Oracle Technology Network Blog (aka TechBlog)

This post is strictly about swag - specifically, a new twist on swag that you will enjoy at Oracle OpenWorld, if and only if you visit us at The OTN Lounge.

First of all, let me address the topic of boring plastic conference badges. You've seen one, you've seen them all, right? Not so anymore. Courtesy of OTN, you can now take steps to make that badge representative of the "inner" you. (But don't take this too far!)

Stop by the OTN Lounge to pick up a full sheet of Mikons that you can use to dress up/personalize your show badge. (Thanks to Oracle ACE alum Matt Topper for suggesting this!) So if you want to tell the world that you're a Apex-head, DBA, blogger, WebLogic fan, or whatever, this is your chance! Plus, you'll easily recognize people with the same affinity without the need for minor chit-chat first. It beats putting a sign on your chest!:

Furthermore, those special ones among you who own an Apple iPhone or iPod Touch just may - and I say, may - be able to acquire an OTN-branded Gelaskin if you keep your eyes and ears open (credit to Dan Kildahl!):

What's more, BEA customers can count on receiving a free Welcome Kit (while supplies last). And OTN "alumni" - long-term members who can prove their status by bringing in an OTN membership card (yeah, we actually had one at one point) or other memorabilia - will get yet another gift of appreciation.

As you can see, at OTN, we are working hard to constantly upgrade your swag experience. Remember, the OTN Lounge can be found in Moscone West, Floor 3. Don't be fooled by imitators!

Update (8:50AM PT, Sept 17) - Look for Oracle.com homepage goodness this Friday!

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Starting Tuesday, Sept. 9sometime the week of Sept. 815, the Oracle.com homepage will look like no other corporate Website you've ever seen.

You read that right. Starting tomorrowthis week, visitors to www.oracle.com will be greeted with a simple UI that has only one purpose: to gather ideas from the user community, about any aspect of Oracle. (No registration is required for submitting ideas directly to Oracle, but if you want to share those ideas with other visitors so they can be voted up/voted down - or if you want a response from Oracle - an oracle.com account is required.)

You'll see this version of the homepage for a short time; during that time, you can always opt to skip through to the classic Oracle homepage. After the "return" of the classic homepage, you will have access to this program through a homepage widget until the end of Oracle OpenWorld.

The platform involved, of course, is Oracle Mix - the Oracle-specific social network that has served as an "ideas factory" for nearly a year. However, as part of this program, Oracle executives will now be directly involved, responding to ideas or feedback in their respective areas. (Look for the "Experts" tab in Oracle Mix to see their answers.) Don't expect to see many of them chime in during OpenWorld however; most of their participation will be post-conference.

Internally, we've been informally calling this program "Shock & Awe", for obvious reasons. What better way to illustrate our developing commitment to transparency, than to replace our standard brochureware with a social media experience? (See Groundswell author Charlene Li's take here; Enterprise Irregular Vinnie Mirchandani was pre-briefed as well, at a Friday dinner I regrettably missed due to a family engagement.)

Let me try to anticipate some of your questions.

Justin, where did this crazy idea come from?
You may recall my entries last Winter about Oracle's internal Marketing 2.0 Summit, in which a far-flung group convened to discuss the impact of transparency on Oracle's business. The germ of this idea sprouted up there, in the discussion group co-facilitated by myself and AppsLab Jake. As it turned out, Charles Phillips loved the idea, and we've been working on it ever since, with Marius Ciortea leading the project.

But Justin, isn't this just a gimmick?
Is the homepage change a transparent (pun intended) play for attention, you ask? The answer is "yes". But the underlying premise is far from one.

Oracle actually has a strong history of responding to customer feedback, whether offline via user groups relationships or online via forums.oracle.com, which contains a couple million messages at this point. The addition of blogs.oracle.com and then mix.oracle.com in the past few years has added to that record, but not in an incredibly obvious way. This program is designed to make these conversations much more transparent, as well as to broaden the process beyond the technical end-user community, where it traditionally has lived.

But this program ends on Sept. 25. Then what?
We fully intend to transform this experience into a permanent fixture of Oracle's brand-to-community-to-brand conversation. In a few months, we will report back not only on the results of this program from an input perspective, but also our plans from an output perspective. In other words, we intend to walk the talk - even if it means learning to crawl first.

