OpenWorld 2009 done - back to Windy Wellington

With OpenWorld 2009 all done plus a few highly enjoyable days in the Valley I'm now back at home. I had a fantastic time once again, second time around was much less daunting - I went for less sessions, more unconference and more shopping!

The first couple of days of OpenWorld this year seemed very light on attendees, but with a flurry of activity in the last few days and a fantastic appreciation event - an awesome performance from Aerosmith - things really picked up. Very few product announcements of essence from the Oracle team so the real highlights for me were catching up with a variety of people/groups at a number of events:

• Australia/New Zealand Dinner
• Rittman Mead BI Meetup
• Bloggers Meetup
• Oracle APEX Meetup
• Catching up with the BI Publisher crew and meeting Ike
• Hanging out with Michael, Greg and Mike - cheers guys.

A huge thanks to all the above for the hospitality.

So only a few notes this year that took my interest to note them down. It seems a bit light especially on the eBusiness Suite side so if I have missed anything major, please post a comment.

Larry's Keynote Announcements:

• Linux update - survey (was it by HP?) reported 65% of Oracle Database customers run Oracle Enterprise Linux beneath the database. Interestingly high percentage.
• Review of Exadata "v2" (Sun Oracle Database Machine) with statistics showing results twice as fast as "v1".
• Product Support System in the works including on site data mining for analyzing system configuration and auto-advising bugs/patches needing to be addressed.
• Fusion Applications related:
  • Commitment for support of, and new functionality in eBusiness Suite, Peoplesoft, JD Edwards and Siebel applications for the next decade in addition to Fusion Applications
  • "Version 1" of Fusion Applications in Testing.
  • Fusion Applications are "SaaS ready" and deployed on SOA, BI standards based middleware.

Just the one product release announcement related to my areas of work:

• Business Intelligence Applications OBIA 7.9.6.1 Release available

A number of interesting things up and coming, but most set for calendar year 2010.

OBI 11g - yet to be released, but demo'd, with my notes:

• Common UI Components across the BI and Fusion product suites
• Online BI Publisher Template Builder
• A variety of excellent new features addons such as Answers Groups, Selection Steps, Visualizations
• Extensions to current fuctionality such as Action Framework
• Additional features such as Scorecards

Oracle APEX 4.0

• The whole APEX community is getting ready and excited about the APEX 4.0 release due 2010.
• It's great to see the new APEX Listener pre-production release out and getting plenty of feedback.

E-Business Suite:

• 12.1.1 to include a new hompage / navigator + Web 2.0 style components therein
• 12.1.1+ Integrated SOA Gateway (as an alternative to the EBS Adaptor which is part of SOA Suite).
• Enterprise Manager pack addons for Health checks including online Patch and technology component Version comparison and recommendation tools.

Some other interesting tidbits that I noted:

• Trial Usage of Advanced Compression on Oracle internal E-Business Suite top 100 objects reduced space usage on average by 3 times. Gotta see how Vision instances go with compression.
• BI Publisher Data Template builder in the works (still), along with the demo'd BI Publisher Online Layout Template editor (demo'd as noted above).

Wrap-Up

So another excellent OpenWorld over - thanks to Oracle for putting on another flawless event and appreciate the Bloggers Pass. Even the weather made me feel at home ;-)

Next major event on my calendar is the NZOUG Conference 2010, Rotorua, New Zealand, March 15-16 2010 - looking forward to it. Hope to see some of you there!

PS. On a side note, from a New Zealand perspective, interesting that an IBM data center should fail around OpenWorld given Larry's consistent reiteration about the redundancies in the Oracle Database Machine and lack thereof in IBM's ex TPC-C beating solution! Even more than a week later seems like things are not quite back to the usual high Air New Zealand standards - following pic snapped 20-Oct-09.

Related Posts

• Oracle OpenWorld 2009: From Silicon Welly to Silicon Valley Again
• A Look Ahead to 2009 - Oracle eBusiness Suite and Happy New Year!
• OpenWorld 2008 Posts

 

Zero-Gee: the ultimate developers or gaming chair, err, throne

A few months back I attended an Unlimited Potential event on design and technology. A prototype of the NASA research based "Zero-Gee" chair - a 135° zero-gravity motorized ergonomic chair - made its appearance and got some interesting reactions from the audience. Well, its gone from design to prototype to reality. I had an email last week from Tom Rynaarts letting me know the first small batch is close to delivery. Talk about a great concept, bound to be a strong following in tech communities for this ultimate piece of hardware. Now, where did I put that spare Xmas money!

PS. Unfortunately they're not generally available yet, but keep an eye out ;-)