Oracle OpenWorld 2009 – So It Begins …

Wow, I’ve had one hell of a 2 week period !!

I’ve been travelling around the southern part of England with my son, as part of  a school football tour, with 22 other teenage boys. It’s been a lot of fun but it’s also been extremely tiring, getting up early each morning, packing in as much as possible into each day, living in youth hostels with a room full of snorers, attempting to sleep on lumpy bunk beds, while making sure 20 odd teenagers don’t do what teenagers do naturally which is getting into trouble. On the whole we succeeded, losing just the one boy for just the one afternoon !!

Highlights included watching two English football matches (Tottenham vs. Burnley and the mighty Crystal Palace vs. Blackpool) and just walking around and enjoying the sights of wonderful places such as Oxford, Bath and London. Lowlight (other than losing that one boy for a while) was getting caught trying to sneak into a public toilet without paying the 50 pence fee only to be caught on CCTV and making the mistake of going into the ladies rather than the mens !!

Rather than go home and recover from the trip, I’ve now made my way across the Atlantic to enjoy Oracle OpenWorld here in foggy San Francisco.

Being a Sunday morning, it was a bit of a struggle and somewhat unnatural to get up early but Tom Kyte was doing the first keynote talk so I made the effort to attend. It was as usual with Tom an entertaining and interesting little discussion on what we as developers (and DBAs for that matter) still do oh so wrong. It covered topics such as how we often don’t know how to ask for help and ask questions properly anymore, how we try and make what should be simple as complex as possible (a real theme at my work at the moment), how we try to ignore and pretend mistakes never occur (don’t mention WHEN OTHERS SET NULL with Tom around), how we even fail to back things up properly and finished up on how best practices can often be abused and misinterpreted if we don’t fully understand the reasons and circumstances when something really is a best practice. All good stuff which is always worth reinforcing.

I had a little chat with Tom afterwards and found out to my joy that Tom is also a great fan of “Flight of the Concords” 🙂

I was then interviewed and filmed by Gareth Llewellyn and the gang from Australia Oracle Marketing on being at Openworld and the such and it all went rather well only to be told afterwards that they forgot to turn on the mike and would I mind being interviewed and asked the questions again !! I thought it was all so funny that I found it really hard not to giggle and laugh during take 2 of the interview. I’ll post the link once it gets uploaded to youtube or wherever. Here it is.

Later in the day I met up with a whole bunch of my Oracle mates, which of course is one of the main reasons for attending conferences such as this. One of them was Alex Gorbachev who also conducted a little interview with me 🙂 I think it’s going to be one of those conferences.

Tonight, I’m off  to attend the Oracle ACE dinner and catch up with more folk. If I don’t drink too much, I’ll try and answer some of the questions that have been slowly mounting while I’ve been away. Don’t like my chances though …

I’ll post a little list of highlights each day during the conference.