26 September 2005

A trip to Oracle World in San Francisco

I am right in the middle of a visit back to Oracle HQ in Redwood Shores. The primary reason was to participate at Oracle World, but it also provides a good opportunity to hang around for a few days and catch up with the various engineering groups I work with.

Oracle World was a zoo this year. People everywhere. I guess that happens when you pull a few big companies into the fold and incorporate their user conferences into the one event. It's nice to see so many people around.

I didn't get to see any of the big keynotes -- we employees were relegated to booth bunnies, with the lucky ones of us also being able to present a session or two.

This year was quite relaxed for me as I only had one session to present. Normally I have 2 or more to deliver, quite often on a topic which is not core to my heart ... this year I co-shared a session on the new high availibility features we have in our 10.1.3 release. I covered off the new install functions as well as the new state replication framework.

Working on the booth is always a good experience -- we get to speak to all sorts of customers who usually have very interesting questions. I saw one chap this year who was walking around with his laptop all fired up and asking questions about how to get his EJB 3.0 application which he built inside of Eclipse to run on OC4J and work against a SqlServer database. After a bit of a chat he went away and came back a few hours later with it all sorted out -- EJB 3.0 beans running against SqlServer on OC4J. I then showed him which of our Ant tasks enables deployment operations to perform a bind-web operation to map a Web module to a web-site. Since he had Eclipse, it was trivial to add the new task to do the web binding since the Eclipse IDE shows tool-tips for Ant tasks -- it was beautiful to behold.

No comments: