Oracle Technology Network Blog (aka TechBlog)

It being six or seven weeks out from Oracle OpenWorld 2008 (!), the Oracle OpenWorld Unconference agenda is now open for session submissions. This year the unconf is running all day, every day, so there's plenty of time for everyone. (Don't worry; procrastinators can also book onsite - we're holding one of three rooms out of the pre-event submissions process for that purpose.) You'll find the unconf in Moscone West's Third Floor Overlooks (same place as last year), just beyond the OTN Lounge.

As AppsLab Jake has already duly pointed out, this is a great opportunity for all you "Suggest-a-Session" folks who didn't make the cut to present nonetheless, under more community-oriented auspices. (I see that Tim Dexter of BI Publisher Blog fame intends to do exactly that.)

One of the the first unconference-ees this year is Chris Muir (an Oracle ACE Director for Middleware from Australia), who had the great idea of convening a workgroup during the unconf for the purpose of jointly producing an Oracle ADF development methodology "for the masses", as he puts it. As Chris explains, the ultimate purpose is to use the Oracle Wiki to document user experiences about best practices for completing successful ADF development projects. The workgroup is currently scheduled to convene on Wednesday Sept. 24, between 9 and 11am.

I hope that this year, thanks to better promotion and more mindshare (I'm told that the unconf link is among the most popular on the OpenWorld homepage), we'll see a more diverse unconf crowd this year - not just technology end-users. Apps end-users, industry experts, and business process owners, we want to see you there too.

I just returned from Moscone Center, having popped into LinuxWorld to catch the joint Oracle keynote this AM from CIO Mark Sunday and Chief Corp Architect Edward Screven.

I've never seen Mark speak before, which is unusual in itself; Oracle tends to trot out more or less the same pool of spokespeople. This fact, combined with the content of his keynote, was refreshing - after all, Mark is himself a practitioner, not a marketer, and his talk was a reflection of that status.

After describing what anyone would consider Oracle's monstrous IT environment - which makes Oracle "the largest user of Linux for running an enterprise environment anywhere in the world" - Mark explained not only the next-generation-data-center principles guiding the construction of a new data center (Project Sequoia) in Utah (green computing being a top priority), but also the "Grid Operation Life Cycle" that his organization is striving to implement, piece by piece, enterpriswide. In this life cycle, which is made possible principally by the combination of clustering (Oracle RAC) and virtualization (Oracle VM), the entire configuration and provisioning process is automated as well as "self-organizing". (The latter word is mine, not his - the point being that the process self-organizes toward maximum resource utilization.)

As Mark explained, a principal example of this process at work is the scenario in which software certification on hardware is no longer relevant; the question "What new hardware do I need to run my new app?" becomes moot. Instead, all enterprise resources are fully virtualized and managed in a single pool, even live-migrated if need be, across the grid.

Edward Screven, more or less the leader of Oracle's virtualization initiative, followed Mark with an overview of the free-to-used, free-to-distribute Oracle VM (which by now should be somewhat familiar to this audience). Edward put an explanation point on Mark's presentation by declaring that one of Oracle's virtues, which has served it well across 50+ acquisitions, is its "willingness and ability to change" - and that this virtue is crystallized in Oracle's grid-driven global IT infrastructure.

Edward also announced the release of new Oracle VM Templates for Siebel (templates for Oracle Database and Oracle Enterprise Linux have been out there for a while now), which he amusingly described as "freeze-dried" software. But his quote of the day - delivered in characteristic, full-speed-ahead fashion - had to be "Virtualization is not a product; it's a feature". (Stockholders of a certain Palo Alto-based company may be increasingly inclined to agree, but that's just a personal observation.)

On the general subject of the Oracle Unbreakable Linux program, I find it amusing (is that the right word?) that people out there who continue to confuse/conflate - and perhaps this is partially our fault for not making it crystal-clear - the Red Hat-compatible binaries that Oracle makes available with the Linux support program known as Unbreakable Linux. (Heard on Twitter today: "Is anyone actually using Oracle Enterprise Linux? What a flop..." Dude, it's NOT about this distro vs. that distro; in fact, that's where Linux is going wrong!) Use of said binaries is not required for support and is thus not a measure of its success; RHEL is 100% covered (for apps certified against it) by the Oracle Unbreakable Linux program, whether Oracle products run in the stack in question or not. As Edward said, "Linux vendors should compete on support and pricing, not on bits." Amen.

Silicon Valley/SF Bay Area is teeming with database application developers, whatever you might think based on the current media dominance of Web 2.0.

These folks should be happy to hear that on Aug. 25, Oracle will host an OTN Developer Day focusing specifically on database app development, with a core curriculum based on Oracle Database 11g w/In-Memory Database Cache and Oracle SQL Developer supplanted by afternoon breakouts on developing with .NET, Oracle Application Express, Java/JDBC, or dynamic languages (PHP and Ruby). Something for everyone!

I can tell you from personal experience that the database app dev team has been working really hard on this for months. Laptops will be provided.

Register the old-fashioned way or via Upcoming.

Despite the fact it has been available for download from OTN since last week, Oracle WebLogic Server 10g Rel 3 (10.3) was officially announced in a social PR today. (Download link and other supporting info here; there is also a very complete description in this post at the Oracle Developer Tools Blog.)

Released by BEA in tech preview in November 2007, 10.3 is the first "Oracle-compliant, feature-bearing" release - meaning: it now functions as official JDeveloper/ADF/TopLink runtime, and it has lots of new stuff in it. Workshop for WebLogic is still in there for all platforms and it's now free, to boot.

If you're a former BEA customer, you've probably been waiting for this for a while. If you're a longstanding Oracle one; well, this is your chance to get your feet wet with what is now Oracle's strategic Java platform.

I feel compelled to add that despite what you may have read elsewhere, the WLS install is fairly lightweight (154MB) when the a-la-carte approach is taken. Or, you can choose to download the entire entree (WLS, drivers, plugins, JDKs, samples) at about 735MB.

Interesting exchange on Twitter in last couple days. The convo started with @yinchang questioning Oracle's ability and/or required credibility for holding an unconference:

To which I replied: Why not? In fact we already did one, at last year's OpenWorld conference.

For whatever reason - perhaps because unconferences can only be organized by those with purity of spirit - @yinchang wondered aloud whether "corporate sponsorship" and "unconference" cannot be reconciled, as if unconfs are typically held in the wilderness, away from corporate things like meeting rooms, lunch buffets, and hotels. Her next step, rightly, was to crowd-source the Twittersphere:

...with His Appleness @guykawasaki himself replying matter-of-factly (and correctly):

I, of course, duly referred both of them to the OpenWorld Unconference page, which is fairly self-explanatory in its openness. (Hey, even SAP presented last year.) All's well that ends well:

I don't mean to pick on @yinchang personally; her semi-rhetorical question was a sincere one. My point rather is to illustrate the fact that communication will trump cynicism, and thence move on to building trust, every time.

I recently participated in a panel at Google's Reaction 2008, a summit for B2B marketing executives (AdWords customers I presume), on the topic of "Building & Participating in Online B2B Communities". I thought you might enjoy the video. (I'm pleased to report that our session was the second-highest rated of the summit.)

The true insiders among you will recognize @SocialJulio lurking in the background!

This weekend, forums.oracle.com received a software platform upgrade, to Jive v 5.5. This was long, long overdue and many thanks to the Web Arch and IT teams.

With this upgrade, users can now enjoy features like tagging, a more robust rich text editor, and most important, a new rewards system:

In the past, users were "rewarded" for their participation based solely on activity. That is, the more posts you created, the "higher" your status in the community. The flaw here is plain as day: Theoretically, I could be a human spambot and achieve Gold Medal status simply based on raw activity.

Now, although a user's frequency of posting is still recognized, community standing will be more heavily based on post quality. Thus, if I feel my question has received a "Helpful" answer, I can award the answerer 5 points. If I feel the answer is "Correct", I can award 10 points. In this manner, the wheat among the pool of answerers will easily be separated from the chaff. (Update, 8/24: in order to award points, you must identify your initial post as a "question" - which is default.)

For those of you concerned about your "status": People who give consistently helpful/correct answers have nothing to worry about in this model. But no more rewards just for being noisy! (Striking because it actually is still possible to achieve "Gold Medal" status based purely on post frequency.)

This change may be disruptive for some, but I'm confident that most of you will agree with this reasonable, common-sense approach to community management. It also happens to be fairly SOP these days among similar communities.

We've also moved the official Forums FAQ to our wiki, in the hope that the community, which is the true owner of forums.oracle.com, will participate in its management.

Finally, I want to refer you to a forum intended specifically for gathering post-upgrade bug reports. (Although we may not answer each post individually, we are reviewing every report carefully.) Be sure to use the forumsupgrade tag!

Here are the known issues, irrespective of bugs:

Drafts :
Users will not be able to access and finish any saved drafts. This will be fixed in the next Jive release.

Rich Text Editor:
- Bullets or numbered lists will be applied to the entire post in the Rich Text editor. Use Plain Text Editor to format if needed for just a specific section.
- Quoted text will be inserted at the top of the reply in a message by default.

Plain Text Editor:
- Hard return will be needed for Heading format. Example:
h1.
text here
- Use of the URL Insert will insert the URL at the top of the post. It will need to be manually moved if desired.

Handles:
- Handles are now case-insensitive
- Script was run to change duplicate handles to xxx2

What are your thoughts on our new approach?

Update: Some users have already registered distaste for our status level names (eg, "newbie"). (To quote Heath Ledger's Joker: "SO serious!") If anyone has better suggestions, we're all ears!

Update 2: We are well, well aware of the lingering instability of forums.oracle.com; a team is working around the clock to restore full, continuous service.

I've wanted to use that title since "300" came out last year!

There is a method to my madness however. As many of you know, we rolled out an upgrade to forums.oracle.com last weekend (to Jive Forums 5.5). Since then, the site has been unstable, but steadily improving - Monday, uptime was 7%; Tuesday, 70%; and Wednesday, 80%. We've thrown more hardware at the problem, upgraded various network components, and have a team of Java and clustering specialists working the problems around the clock.

Uptime is still not where it should be of course; forums.oracle.com is business-critical for a lot of folks (as well as for Oracle), and I'm glad they consider it so. If nobody cared, we'd be wasting our time.

We made a conscious decision early in this process to stick with the upgrade; to fight through the problems instead of run from them. Some people would argue with that decision (many of you have), but so far, I'm glad we made it - even if there are grumblings about the new rewards system. (In fact, I've seen more complaints about that than about downtime!) Regardless, I do want to apologize for the downtime you've suffered through thus far.

Is it possible that we'll have to change course? Sure it is. Stability is our top priority - much more so than features. If we have to trade the latter for the former, we will.

But we're not there yet. After all, "This is Sparta!"