I'm going to leave it at that and respond to any further questions I see in comments!

This is one of my proudest moments at Oracle. I'm confident that we are nudging the corporate aircraft carrier toward new directions that most of you, I expect, would not have anticipated.

As I remarked during the early days of Oracle's acquisition of BEA, Tuxedo has proven to be one of the more interesting - if under-appreciated - aspects of the BEA-now-Oracle product line.

Although not well known in developer circles, Tuxedo is the rock upon which millions of business-critical transactions are run today. Interestingly, it now also proving to be an important component in Oracle's new Application Grid solution, which more or less debuted this week in this InfoWorld Webcast.

Application Grid, which is premised on a bundle comprising WebLogic Server, Tuexdo, JRockit, Coherence, and Oracle Enterprise Manager with WebLogic Operations Control, is all about applying the database grid concept of resource pooling and sharing to the application infrastructure layer. It's a natural progression; in fact, when you think about it, taking SOA to its logical conclusion - which is its whole point of course - will indeed lead you to an Application Grid environment, in which resource utilization dynamically ebbs and flows based on required service levels.

This is pretty interesting initiative; I'm going to look for more content at Oracle OpenWorld and Develop next week. A good bet will be Ted Farrell's (Chief Fusion Apps Architect) Monday morning keynote at Develop (10:15am at the Marriott). For those of you also interested in the Charles Phillips/Chuck Rozwat keynote in Moscone at 9am: No worries, that keynote will be piped into the Marriott so you will easily have enough time to watch that and then attend Ted's keynote in person.

Just got the download on a great new social media program for OpenWorld.

Starting on Sunday, Qik account holders can join an "OpenWorld" event and stream their Qik video directly to blogs.oracle.com/videoblog. (yes, there will be a human filter in place to minimize the shenanigans), as well as to a video wall within Moscone Center itself. Furthermore, an employee team - yours truly included - have been equipped with Samsung devices to scour the conference for "targets of opportunity."

For those unfamiliar with it, Qik is a product that allows you to stream live video from a supported mobile device and then share and tag it appropriately. It's cool!

So, if you already have a Qik account, look for the OpenWorld event on the Qik homepage, starting Sunday. If you don't, register for one at qik.com!

If you're interested in watching my personal stream during the show, bookmark this blog post because I am embedding it right here:

(of course this widget will be blank until Sunday)

So the aforementioned "Participate" homepage went live this morning, and we have received nearly 400 ideas thus far - some good, some bad. Here are some of may favorites:

Offer free Oracle Enterprise licenses to ISPs. Currently, MySQL & SQL Server dominate this market. Why? You can barely find any ISP that offers Oracle at all.

Create Oracle virtual labs that allow us to remotely test and learn oracle products without downloading stuff

It would be nice to be able to talk to the Oracle database for queries and other database operations and have the database respond with both voice and screen display data.

Build an extension for ASM to be an iscsi head for a storage device. Allowing for a flexible / dynamic removal of disk devices for a file-server or any OS operation.

Can Oracle corp support Oracle database running on Mono (see http://www.mono-project.com/ ) an open source implementation of Microsoft .Net Framework on Linux.

This is just the beginning of a very long story. Keep those ideas coming! (And no, "Fix the download server" is not an idea. You don't get credit for telling us something we already know. :) )

We're two days into Oracle OpenWorld '08, and this is my first valid opportunity to post a blog about anything (while being half conscious anyway). Fortunately, I have a great subject.

Today, Oracle announced that it will certify/support deployments of Oracle Database (all editions), Oracle Enterprise Linux, Oracle Enterprise Manager, and Oracle Fusion Middleware to Amazon Web Services' (AWS) Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). In fact you may transfer your existing licenses to AWS if you like.

Oracle is also providing free Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) in that environment, so you can get up and running on a full Oracle-on-EC2 environment in minutes. So if you're a developer or enthusiast who is averse to procuring and provisioning hardware and doing installs (and who isn't?), you're very happy right now.

Oracle has also introduced an Oracle Secure Backup Cloud module, which enables the use of Oracle Secure Backup for database backup to Amazon's Simple Site Storage (S3) service - which is of course ideal for EC2-based database deployments, but also useful for traditional deployments. (Your existing scripts will run fine with no modifications.) A reporting portal is also available.

