OOW, Day 2 (Monday)

Turns out, I apparently had more fun than I should have last night at the ACE Dinner. So, I woke up this morning not feeling very well. That combined with the time zone adjustment left me waking up a little groggy this morning.

Starting the day today was the announcement regarding Oracle VM as described in the keynote by Charles Phillips. I missed seeing the keynote, but caught the announcement from Justin’s tweets. Popular theories is that this was done similarly to the Oracle Enterprise Linux launch in that Oracle took open source Xen and re-rolled it into binaries. We’ll see when it is released for public consumption on November 14th.

I rolled in to the exhibition hall just before it opened so that I could help support the Piocon booth. If any of you are looking for it, the booth is in Moscone South safely tucked away in the far right-hand side of the hall in the 2800 row. To find it, walk to the end of the hall until you actually see a wall–a real wall, not the fake booth walls. We’re right behind that. 😉

After hanging out at the booth for the initial rush hour, I headed to grab some lunch before attending the RAC SIG Customer Panel session at 12:30pm. There was a decent sized group there, 99 people according to the number of scanned badges. Murali did a good job introducing the panelists and they each described some of their environment’s characteristics. Following the introductions, there was at least 40 minutes of Q & A time for the audience to ask questions of the panelists.

After that session, I headed over to the OCP Lounge. Every year, this is a safe haven that is conveniently located right in the heart of the action above the exhibit hall. Plus, it’s always nice to see Carey Hardey who welcomes all feedback about all Oracle certification programs. I had to break off my chat with Carey to take a concall with a potential customer which tied me up for about 30 minutes.

Following my customer meeting, I strolled around the exhibit hall until the 3:15 sessions started. I attended Nitin Vengurlekar’s session “Back of the Envelope Storage Design” which was full of good tips and tricks as well as recommendations for the best way to use storage.

To wrap up the “regular” conference day, I presented my own “RAC for Beginners: The Basics” session. I had 161 attendees in the room and several good questions posed during the session. As usual, I started to run a little long, so had to rush through the last part of the presentation (not sure why that always happens…something to work on). Seemed like about 20 people hung around for follow up questions after the session, so that’s a good sign I think (or I didn’t do a good job presenting the information). Overall, I think it went well and I was pleased to have so many attendees for the last slot of the day, in the last room, down the last hallway after they switched my room last week (so printed materials still had the old room listed). For those that attended, thanks! Please send your feedback so I can improve the session!

After my session, I chatted with several of the attendees and answered many questions before dropping my stuff in my room and then heading to the AppsLab Meetup at 21st Amendment for a little while. I got to meet Jake and Rich as well as Billy Cripe (sporting Skirt 2.0) and Andrew H. from soon-to-be-acquired BEA along with my long-time friends Matt Topper, Eric Broughton, Shaun O’Brien, and Matt’s crazy Java Developer friend from that one company in Detroit. Thanks to Jake for allowing us to take part in a cool event and get a chance to chat with Dudes 2.0.

The OTN Night events at the Westin started at 7:30p and we made it there around 8p. I’m not sure how we did it, but we managed to fit 4 people (none of us skinny people) in the back seat of a Benz S-class. Somehow, Shaun O managed to flag down this car (which happened to be a car for hire) and they took us up to the Westin for OTN Night. Sweet ride–even if it was one of the most uncomfortable rides due to having to hold myself in midair for 10 minutes. I checked out all the fun, watched Shaun do an impersonation of a JDeveloper demo on speed and then finally crashing from exhaustion back in the room for a well-deserved rest.