OTN TechBlog

It just so happens to be "Picture Day" at my son's school, so I thought I'd bring you up to date on some OTN pix from recent Installfests, as well as the OTN Developer Day in Red. Shores on Monday. A picture's worth 1,000 words:

Yesterday I got my hands on the Conference Proceedings from Oracle's 1983 Int'l User Group Conference in Boston:

The TOC is really a kick; papers include:

• "Using ORACLE as the Cornerstone of a Corporate MIS" (Mark Filteau, the BDM Corp.)
  
• "Uses of ORACLE in the NOVA Laser Control System" (D.L. McGuigan, Lawrence Livermore Labs)
  
• "A High-Level Interface Between Personal Computers and Mainframe ORACLE" (Martin Gardner, STSC Inc.)

Oracle's address is listed as 3000 Sand Hill Road, Menlo Park, CA.

Did anyone out there attend this conference?

Good news for PHP propeller heads everywhere: a Beta of the OCI8 1.3.0 extension, which supports the Database Resident Connection Pooling feature in Oracle Database 11g, is now available (under the open-source PHP License) in the PECL repository. (You can also read a technical description of DRCP here.) The driver is backward-compatible to 9.2, but you'll need 11.1 and later to take advantage of DRCP, Fast Application Notification, and other new features.

Maintained by Wez Furlong (aka Dr. Evil), Andi Gutmans, Antony Dovgal, and Oracle's own Chris Jones, this new extension promises to bring yet more stability and scalability to Web applications built on Oracle+PHP. There is an ungodly amount of community energy out there around this (OPAL) stack -- still less than LAMP (to be expected), but growing to be sure. It's a worldwide phenomenon and Java fanboys everywhere have a right to be annoyed.

Registrations for the parallel Oracle Develop Conf at Oracle OpenWorld are piling up (already twice as many as last year I think), but even if you've already registered, you're not done yet!

It's still necessary for you to reserve your seat for the sessions of your choice, using the very handy Schedule Builder for this purpose. Do this ASAP because the more popular sessions are already filling up.

Here's another nice development on the community front: For the first time, Oracle is issuing blogger credentials for Oracle OpenWorld. A group of "A-listers" (as Scoble calls them) will soon receive (if they haven't already) invitations to accept full conference passes carte blanche, and to enjoy the same type of access that the mainstream press typically does (including a designated blogger area in the press room).

This may seem like a little thing, but for Oracle, it's far from it. It's active acknowledgment that the world has changed (no small feat for a huge corporation), and I applaud everyone involved for making it happen!

Update: At least one invitee (Dennis Howlett) is unimpressed (to say the least) with the fact that T&E will not be covered this year. What do you think about that issue?

My OpenWorld is schedule is looking less like a blob. The evolving
agenda below is exclusive of any keynotes I pop into, time spent on the
exhibition floor, or "work" hours in the show office (nope, no sessions
- employees not allowed).

Of course I will be
Twittering (personal | official), live-blogging, and
video/photo-casting
all day, every day (not to mention tagging
your blog entries!).

Sunday, Nov
11
11am-5pm: At the Oracle ACE Director Technical
Briefing, and also serving as the moderator of an ACE Director round
table there.
5pm: Taping the first episode of the official
Oracle OpenWorld Daily Show in the late PM, watch it Monday
AM!
7:30pm: Oracle ACE dinner,
yum

Monday,
Nov 12
8am: First stop, the OTN Lounge at Mosc
West (3rd Floor) to set up the Unconference agenda whiteboard and get
that deal rolling! I'll be checking up on the Unconf all
week.
11am: Catch me in Yerba Buena Theater for the opening
session (panel) of the "No Slide Zone", an experimental track in which
Oracle speakers will be relying on unconventional formats (fishbowls,
whiteboarding etc.). Marius Ciortea (Oracle.com Web Strategy) and Paul
Pedrazzi (AppsLab/Apps Product Strategy) and Mark
Townsend (VP
Database Product Management) will be on this panel as
well.
2pm-5pm: Staffing the OTN Lounge
5pm: Videocast
taping from the Unconference
7:30pm: Meet you at OTN Night
(Westin St. Francis)!

Tuesday, Nov 13
10am: Podcast recording
with Oracle's Kurt Hackel (Linux engineering)
12pm: Presenting
at the Oracle Book Publisher's Seminar, one of the great lesser known
sources of product direction info
2pm-5pm: Staffing the OTN
Lounge
5pm: Videocast taping from the OTN Lounge
7pm:
Oracle Blogger Meetup at Thirsty Bear, yes!
8pm: Miscellaneous
partying from that point forward

Wednesday, Nov
14
10am: Podcast recording with Oracle's Chris
Jones (PHP guru/OCI8 hacker)
10:30am: Podcast recording with
Eddie Awad, the
community's unofficial "Webmaster"
1:30pm-5pm: Staffing the
OTN Lounge
5pm: Videocast taping from a location
TBD
6pm: Miscellaneous partying from that point
forward

Thursday, Nov 15
10am: Podcast
recording with guest TBD (Cameron Purdy? I hope so)
11am-2pm:
Staffing the OTN Lounge
2pm: Things are a little fuzzy from
this point forward.....

Look for me, happy to meet
you!

I had a great time at the Lunch 2.0 at Oracle today (even though I didn't get to eat and ran around too much), and I want to thank everyone for attending. I estimate at least 200 attendees today. (It was especially good to meet Jeremiah Owyang and Robert Scoble, and I look forward to seeing their feedback online, even if it's not positive!)

(Also many more and better photos from Tim Bonnemann here.)

As for myself, I do think we overdid the demo aspect; some more opportunities for luncher interaction would have been nice. (Sentiments echoed by luncher Lisa Amorao.) Nevertheless, the crowd seemed engaged and there were several questions from the floor, especially about Oracle Widgets.

All in all, a success in my view, and I hope to work on more Oracle-sponsored Lunch 2.0's in the future.

I'm not one to favor virtual worlds at the expense of the real one, but the AMD Virtual Experience (now in its second year - or I should say, on v2.0) is pretty cool.

Oracle is a sponsor again this year, and OTN has some real estate in the virtual booth where you can listen to podcasts, download software and technical white papers, etc. It's definitely worth a visit.

Finally, someone (Charles Babcock of InformationWeek) evidences a rather sophisticated understanding of Oracle Unbreakable Linux support - most likely because he actually spoke with Wim Coekaerts, Oracle's steward of this program, instead of winging it.