing this blog and catching up on a day of emails).

Today was the second day of SIGs. As President of IOUG I spent the day in the several IOUG SIG meetings. The first (starting at 8am) was the Cerner SIG. Cerner is a healthcare application, and Oracle is the vast majority of the backend database. The Cerner SIG liked how IOUG provided their listserv. Cerner has a conference coming up in Orlando in mid-October. One comment from the room was that competitors to Cerner come to management and convince their companies to switch applications, promising no downtime and better performance. After management switches vendors it ends up being costly to roll out and not as reliable as promised.

Next was the IOUG RAC SIG. The attendance was large, and we broke into different groups first based on OS’s (Linux, HP-UX, etc), and next on applications.

Paul Dorsey and Shay Shmeltzer led the J2EE SIG. Paul is developing the IOUG’s developer content for Collaborate ’06, and is also the NYOUG President. Shay is an expert on J2EE from Oracle Corporation.

The Peoplesoft SIG had a large crowd. There was a panel of four Peoplesoft experts: Edric De Armas of Darden Restaurants (Red Lobster, Olive Garden owners). Upgrades are big efforts for them – it takes five weeks without tuning. The other panelists were Jerry Treshinsky (President of the Peoplesoft SIG), Judi Hotsinpiller (Sandia), and Kyu-Mok Stricklin (Boeing).

After lunch was Charles Phillip’s presentation for the user group day. Jeb Dasteel, VP of Oracle, kicked it off. Pat Dues, President of OAUG introduced Charles Phillips, the President of Oracle. He said it was in Oracle’s interest to inform the leaders of the user groups Oracle’s messaging. Some interesting numbers:

- Oracle OpenWorld expects to have 35,000 attendees, 3,000 partners, 300 exhibitors, 650 press and analysts, 800 sessions, 100 user group meetings.
- Oracle has 275,000 customers, 15,000 partners, 7,500 ISVs, and 1.6 million active developers and DBAs

The four strategic messages at OpenWorld are 1) applications, 2) standard and open, 3) middleware/SOA credentials, 4) grid momentum

Why are user groups important to Oracle? Community, connecting Oracle with the broader customer community, facilitating dialogue so customers can get value.

During the Q&A, yours truly asked the first question on the business drivers for the Siebel acquisition. The answer was that Siebel had the best of breed in CRM.

Next question was on Fusion. John Wookey and Charles Phillips flew around and met with customers to get feedback on direction. This is the fusion strategy council. In addition is the IOUC Fusion Council. Oracle values collaborating with the community, listening to feedback, and they want the feedback.

Next question was about Oracle Fusion running on non-Oracle databases? The answer was that Fusion will work under IBM Websphere. Running off of the database (DB2) is more complicated because Oracle Fusion integrated with Oracle technology. Oracle is talking with IBM and the Fusion Council to evaluate.

Question: what are the timetables for Siebel with regards to support, licensing, pricing? Answer: First Oracle needs to finish the acquisition around January and cannot do any changes due to regulatory laws. When the deal closes Oracle will investigate how they will handle licensing and pricing. For technology, Oracle can today plug into Siebel’s open services.

After the Q&A Charles took the time to meet with the IOUC Presidents (IOUG, OAUG, ODTUG, APOUG, Quest).

This made me late for the IOUG DBA SIG. Peter Koletzke gave a presentation, and then there was very good technical Q&A with both Peter and Gaja Vaidyanatha.

The IOUG SAP SIG was presented by a panel led by Christian Graf, who is SAP’s product manager for the Oracle platform. The SAP SIG meets at every IOUG conference, and was founded in 1997. Christian’s topic was requirements for running SAP with Unicode (international character sets).

From 5:30 to 7:00pm IOUG hosted our appreciation reception for our volunteers, SIG and RUG leaders, and BOD members of other user groups from the IOUC. It was the “launch party” of the new IOUG brand. People came to relax before the big week and meet new friends and catch up with old friends. I enjoyed meeting more of the Oracle community and hearing how things are going around the world for our community. I had a good conversation with a regional user group leader that told me he thought the formation of the RUG council and communication was great, and is also participating in the IOUG HTML-DB benefit for our RUGs (IOUG hosts the website for free using Oracle’s HTML-DB technology so that the user group does not need the infrastructure and support efforts involved with managing a website).

In parallel to the IOUG reception was Dana Carvey of “Wayne’s World” and “Saturday Night Live” fame. I heard it was very funny.

After the IOUG reception I went to the Oracle Magazine awards dinner. Congrats to all of the winners of this year’s awards. The contributions of these volunteers and professionals are very much appreciated by all of the Oracle community. I had some good conversations – my table had Ken Jacobs (“Dr. DBA” and IOUG BOD member), Tom Kyte, the head of PL/SQL for Oracle, and a few Oracle professionals. Also I learned that Jeff Spicer is now in charge of not only Oracle Magazine, but Profit Magazine, and OTN.

Saturday:

I arrived at Oracle OpenWorld on Saturday, for the “Extreme Weekend” events. Saturday was the first day of SIGS from the various major user groups. Entering Moscone West at about 1pm you could see that the registration lines were literally out the door. This was an omen of just how busy the week will be – with Oracle having acquired Peoplesoft and just this week Siebel (plus 4 other companies this year such as Oblix and Retek). OpenWorld 2005 is expected to be the largest to date.

I was pleased to see a write-up of the IOUG rebranding on the cover of the Oracle daily. For those who are unaware, IOUG surveyed the Oracle community and received a tremendous response – over 16,000 people filled out a lengthy survey. We used this feedback to help better define our user group and how it fits within the greater Oracle community. So, IOUG rebranded as the Independent Oracle User Group, for the complete technology and database professional. We still support the international community (our members and RUGs are from dozens of countries). The new name represents the independent, user-driven focus of the IOUG.

First was the ODTUG Tools SIG. Some of the ODTUG BOD was on a panel. They discussed that Oracle is going to enhance JDeveloper by adding an ER diagrammer for free, with functionality like Visio. Also HTML DB is an excellent environment for web development – similar to Microsoft Access in the ease of development.

IOUG, OAUG, ODTUG, and Quest comprise the User Group Pavilion was hopping. I stayed for a while and talked with several users. The user that traveled the farthest was an IOUG member from South Australia – he subscribes to SELECT Journal.

Since I am from Chicago, I also attended the ICAB Midwest regional user group. ICAB focuses on Peoplesoft. The Midwest group is focused on Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, and other nearby states. It was nice to see new groups such as ICAB join the user community.