MacLochlainns Weblog

Day 2 is a wrap. As we left AT&T Park, the Giants’ were behind by one run. It was a hard call who I wanted to win because we lived in Colorado for 7 years cheering for the Rockies. It was a wonderful ball park, and the first time I’ve made it to a Giants game since they played at Candlestick Park.

The publisher’s seminar was very informative about direction and product. The summary may surpise some, but ultimately they seem to make good sense. Of course the big one is withheld until Larry delivers his keynote. I’ll report it as soon as I hear it.

The following summarizes what I heard:

Cloud Computing
Cloud computing is definitely on the menu for Oracle. Oracle has an FAQ for Cloud computing here. An exisitng API supports it. You can use Enterprise Manager to backup to Amazon EC2, but first you must run the Cloud Backup Installer. It uses the EM tape backup, which extends a previous API that existed for tape drives.

APEX
APEX is popular (oh, yes that’s true). Rumor has it that there are 250,000 developers using the product. APEX is also in the same space as Oracle Forms, and APEX will provide an Oracle Forms’ conversion tool to an improved Web 2.0 solutions.

SQL*Developer
Oracle statistics indicate there have been 1.5 million downloads of SQL Developer. While Quest seemed to feel that Toad licenses haven’t declined. Quest also mentioned that they might consider porting Toad to the Mac OS, but that’s a second subjunctive that’s technically a hypothetical remark.

The announcement today on SQL Developer was that it will soon include a data modeling tool. The up or downside on that announcement is that the ERD’s look like the return of Oracle*Method (why not? ;-)). Running down the other perspective on SQL*Developer let me connect with Steven Feuerstein again this year. By the way, he’s got a new PL/SQL book that’ll be released some time late next year.

Oracle 11g Upgrade Oppotunity
The discussion today covered that the cost of upgrading from Oracle 9iR2 to 11gR1 is less than an upgrade from Oracle 9iR2 to 10gR2. The reason for the change are those long overdue improvements in how upgrades work in Oracle 11g. Though there was mention that the first major patch of Oracle 11g is due shortly after OpenWorld 2008 (yes, that means October or …. maybe November). Oracle also mentioned that 5% of customers have upgraded to 11gR1 without the major patch. Oracle expects another 10% of customers to upgrade to 11gR1 after the patch release. A significant feature of the upgrade process is the automatic migration of all execution plans. I have to also champion the utility of the new Automated Database Diagnostic Manager (ADDM) in the Oracle Database 11g because it is sweet!

Java Developers working with Oracle
The numbers thrown out were 100,000 developers in 2005 and approximately 1,000,000 today. It seems Java inside the Oracle database and integrated through the JDBC with Oracle has always finally found its place in the mainstream Oracle community.

That’s about all the key points from the publisher seminar.

Visiting vendors is always important. RedHat is a big stop each year. This year was a pleasant surprise because they’ve got a new centrally managed identity, policy, and audit information product (IPA) for Linux and Unix environments. It uses open technologies and standards, including LDAP and Kerberos. They also have an open source virtualization software – Solid ICE.

Jim Brennan, Senior Product Manager, gave us a great demonstration of the Red Hat Enterprise IPA tool. It was impressive in how simply it works and I could easily see how I could leverage it to manage the student accounts on the servers I administer.

That’s it for Day 2 … the other tidbits will have to fade away. I apologize for it being late but it took a while to make it back to the hotel.