Pilgrimage to OracleWorld

Oracle OpenWorld 2009 starts next week (11–15 October) in the Moscone Center, San Francisco. It is the annual event for all things Oracle - 1,800 sessions, 400 partner exhibits, keynotes from the world’s technology leaders, hands-on labs, and more. With such a wealth of information available, the canny attendee will have to focus their attention on the issues that are hindering their IT's infrastructure. What is worth seeing?

Let's find the sessions!

Oracle kindly provides a means to drill down to the sessions that might be of interest. Unfortunately, the great breadth of available material leads to a mish-mash of categorization. For example, among the group “Application Stream”, sessions related to “Automotive” can be found. Not exactly intuitive and with such a proud heritage in BI, I would expect better.

Another example of Oracle's strange categorization methods can be found with the sessions connected to Grid Computing and High Availability. The only difference between the session lists is that Grid Computing has 2 extra sessions. Are we to believe that Oracle views HA as Grid Computing?

After this bad start, I finally stumbled across the OpenWorld blog and found a useful session search tool.

Bingo - bookmarked sessions!

Database:

• Oracle Real Application Clusters on Oracle VM: Best Practices -  movements towards the Cloud?

• Thinking of Cutting Costs? Think of Oracle Advanced Compression  – case study of RealNetworks who reduced their storage costs and improved app performance
• Do More, Store Less: Efficiency Gains for Your Business - cutting costs in the data center

Data-Grid:

• Building a Distributed Computing Infrastructure, Using Oracle Coherence -  drive towards flexible and scalable distributed computing

• Data Grid Technology Goes Mainstream: Embracing Oracle Coherence - Electronic Arts discusses how it is using Oracle Coherence as the basis for scaling its platform for multiplayer games

Huh, where is Cloud?

One big surprise for me is the lack of references to Oracle in the Cloud. I recently read about the Gaia  project, which is an European Space Agency funded mission. It aims to monitor 1 billion stars, approximately 1% of our Milky Way, over a 5 year period. Obviously, this involves processing massive datasets.

The project met this challenge by porting the infrastructure to the Cloud. Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) were configured for the Oracle database, Grid and processing software (AGIS). The result is an Oracle grid running inside the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. To process 5 years of data for 2 million stars, 24 iterations of 100 minutes each were done This translates into 40 hours of running a grid of 20 Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud high-CPU instances. Benefits included reduced costs, approximately by 50% compared to the in-house solution. Massive scalability on demand without having to invest in new
infrastructure and train new personnel.

I know that many businesses are interested to learn how to leverage the Cloud with Oracle products. Why is this not addressed at OpenWorld? if so, where?

Enough grumbling

The aim of Oracle OpenWorld is to bring the community together and make companies work better. This will be achieved with a schedule that is packed full of 1,800 sessions and 400 partner exhibits. The bottom line is that companies want ROIs and I look forward to OpenWorld providing some of the answers.

Comments

[Krishna Kakatur]

Thanks Kevin for selecting our presentation! Our session should be interesting. We couldn't change the abstract, but we are going to present more than what we initially planned for. We do have exhaustive comparisons, and tips. We worked closely with oracle to identify bugs, patches and work-arounds.It's a lot of information in one hour.

[Michele DiSerio]

Thank you in advance for attending the aforementioned Data Grid (Oracle Coherence) sessions. In addition to these sessions presented by my colleagues on the Coherence team, there are over 25 Coherence data grid sessions this year, including hands-on labs and customer speakers. You can see the full list here: www.oracle.com/technology/products/coherence/oow09.html