The Oracle Open World, Day 1 - Key Conference I

This year the slogan is ... "Engineered for Innovation" According to the slogan is the kind of surprise Larry Ellison will have prepared for the Oracle community, so if you have some intuition and track the recent history of Oracle you may guess what the surprise from the big boss is about.

Larry Ellison entered in his own personal style, and the first phrase that he pronounced gave the guideline to what this was about ... he said "Sometime back when we bought Sun the customers said that Oracle was already into the hardware business, but we didn't receive the memo" ... referring to the hardware he was displaying on the stage he pointed at it and he said ... "we have a lot of hardware on the desktop". These keywords were the elements that defined what Larry Ellison wanted to show to the world this year.

The main goal of the hardware is to deliver the power of the hardware with highest performance and the lowest price. As usual the comparison against the IBM P795. Larry Ellison seems to enjoy these comparisons. The Exadata and Exalogic are aimed at achieve the maximum performance with the minimum cost, he referred the price of the servers is cheaper than the x86 servers world's cheapest servers.

What's the magic behind the servers ? The magic word is Parallelism and compression. The philosophy is to parallelize everything, this way data can be moved faster. The X machines parallelize both hardware and software. Since the current hardware cannot be made faster due to physical limitations, unless new technology arrive, in the mean time we have to use what's available and the challenge is to configure it so the best performance possible can be taken out of it.

Oracle is not creating a faster hardware, you cannot make the hardware faster due to physical constraints, so how can the hardware be made faster? Using the same hardware in a more efficient configuration. Not one big machine, not one big storage server, but a fundamental parallel everything architecture. If properly configured this increases throughput, performance, reduces energy and space consumption. The Exadata and Exalogic machines architecture probably is well known by now, infiniband connectors parallel infiniband network pipe connections moving data in and out. Infiniband is the fastest network. Faster, more reliable, and with a better performance than that of the internet.

"Performance is about moving data, not about processor", So if you think technology from this perspective, your goal will be to reduce the amount of data and increase the speed of moving it, if you are able to move less data at a faster speed the result will be the eXtreme performance.

The OS for the X machines was engineered to exploit the advantages of the parallelism, with all the advantages parallelism provides, such as no single point of failure and increased throughput and performance.

How can the amount of data be reduced? Well, from the hardware perspective the magic is created by compression. 10x data compression which means 10x less data to move, 10x data to store and another power related indirect consequences which makes this machine to require less physical space and have a small carbon dioxide footprint.

And what other surprises has revealed the big boss of Oracle? ... the Exanalytic machine (another X) and the Sun Supercluster (S), ... and I'll be talking about it in my next post.

The Oracle Open World, Day 0

Oracle Open World Day 0. Arrival to SFO.

Visiting the Oracle Open World in my personal experience is the opportunity to meet with peers, networking, updating knowledge, interact with people, meet the gurus, and have fun. My OOW started on Saturday, and the visit to the holy Oracle Headquarters is a must for me. It's the reminder of the long journey I've walked so far along with the company.

The temparature was nice, a typical autum californian day, beautiful, I love this weather. However, you never know, I remember some years back San Francisco had a severe cold front that was mixed with a high humidity level in the air and the consequence was that you could hear a lot of people sneezing and coughing in the conference rooms.

On the other hand, taking pictures of the architecture is always an amazing experience. The reflecting windows of the cylindrical shaped buildings that in my personal opinion emulate the physical shape of hard disks built with steel, concrete and glass. The blue colored windows disguise the buildings with the sky. Always an amazing landscape.

I don't know why the OOW doesn't start on Saturday, it would be great for me to use two weekend days and three vacation days rather than using one weekend day and four vacation days to attend the event. Most probably the logistics and the convenience for most of the people who attend the event.

The OOW is always a great experience that is absolutely worthy.

The Oracle Open World 2009 is just a few weeks ahead

The last OOW2008 was for me the first time I visited this event. This is the time to meet partners, colleagues and friends. There are tons of information, a lot of activity during the day evening and night. It all starts early, between 8:00 and 9:00 a.m., depending on the scheduled activities and the interest in key conferences or other early activities. If you have already confirmed your assistance make sure you have accessed the scheduler builder tool. By now most of the hands-on workshops have no more seats available, this is the first activity that is in high demand. There are lots of conferences and most of them are overlapped, so it may be difficult to be at two or more places at the same time unless you develop the ubiquity ability.
The schedule builder is a very important tool during the event. This allows you to better plan ahead how your time will be distributed, when you are going to take breaks, when you are meeting friends and partners, visit the exhibition hall, assist to the demo grounds or perform other relevant activities.
The last time I was there I didn't carry my iPod with me and my cell phone didn't have wireless capabilities. Never do that. It is very useful to have your schedule on your handheld device and it is important to have internet, it becomes a very useful mean of communication. There are computers where you can quickly access your email and internet, but since they are public, it becomes difficult to remain more than ten minutes when several folks are waiting in line. I suggest you to take your portable wireless device with you.
Last year the electronic presentations were not available but for those who buy them. There is a CDRom you can buy. So if you are interested you can get them from Oracle.
This year I will be signing my book, the scheduled time slot will be on Tuesday 13th at 16:30 hrs at the library. I hope to see you there.
This is just the beginning, there will be a lot of things more to comment about this event.