1. Installing Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Grid Control Rel 5 on Oracle Database 11g and Linux, by Mike Revitt

2. High-Performance Oracle JDBC Programming, by Yuli Vasiliev

3. Oracle RMAN Backups: Pushing the "Easy" Button, by Porus Homi Havewala (Oracle ACE Director)

4. Tom Kyte: On Dynamic Sampling (from Oracle Magazine)

5. Scripting Oracle RMAN Commands (from Oracle Magazine), by Arup Nanda (Oracle ACE Director)

6. Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control Architecture for Very Large Sites, by Porus Homi Havewala (Oracle ACE Director)

7. Taking an Oracle ADF Application from Design to Reality, by Chris Muir (Oracle ACE Director) and Penny Cookson (Oracle ACE)

8. Tom Kyte: On Constraints, Metadata, and Truth (from Oracle Magazine)

9. High Performance and Availability with Oracle RAC and PHP, by John Lim

10. Oracle ADF Development Essentials, by John Stegeman (Oracle ACE Director)

(The "all-time" list looks quite a bit different of course; the above is restricted to publication this year only.)

You may also be interested in the current state of the "Most Popular Downloads" list. This list excludes packaged applications and drivers/utilities:

1. Oracle Database
2. Oracle SQL Developer
3. Oracle JDeveloper
4. Oracle WebLogic Server
5. Oracle Enterprise Manager
6. Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler
7. Oracle Application Express Standalone
8. Oracle SOA Suite
9. Oracle JRockit
10. Oracle Application Server

Always instructive information when reviewing the past year. Somehow, I think these lists will look quuiiiiitte a bit different in 2010.

Believe me, I am not blaming the victim. This is almost certainly my fault: for one thing, the number of posts have gone down, in inverse relation to my Twitter activity. (Yes, I am one of those shallow people who think that Twitter is often a worthy substitute for blogging.) At the same time, my Twitter follower count has gone up like a rocket.

It's also true that for the most part, the most interesting subjects are off-limits for me at the moment. So, it's possible that a lot of people got tired of looking for juicy content here, and then not finding it. Frustrating.

Perhaps when the information floodgates can open, the crowds will return. In the meantime, if there are any "discussable" subjects of interest to you, feel free to leave me a comment. I'll redouble my efforts to minimize Twitter-induced blogging disruption.

Of course, if you are a TechCast subscriber via iTunes, you will download these mp3s automatically.

As I have written previously, we are working on a complete TechCast overhaul, which may entail, among other things, live broadcasts. When I know, you'll know.

This is a big fat thank you to everyone who attended Oracle OpenWorld 2009, and especially to the Oracle ACEs who dragged themselves, in many cases, across continents and oceans to be there. You truly are the life-blood of the community. (And thanks especially for all the birthday greetings.)

If you couldn't attend, and are too lazy to click somewhere else from here, I bring you photos:

You can also read attendee blogs and watch the tons-'o-video we captured there.

Now, for some things I learned:

• You all hate Schedule Builder. (Welcome to the party.) We desperately need to do something about it.
• You all love the unconference, but want to see it promoted much more widely to the average attendee. I'm with you there.
• Oracle OpenWorld Live was a huge hit, with a constant viewing audience in the hundreds. Agree, we need to do more of that next year. (Plus, it spiced up the OTN Lounge.)
• You seem to be split on Moscone/SF as a host city. Some believe the conference has outgrown it, others can't see OpenWorld anywhere else, even with the inconveniences.
• The Java technologist community is very nervous about OpenWorld serving as a substitute for JavaOne; the cultural and content differences are stark. The sooner we can communicate our plans there, the better. (Unfortunately, nothing can be said until deal close. And contrary to some of the rumors out there, no announcements have been made on this subject at all.)
• James Gosling and Tim Bray are really nice guys; I can say the same about pretty much every Sun employee I met this week.

That's a partial list. Please add to comments about anything you'd like me to know about your experience as either a physical or virtual attendee.

See ya next year!

