First up from November 17-19 is Germany's Oracle User Group annual event (DOAG 2009) in Nuremberg. In addition to over 300 sessions, there's a keynote from Oracle SVP Andy Mendelsohn (Tuesday 17th @ 11:00am) and a demo theatre featuring Oracle Real Application Testing, Oracle Application Express, Oracle OLAP and more.

Then on November 30th the UK Oracle User Group annual event kicks off in Birmingham's ICC, and runs until December 2nd. Oracle's Tom Kyte is one of the opening day presenters (Monday 30th @ 10:45am) with an interestingly entitled keynote "What are we still doing wrong?". Definitely one not to miss for all the Oracle Database developers and DBA's in attendance at Birmingham. And, look out for for some of the database Master Classes on offer featuring Oracle Application Express among many others.

• Agenor develops scalable Oracle Database 11g applications with Application Express
• Extreme Performance Data Warehousing with Oracle's Ray Roccaforte
• Lexmark runs Siebel CRM on Oracle Database 11g and Real Application Clusters
• Oracle Exadata V2 with Oracle's Juan Loaiza

BTW, we have some great podcasts lined up for November. So sign up for our podcast feeds and have our podcasts delivered to you as soon as we publish them!

To answer these questions and more, join Hasan Rizvi, Senior Vice President, Oracle Fusion Middleware and Juan Loaiza, Senior Vice President, Oracle Systems Technology in a live Webcast on Tuesday, November 10th at 8:00am PT (11:00am ET).

Lowering IT Costs with Oracle Database 11g Release 2
Event Date: Wednesday, November 4, 2009
Time: 11.30 a.m. PT / 2.30 p.m. ET

Register now and then bring your questions. We'll take plenty of time for Q & A at the end of the presentation.

Agenor is a developer of web-based SaaS implementation software helping organizations manage time-constrained implementations, upgrades, and other changes to business-critical systems rapidly and with significantly reduced risk.

We talk about the ease of developing applications on APEX and maintaining security and integrity of customer data using Oracle's Fine-Grained Access Control.

This Oracle Database podcast has all the details. You can also read their Customer Snapshot.

Lower IT Costs with Oracle Database 11g Release 2
with Mark Townsend, Vice President of Product Management

Reduce Storage Costs with Oracle Database 11g
with Ara Shakian, Jean-Pierre Dijcks, and Bill Hodak - from Oracle's Product Management group

Kerry Osborne of Enkitek (who presented on 'Upgrading to Oracle Database 11g Release 2') yesterday has posted some great pictures of Jerry's World (AKA - the new Dallas Cowboy's Stadium) on his blog (which BTW, also has some useful insights into Oracle Database 11g).

"Specifically Exadata V2 uses new database algorithms to optimize SQL language queries; leverages the latest release of the Oracle Database 11g database (Release 2, which started shipping in September); and includes flash memory to stage result sets into cache memory. Taken together, these new technologies can be expected to speed performance, compared with Exadata V1, for which benchmarks of the storage components were released this spring."

Click here to read the full report, and let us know what you think.

WAND's DataFocus solution adds value in Oracle Database environments by providing a data model for unstructured information, and enhances Oracle Secure Enterprise Search by adding advanced taxonomy metadata to documents for intuitive retrieval and navigation. Learn more and watch a short video to find out how it works.

Watch this short video and see how our two DBA's take on their organization's critical patch upgrades with ease using Oracle Real Application Clusters.

Take a couple minutes to listen to the podcast.

ANGELO ROMANO - IT MANAGER OF THE YEAR Office of the Comptroller, State of Connecticut : Using Oracle Database 11g and Oracle Real Application Clusters (Oracle RAC) on Linux, Angelo reduced costs and downtime for the State of Connecticut.

JAKE RUTTENBERG - DATA WAREHOUSE ARCHITECT OF THE YEAR Manager of Application Development, Business Intelligence Solution Delivery, Starbucks Coffee Company : Jake achieves high availability and massive storage throughput with a system based on Oracle Database, Oracle Real Application Clusters (Oracle RAC), Oracle Automatic Storage Management, and Oracle business intelligence solutions.

MARTIN BUECHI - PL/SQL DEVELOPER OF THE YEAR Lead Software Architect, Avaloq : Martin assists with Avaloq's banking software which runs on Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition and is composed of 4 million lines of handwritten PL/SQL.

HÜSNÜ ŞENSOY - DBA OF THE YEAR DBA and System Engineer, Turkcell : Şensoy was the driving force at Turkcell for a database platform consisting of Oracle Database 11g, Oracle data warehouse products, Oracle Real Application Clusters (Oracle RAC), Oracle Automatic Storage Management, and Oracle Clusterware. The data warehouse--which stores more than 100TB of data--includes everything from operational data to customer relationship information.

DIMITRI GIELIS - ORACLE APPLICATION EXPRESS DEVELOPER OF THE YEAR Director, Apex Evangelists : Gielis, an Oracle ACE, has been working with Oracle Application Express since its early releases.

For all the winners, great articles on Oracle Database 11g and much more - check out the Nov/Dec issue of Oracle Magazine.

There are still a couple of days left to check out the new Exadata demo in the demogrounds - stop by Moscone West (W-023 and W-028) to see for yourself the speed of data throughput for a quarter, half and full rack, with the option of enabling compression: OLTP, EHCC query and EHCC archive. You can also determine the location of the data: disk scan, flash cache scan, memory scan. A nice touch is the ability to compare Sun Oracle DB Machine against the publicly published scan rates for Teradata 2550 and Netezza TwinFin 12.

There have also been two notable press releases this week regarding Oracle Exadata. The first was about the Exadata Partner Program, which allows Oracle partners to resell Sun Oracle Database Machines and Sun Oracle Exadata Storage Servers, and also provides partners with enablement resources to help build value added services for Oracle's customers.

In the second bit of news, Oracle highlighted the following global customers who have selected Oracle Exadata: Amtrak, Allegro Group, Automobile Association of the UK, Banca Transilvania, CTC, Garanti Bank, Generale de Sante, Giant Eagle, HISCOM (Hokuriku Coca Cola), Integrated Health Information Systems Pte Ltd/National Healthcare Group, Singapore, KnowledgeBase Marketing, Loyalty Partner Solutions, M-Tel, MTN Group, Nagase, NS Solutions, NTT Data, OK Systems, Philippines Savings Bank, Research in Motion, SoftBank Mobile, Screwfix, Thomson Reuters, True Corporation Plc, TUI and Yamazaki Baking.

If you saw Oracle Exadata at Oracle OpenWorld, let us know what you thought!

(oh, and thanks to Keith Laker for the pictures)

When: Wednesday, October 28th at 1:00pm MDT

Learn more and register here.

The ability to add high resolution imagery to geospatial and location-based applications adds value through improved usability, increased confidence in results and routes, and greater context to the information displayed in the map. Companies are increasingly turning to commercially available online databases to access more complete and current imagery than they can hope to possess internally, and to help minimize the cost of obtaining, processing, storing, and distributing this data.

This deep-dive webinar shows how DigitalGlobe's Javascript SDK integrates with Oracle Fusion Middleware MapViewer and how Oracle developers can add international high resolution imagery from one of the largest and most frequently updated collections to support enterprise applications driven by Oracle Database and Oracle Spatial. Register here today.