Sunday, September 22
The morning saw 60,000 attendees descend on San Francisco and spend the afternoon getting their bearing while exhibitors set up in the Moscone Center. Everyone was preparing for Oracle CEO Larry Ellison’s opening key note speech in the evening, at which he made a couple of big announcements concerning updates to the company’s combined hardware and software database systems.
The big announcements were Oracle’s introduction of in-memory option for its 12C database, as well as its Big Memory Machine, M6-32.
Ellison believes that the in memory option will make getting responses to queries 100 times faster. You can now get responses faster than you can come up with the questions, he said, adding: "These are ungodly speeds."
The M6-32 Big Memory Machine, which is said to be ideal for in-memory databases is a high-powered server featuring a new processor in the form of the SPARC M6.
The chip incorporates 12 cores – twice the number in the current M5. Impressively, it can run 96 threads per processor.
Monday, September 23
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Day two at Oracle Open World 2013 had a strong focus on Big Data, with Oracle introducing an array of new products, plus enhancements to existing ones.
During his keynote speech, Oracle president Mark Hurd said that, on average, business customers are seeing their data grow 40% every year and they are spending between $7,500 and $9,000 per terabyte to manage that data.
Oracle is trying to make it easier for companies to manage their data, Hurd said, before making the company’s Big Data announcements.
Oracle’s Big Data Appliance now features ‘enterprise-class’ security for open-source data processing framework, Hadoop.
Big Data Appliance has been integrated with Kerberos and LDAP authentication, as well as Oracle Audit Vault and Database Firewall. The software add-ons can examine Hadoop audit trails, looking for suspicious activities and notifying administrators
Hurd also confirmed that Oracle has released additional features for Hadoop, including a new connector that enables standard XQuery operations to process and transform XML documents, executing in parallel across the Hadoop cluster.
On top of this, Big Data Appliance also now boasts Perfect Balance, which modulates workloads for enhanced performance in MapReduce jobs, Hurd added.
Thursday, September 26
The keynote of the final day features innovation and M2M. Edward Screven, Oracl’e chief corporate architect took to the stage to explain that by 2020, 98% of growth in IT revenue will be from 3rd platform technologies.
Deutche Telekom’s chief innovation officer, Thomas Kessling, joined him on stage to discuss his vision of the M2M market.
As an example of its rapid development and growing importance, he noted that there are 45m connected cars in the world, with the number expected to reach 210m by 2016.
Team Oracle USA made one last appearance to join Oracle executives to discuss how Oracle solutions helped them to win the Americas Cup. Data Analytics solutions enabled to closely examine minute details of their performance and, in turn, make relevant adjustments to improve performance every day.
Larry Ellison then finally showed up again, managing to get to a meeting with Wall Street analysts.
He commented that the presentation that he missed on Tuesday was the first one he had missed in 25 years and added that, in time, he hoped that people would forgive him.
Tuesday, September 24
On day three, all the talk was about Larry Ellison blowing off his keynote speech in favour of spending time with Oracle Team USA, which was in the process of making an historic comeback in the Americas Cup.
He had been due to outline Oracle’s annual manifesto that was to revolve around the its lineup of cloud services unveiled this week after years of development.
Executive VP of product development, Thomas Kurian, stepped in to discuss the enhancements to its cloud service in the form of Database as a Service, Java as a Service and Infrastructure as a Service.
He explained that the new services would give customers access to the world’s leading database and Java application server in the cloud, with managed service options and full administrative control.
They augment Oracle’s comprehensive portfolio of Application, Social, Platform and Infrastructure Services, all available on a subscription basis.
The new Oracle Database as a Service provides full control of a dedicated database instance, supports any Oracle Database application, and gives users greater flexibility and choice over their services.
Oracle Java as a Service provides full control of dedicated Oracle WebLogic Server clusters, supports any Java application, and gives users greater flexibility and choice over their services.
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure as a Service provides general purpose compute and storage services to support any application and gives users greater flexibility and administrative control.
Wednesday, September 25
Oracle’s longterm partner Dell was in attendance to talk their about the ongoing and strengthening relationship. Michael Dell, Dell CEO, took to the main stage to announce that Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c is to merge with Dell OpenManage,
Dell’s Active Infrastructure is also be offered for Oracle Linux and Oracle VM, meaning a complete, fully optimised Oracle solution can be installed directly to a data centre, with full technical support.
Also announced was an update to Dell’s Toad product for Oracle and SharePlex, with new features for Oracle Database 12c.
Plenty of customers were also on hand to talk about what they get out of implementing Oracle’s solutions. This included the likes of Tesco, Lego Group, RBS, Standard Life and Allied Irish Bank.
The day concluded with the Oracle Open World 2013 Appreciation Party, which featured free drinks, free food, free funfair rides and games, plus live performances by Maroon 5 and The Black Keys. Team Oracle USA also made a brief appearance following their miraculous Americas Cup win.
