OTN TechBlog

Last month, at the Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) in L.A., OTN's Chief Installfest Officer Todd Trichler was present on the exhibitor floor to sling free software (Oracle Enterprise Linux and Oracle VM), as he is wont to do.

Todd also had the presence of mind to take a small survey sample among the 1,000 attendees, with questions focusing on awareness of the availability of free Enterprise Linux ISOs from OTN, of Oracle VM, and of VM templates for Oracle Database, Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control, or SOA-on-Oracle WebLogic Server.

While a good number of the attendees had some general idea about Oracle's activity in the Linux and virtualization areas, many were surprised to realize the extent of Oracle's commitment there - that is, about the existence of actual supported products. To many, the existence of Oracle Enterprise Linux and Oracle VM was news. This is quite surprising considering the sophistication of the audience - this was not LinuxWorld (now "Open Source World", I believe), after all (Did I just say that?)

We clearly have a lot of work to do in this area. Any suggestions?

A recent post about Oracle Unbreakable Linux adoption ("Oracle's Unbreakable Linux not denting Red Hat"), certainly a rainmaker on Twitter, was brought to mind while I was authoring my previous post about awareness of Oracle Unbreakable Linux.

There's a lot of stuff in there - which Wim Coekaerts himself more than adequately has addressed - but I'm going to limit myself here to the purported results of a Piper Jaffray survey on which Matt's post is largely based (which I haven't seen). Based on this survey, Matt writes:

At a lower cost and allegedly superior support, Oracle should have thousands upon thousands of Unbreakable Linux customers by now. It doesn't.

Again, it's hard for me to comment because I haven't seen the methodology, but knowing how such reports work I am inclined to believe that it was fairly limited in its scope of respondents. Now, as we know, Linux (or any other OS) will have an extremely large footprint in any organization - meaning, it will serve as the platform for many, many different types of apps, and thus you may have to speak with many, many different buyers if you want to get an accurate picture of enterprisewide adoption. Did Piper do this? I don't really know.

There's an even more important point here though - I believe, as reflected in the previous post, that awareness of Oracle's Enterprise Linux support offerings is actually lower than you might think (scratching the surface, really). Red Hat has at least a 10-year head start here, so to compare adoption of one program vs another is a case of "apple, meet orange" to me.

Now, Oracle Applications Unlimited, IMO, has been one of Oracle's more successful customer-communication programs. In the early days of the Oracle-PeopleSoft-JD Edwards integration, the support and investment policies for "traditional" (that is, non-Fusion) apps were murky and plagued by FUD; Oracle Applications Unlimited played a major role in draining that swamp. If you are a customer using one of these apps (or others that have followed) and after two or three years don't have at least a basic understanding about these policies, you have some very late homework in front of you.

If you are one of those people - or maybe you just want to hear the latest updates - a virtual event on March 11 called Oracle Application Unlimited Experts Live! is worth a visit, especially since you don't even have to leave your chair. (Getting the latest roadmap for Applications Integration Architecture, an increasingly important factor here, is reason enough, probably.)

The agenda includes a live keynote from Oracle Apps Development chief Ed Abbo, as well as several demos and chat sessions with experts in the Social CRM, Talent Management, BI, SCM, HCM, and even "Green" areas.

I am skeptical of the virtual event concept generally, but in the current travel-upon-pain-of-death conditions, it could well become a format that I learn to appreciate. I fully expect to see more of them in the next year than in the previous 10 put together. (In fact, here's another one from Oracle - a recent Enterprise 2.0 virtual conference, available on demand through June.)

It doesn't really matter what I think though - if you appreciate the format, that's all that matters. Let me know if you do, and we will consider it for our Developer program in the future.

Eat SQL for breakfast? We have a challenge for you.

The DB-Quest Challenge is now out there in an effort to document the identities of the smartest database professionals, globally. (You know who you are.) The questions range from the easy to the difficult, with some being designed by Oracle ACEs (thanks to Andrew Clarke, Bradley Brown, and Dave Moore). So, if you think you can correctly answer questions on a range of database management-related subjects, then this is your opportunity to join the Global Top 10 leaderboard.

Brainiacs who reach the leaderboard earn the privilege of submitting new questions for inclusion in the quiz. Even so, if you have a question to include and garner the overwhelming support of the community via this Oracle Mix group, we'll consider it too.

I'll be following the status of the leaderboard and reporting the results here from time to time. Give it a spin.

The 11g release of Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse (OEPE), a certified set of free Eclipse plug-ins designed to help you develop, deploy, debug, and test applications for Oracle WebLogic Server and Oracle Database, was announced at EclipseCon yesterday and is now available for download from OTN.

OEPE is a pretty good example of how Oracle's involvement in open-source platforms such as Eclipse (Oracle is an Eclipse Strategic Developer and Board Member) yield tangible benefits for developers. The new release adds support for Java Persistence API (JPA), ORM, and Spring, among other things.

By the way, Oracle blogger James Bayer has posted a very detailed overview of the differences between OEPE and Oracle JDeveloper, from the perspective of an experienced Eclipse user.

The following conversation between Pieter Humphrey and Duncan Mills, captured at EclipseCon yesterday, offers more details.

We have just released the first video version of an OTN TechCast, the podcast show that has proved to be most popular one from Oracle since its inception in 2005. (In fact, you may remember that OTN TechCasts were the first podcast show from a major software vendor, AFAIK.)

It's probably a year or too late, but better late than never: you can now watch, in addition to listen to, OTN TechCasts shows on your 'pod.

The topic for our maiden voyage is Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Grid Control Release 5, the first true cross-stack release of that product. Development VPs Richard Sarwal and Leng Tan joined me for a 10-minute chat about the dramatic transformation of OEM from a database console to a true systems management platform since Release 1.

Interested to hear what you think. I'm thinking about dragging members of Oracle's Linux Kernel Development team into the studio for our next show.

As always, you can subscribe via iTunes as well as via plain old RSS.

For the first time in many years, a public call-for-papers has been issued for Oracle OpenWorld.

Can anyone remember the last time this happened, if ever? Not in my tenure here (since 2003).

You have until April 19 April 26 to submit your paper; every submission will be carefully considered - and those lucky few will be notified on June 9. Some sessions that are not picked for the show will available for public voting via Oracle Mix starting in early June. After three weeks of voting, winners will be announced.

The Oracle OpenWord blog has some useful suggestions for getting your paper noticed here.