Oracle Openworld 2011 through he eyes of an I8C employee

In the beginning of October I was one of the 45,000 attendees from 117 countries.

If someone would ask me next year what was on the 2011 Open World I will definitely remember these key words: CLOUD and EXA.

Exalytics and Supercluster were anounced during several keynotes. These new children of the EXA family will allow Oracle even better to power private clouds and their own public cloud. These machines are impressive and they are definitive an asset to your corporation ... if you can pay for them :-) In any case the specs for Exalogic, Exadata and Supercluster are pretty amazing. Who would have thought a few years back that you could have a machine that can load a few TB of data in memory?

As mentioned before Larry Ellison also announced the Oracle Public Cloud. Their cloud offering is mixed in that way that it offers a SAAS model for CRM and HCM fusion applications and Oracle Database and a PAAS offering for Custom Java applications. Maybe the riot with Salesforce was only to get extra attention for this anouncement ;-)

While the cloud wars continued I was trying to get a roadmap for fusion middleware for the next years. I however could not seem to find it, which was a pity.

A keynote that did provide a roadmap was at JavaOne. For java 8 the most interesting items are for me: addition of lambda expressions, Java modularity and completion of the HotSpot/JRockit JVM convergence project. Also nice to hear was that Twitter will join the OpenJDK!

At openworld some of the most interesting sessions I followed were:

• A hands on workshop for Oracle CEP: this is a really interesting tool. Even though you can freely download and play with it, it is nice to just walk in a room to play with the tool and get all the information that you want, straight from the PTS guys.
• A more in depth talk on Oracle Coherence gave me some more insight in this product. A distributed cache is something that is used in many applications nowadays, mainly to boost performance to new limits. In middleware and more specifically in ESB solutions this technology is interesting to cache configuration data, offload frequently used data from the database, cache service results and sometimes it is even used for messaging.
• Continuous integration for SOA and BPM projects: this was a very interesting session on how to do more Test Driven Development (TDD) in an Oracle SOA environment. They also showed how to use popular tools like ant and Jenkins.
• There were also some panel sessions during the conference. The most interesting I found the one on OSB and how to tune this ESB for peak performance. By the questions from the audience you can really see that this ESB is widely used in massive deployments.

For me personally the only downside of Open World are the 25 hours I need to spend in the airplane :-)

Author: Jeroen V.