This is a pretty big deal for people interested in learning about Oracle who want a super-low barrier to entry. But for enterprises who have shied away from the cloud or utility-based computing, this new deployment option is similarly attractive. I spoke with Senior Director of Product Management Sushil Kumar about this earlier today for podcast purposes. (See also the AWS blog's own views on the subject.

The new Cloud Computing Center on the OTN Website has more info.

Kevin Walsh - who is the SVP looking after Oracle's R&D labs in China (and an all-around nice guy and prolific blogger) - revealed his gadget mania today:

The Unconf is rolling along over in Moscone West; participation is tremendous this year - even in the Apps side of the house is well into the swing of things.

There are a couple sessions on the sched for today that I want to highlight (both involving Ajax):

"Integrating Google APIs into Your Applications", Chris Schalk (3pm)
Some of you may remember Chris Schalk, who until a couple years ago was the product manager for Ajax functionality in Oracle's Developer Tools team. Well, Chris moved over to Google to be their Ajax guy (and is also involved in the OpenSocial effort). Chris will be at the Unconf today to provide a crash course (forgive the double meaning) in working with Google APIs, which extend far beyond mapping to include Ajax APIs for search, translation, etc.; data APIs for server-side integration; and of course OpenSocial.

Responsive, Scalable, and Highly Available Ajax Applications Using Feeds (4pm), Nikunj Mehta
Nikunj Mehta, who leads an interesting group at Oracle called "Ventures" (and who holds a doctorate in philosophy if I remember correctly), spends his time these days investigating the innovative use of news feeds for scalable data integration in Ajax apps. In this session he's going to share some of his team's findings.

If you're at all interested in Ajax development you'll want to check these out.

What the heck? Someone with executive connections has procured a video camera and is on the loose at OpenWorld:

True story:

Deborah Lilley (an Oracle ACE Director btw) tells her story in this video:

Thanks to all you Oracle ACEs out there who attended our dinner last night! Most photos courtesy of Eddie Awad:

Another interesting means of searching OTN content is now available, courtesy of iamthenode.com.

The experience speaks for itself, but suffice to say here, iamthenode gives you the ability to navigate community content in a highly graphical manner. Talk about "throwing something against the wall to see if it sticks"...

iamthenode mousepads are available for the taking at the OTN Lounge!

An Oracle logo on a piece of hardware: Count that among the list of things I never thought to see happen, but did.

During his keynote today, Larry Ellison revealed the HP Oracle Database Machine, a grid-in-a box comprising, as the PR calls it, "a grid of Oracle Database Servers and a grid of new Oracle Exadata Storage Servers packaged in a single rack ordered as a complete system from Oracle." The system is chiefly intended for large data warehouses but as Larry describes it, is also the first database machine fast enough to support OLTP as well. And it is extremely, extremely fast. (Oracle ACE Director Mark Rittman live-blogged the keynote and has an excellent play-by-play here.)

With up to 168TB of raw storage accommodated, the Machine will "hold a lot of songs," as Larry put it it. Does it come in pink and magenta?

The key component is the Oracle Exadata Storage Server, which breaks the storage-to-database bottleneck by moving/parallelizing query processing into the storage array. Consequently, only specific query results, not entire data blocks, cross the interconnect (which is also considerably larger). The Exdata server is available separately from the HP Oracle Database Machine; both are based on 100% open, standard hardware architecture.

As Larry said in his keynote, right off the bat, "Sometimes you have to think out of the box." In this case, he was apparently thinking inside the box.

Read also Kevin Closson for an excellent, detailed analysis.

As is the tradition, I will now provide photos from OTN Night (from Monday night). The names have been removed to protect the innocent (and guilty).

As if these photos weren't enough evidence of a good time had by all, I must report that the venue, the SF Hilton, made Primo Beer available to our guests. I haven't seen evidence of Primo's existence since the 3rd grade, when the owning of that brand was considered the pinnacle of achievement in the bottlecap-collection wars. Isn't that quaint?

It is well known that Mogens Norgaard of Danish consulting outfit Miracle AS maintains a secret virtual office while at Oracle OpenWorld. I went there to investigate today: