Wow, it’s hot and sunny here! I keep forgetting, so I’m still wondering around with a jacket in tow. That’ll be getting dumped at the hotel later.
Today’s been a quieter day so far, but no less enjoyable for that. After making a lazy start, I thought I’d check out the initial keynote but was late, so didn’t get to see Michael Phelps and left after 40 minutes or so. Beehive, blah, blah, blah … I sympathise with Oracle and understand what a big marketing deal that Openworld is, but I suppose keynotes just aren’t my cup of tea. Then again, I’m pretty certain I’ll be watching Larry’s keynote this year. Might even use my Blogger credentials for that one.
I popped into the OTN lounge briefly to pick up my T-shirt and had a quick chat with Mark Williams (one of my favourite people in the community) and chuckled to myself as I watched Tom Kyte perched on a chair in silence, waiting to be summoned for his live podcast 
Then I had a selection dilemma. I’d planned on attending an Oracle utilities presentation, then bumped into Jared Still who was attending the ACE presentation, so that put that idea in my head, then I thought I might go and see Andy Bulloch present on Grid Control usage at Rabobank. Andy’s been a big help to my current site in helping implement Grid Control there. Then, as I was passing one of the halls, I noticed that Juan Loaiza was presenting on ‘Oracle Database 11g: Next Generation Performance and Scalability’. As I mentioned to someone in an email the other week, when I see Juan’s name connected with something, that’s an encouraging sign for me.
After I sat down, Tuomas Pystynen sat next to me and, because Juan knew him, he came over for a chat. Then someone else came over. I didn’t catch his name but then he started talking about the ASM book and I realised it was Bill Bridge, the original architect of ASM. The next thing I know, Ken Jacobs strolled up and said hello to everyone. I know I shouldn’t care about these things, really, but I just love software so when I meet someone who’s been involved in decent software development, that probably means more to me than most things that happen at a conference. It’s also quite a recommendation for Juan, when you think about it!
Anyway, Juan’s presentation covered some familiar new features of 11g very well but the section I probably most enjoyed was when he was discussing the type of customer systems Oracle are seeing now, e.g.
- 200 Terabyte warehouses
- 300 Processor cores in the highest end SMP systems
- Several Hundred GB SGA
and what he expects to see by 2010
- The first proper Petabyte production Oracle database
- 1000 Processor core SMPs
- The first Terabyte SGA
He did point out that some of the latter already exist, but only really in benchmark systems.
As he said, it’s easy to think that the RDBMS is a done deal these days and doesn’t need much improving, but it does, just to keep up with the explosion in system size and hardware availability.
He ran through a bunch of different features for 45 minutes, followed by a quick Q & A session. There were quite a few chuckles when someone tried to ask when 11gR2 will be out, even just an estimate. I sense that there is *no* chance anyone will be talking about that!
By now I needed to grab some lunch and so I missed Eddie Awad’s presentation that I planned to see. I have a feeling there are going to be a few missed ones this year, with all the social activity, phone calls home and the rest. One thing’s for sure - my pre-conference agenda planning is completely rubbish. Too many sessions to choose from, so it’s too easy to make the wrong choice.
I’m also finding an increading number of clashes on my social diary which I fel really bad about because I do like meeting up with people I don’t see often. Maybe I’ll start running between two different events each evening