LJ's Martini Club & Grill
101 4th St
San Francisco, CA 94103-3003
(415) 369-6114

(also in the Metreon Center but on the 2nd Floor). The date/time (Tue, Oct. 13, 6:00pm) are otherwise unchanged.

For the uninitiated, OTN Night is a big party thrown by the Oracle Technology Network team, traditionally on the first night (Monday) of Oracle OpenWorld (with an "Arabian Nights" theme this year). For my money, it's the best party of the week: free food, free beverages, free dancing and entertainment (check out the belly dancers this year!), and for the true geeks, the "Oracle-on-Linux Experience" demo-fest running in parallel.

If you're the competitive type, you can volunteer for a round of "Oracle Jeopardy" in which the most impressive masters of mind-wracking Oracle and San Francisco trivia will get chances to win prizes, including Blackberry smartphones donated by our party sponsor, Research in Motion.

It gets better - Oct. 12 is my birthday, so why not help me celebrate? Meet you at OTN Night!

Monday Oct. 12, 7-10pm
Howard St. tent (no walking this year! Crawl over from Moscone if you'd like.)

First Place: Eric Brandenburg, USA
Second Place: Oscar Gordillo, Colombia
Third Place: Matt Nolan, UK

....with 4th-through-12th place winners from Nigeria, Germany, India, and elsewhere around the world.

The premise of the competition, announced in June 2009, was to seek the "best" application (as determined by a panel of judges) of Oracle Application Express to a business problem. The guidelines were quite detailed.

Eric's app, IT Access, is designed to track the assignment of physical IT assets and/or application access to employees - with one of the main goals being to decommission those assignments when an employee leaves the company.

I'll be speaking with Eric in person during Oracle OpenWorld (to which he has won a free pass), as preparation for a write-up in Oracle Magazine about IT Access.

Congrats to Eric, and to all the other winners!

We launched this program in 2005 as a purely audio podcast, and in fact Oracle was the first company to provide podcasts from a major conference floor (Oracle OpenWorld 2005) at the time. About a year ago, we went to video format, including both mp3s and m4vs in our feed. We've also bounced from full-scale corporate studio to small studio and experimented with different editing approaches.

The video decision has been limiting however due to the iPod form factor. For example, we have hesitated to include screen-casted demos in these recordings.

Soon after Oracle OpenWorld 2009, we'll be making some changes:

• First, we will no longer include video attachments in the RSS feed; it's just too limiting. The feed will become audio-only once again, and we'll be free to include demos when appropriate. If you want video, you'll have to watch it in hosted mode at OTN.


• Second, we'll be making new shows every other week, instead of the 1-to-2 month publishing periods of today. This is good stuff, we need more of it!


• Finally, our approach to editing will be even more informal. Until now, I've felt like Mike Wallace, when I'd rather just be chatting with my guest. This should make the content more conversational and fun.

These are good changes, man.

Finally, note that we'll be live-streaming TechCasts from the OTN Lounge @ Oracle OpenWorld this year, Mod-Weds at 10:30am, as well as the full "Heavy Hitters" schedule. You'll also be able to see all videos on-demand; the URL is oracle.com/openworldlive.

Update (9/30/2009): I have completed the interviewee list for TechCasts to be recorded (live) at OpenWorld:

Mon 10:30 - James Gosling, VP and Sun Fellow, Sun Microsystems
Mon 10:45 - Larry Cable, Architect (Topic: JEE 6 and OSGi in Serverside Apps)
Tues 10:30 - Chris Jones and Kuassi Mensah, the Dynamic Languages Duo (Topic: Oracle + PHP & Ruby)
Tues 10:45 - Bill Dettelback, Principal Product Manager (Topic: PaaS with WebLogic)
Weds 10:30 - Kris Rice, Director, Database Tools Research (Topic: Oracle SQL Developer & SQL Developer Modeler)
Weds 10:45 - Mike Lehmann, Senior Director of Product Management, Fusion Middleware (Topic: Application Grid)

Yes, you read this right: James Gosling will be my first guest. Awesome.

