Monday, October 3, 2011

Oracle OpenWorld 2011. Day 1

As usual, for all government projects September is a pretty busy month (end of fiscal year), but nice thing about September - it always ends (plus/minus a week) with Oracle OpenWorld.

Even a lot of people complain that this conference became more and more marketing-oriented, for me it is a place to meet a lot of my old friends by Oracle community, get the "temperature" of the industry, talk to new people (there is always a ton of new faces from all over the world!). I even try not to submit abstracts for the next cycle of conferences (Collab, KScope) until I return from the OpenWorld - some of topics could just come up as a part of late-night discussion somewhere in the bar after N-th glass of beer. The key point - such topics will be 100% hit! Because if you remember something at that point - it usually means that it is really high in your priority queue :-) Anyways, for the next couple days I will try to post about my experiences here (sorry, not in the minute-by-minute structure!).

Day 1. Sunday, Oct 2.
Sunday is always a conference-in-the-conference, because this is the day when different user groups have a chance to organize its own symposiums. This year I participated in ODTUG Web Architecture Forum, playing a role of the person from the "other side of the wall" - my story was told from the point of view of a good DBA/Senior Database Developer that actively participates in the development of Web applications.

Of course, it was all about "thick database" approach, my favorite concept of pushing as much business logic into the database - and of course, a lot of people in the audience were not 100% comfortable with such extremes. But at least it made them thinking - which is always a good thing for you as a speaker. After my talk I've had about an hour-long conversation with a couple of developers from my native Ukraine - and I was really glad that their way of system development is reasonably close to my understanding, which means that my ideas are valid "in general", not only for the North America. :-) I would hate to sound "provincial" :-)

Another big part of the Forum was a talk of my guru Paul Dorsey about ways of building new Web-based system. The talk was very entertaining - but the summary was very grim... There is no coherency in the industry whatsoever! Take 10 system - get 12 architectures (not even 10!, sometimes architectures start to mutate inside of the life-cycle!). H-m-m... I more and more like my "thick database" approach!

But the evening ended up on the good note - a lot of thanks to Lilian Buziak for setting up an Oracle Ace Dinner (for me it was the very first one, since I got my Ace status only this summer). That was a perfect spot to talk with the "old-timers" (including my esteemed co-authors of "Expert PL/SQL Practices"). And food was great too :-)

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