Openworld 2010, despite the supposedly lagging economy, had record attendance again this year. No doubt this was the result of Oracle acquiring something like fourteen companies since last year, including Sun in 2009. The crowds were thick, divided about evenly between geeks in badly-fitting vendor t-shirts and slick sales-side hustlers with dress pants and shiny shoes. I landed somewhere in the middle of the two (badly-fitting dress shirt, comfortable jeans and loafers), proudly sporting a long dangling codpiece of ribbons from my attendee badge:
My OOW2010 Codpiece
Oracle made a number of important announcements this year at OpenWorld, including a the Exalogic machine, and support for Amazon EC2, which I blogged about here.
For me, the highlight of the week was meeting a number of top Oracle technical minds at Oracle Closed World, the brainchild of Mogens Nørgaard from Denmark. Members of the Oak Table and other luminaries of our field stood up and spoke candidly about technology, drilling down to the most minute detail. Computerworld Denmark covered the event well here.
I’ll be speaking to a hung over dwindling crowd at noon today, the last day of OOW, and the day after the blowout party on Treasure Island. By telling people about running Oracle on EC2, I hope to make life easier for DBA-kind. Amazon’s IaaS cloud gives us all a cheap way to provision host resources on demand, and get things done in hours that would otherwise take weeks (or be impossible) via normal corporate hardware procurement processes.
This will be the last big conference for me for a while – I am going to focus on Blue Gecko customers, research and sharing my insights here.
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