With help from the OTN team (once again, we've got the bar tab covered), Alex has announced the details:

When: Tue, Oct. 13, 6:00pm
Where: Jillian's, San Francisco (steps away from Moscone Center)

Plan to be there, or we'll talk about you behind your back.

You'd think that oraclenerd would be a fixture at Oracle OpenWorld, right? Wrong. Financial difficulties make a self-funded cross-country journey to San Francisco impossible this year. (Thankfully, oraclenerd is already fixed up with a Blogger Pass; one fewer thing to worry about.)

We're hoping to get oraclenerd there anyway, by encouraging you to purchase the official oraclenerd T (just $19.99):

Chet has advised me that his T-shirt take is less than optimal, so we'll have to sell a lot of these things. (Oracle ACEs, expect to find an extra piece of schwag in your goodie bag this year.)

C'mon, help a boy achieve his dream! Help send oraclenerd to Oracle OpenWorld!

You can build these sessions into your agenda today via the Schedule Builder. Get to work!

The key takeaway is: we're adding some new wrinkles to the tried-and-true OTN Lounge formula of free software and T-shirts + free espresso/energy drinks/beer + daily raffles.

First of all, for the first time in memory the OTN Lounge will have its own mini theater where you can engage in Q&A, and meet, with people we call OTN's "Heavy Hitters". We haven't finalized the list of guests, but you can expect a combination of traditional favorites and "new blood". And each and every one of these talks, in addition to other activities, will be video-streamed to the outside world so that non-attendees can partake. More info on that as we have it.

Also, we'll be providing some interactive entertainment in the form of a resident professional Lego Artist. Alas, I cannot spoil the surprise of what his project entails!

Finally, I would be remiss without mentioning the OTN Night Party, which will "ignite" under the Howard St. tent this year, at 6:30pm on the Monday night of the conference. Arrive early because with this convenient location, we expect a mob.

I'll provide more updates as we continue to elaborate on this agenda.

Here's the back-story: BEA's Dev2Dev portal, as you may remember, offered a project-hosting service called CodeShare through a partnership with CollabNet. When BEA came over to Oracle, I immediately recognized that with some retrofitting and reskinning, the CodeShare infrastructure could be repurposed to plug a long-standing hole in the OTN program offering: a collaborative sample code repository. (For a good long while, Oracle sample code has been hosted in a static, "antisocial" fashion by OTN.)

There were a few challenges. Most important, it was necessary to extend the Oracle Single Sign-on service such that OTN members could use existing credentials to access a CollabNet-hosted site. Second, whereas CodeShare was a general-purpose code forge (which supported private projects as well as public ones), the sample code site would be much more narrow in scope - we have no need or intention to compete with the several excellent forges already out there. So, a good amount of content migration and user coordination work was required. With a lot of help from Oracle Consulting and CollabNet, we accomplished both objectives.

The result is a new service for OTN members (no additional registration) that supports the collaborative development and sharing of sample application source code, code snippets, templates, scripts, and skins across the OTN ecosystem (employees and nonemployees). Whether you want to found or participate in a full-blown project with all the requisite bells and whistles, or just share and/or consume sample code snippets, samplecode.oracle.com is the right place. (It's NOT the right place for personal private projects however. Playing well with others is required.)

As time goes on, we intend to migrate all existing OTN sample code to this new repository. So you may want to get started now; hopefully this very brief tour will help:

The newest example is the just-announced Oracle Application Express Developer Competition 2009, in which the Oracle APEX and OTN teams seek to find the best examples of "sick" Oracle Application Express skills in the land. As contest mastermind David Peake explains, although free Full Conference Passes for Oracle OpenWorld 2009, as well as free copies of Pro Oracle Application Express, are at stake, bragging rights will likely be the most effective motivator.

I'm proud to reveal that I am one of the judges, so you'd better be nice.

Everything you could possibly want to know about criteria, guidelines, entry rules, prizes, and so on can be found here. The deadline, Aug. 24, draws near, so get to work!