2nd day at Oracle Open World

Day two proved to me quite a good day for me here in San Francisco. I learned quite a bit, the only downside to day 2 was my loosing my ticket to the Oracle OTN appreciation event (where Elton John was supposed to sing).

Tom Kyte opened up the morning for me. It's actually the first time I've seen him present and I really enjoyed his presentation. The takeaway from the session I suppose would be "Question everything". For example, everyone assumes implicit cursors are "worse" then explicit ones, but Tom tells us that this is no longer true (nice). Tom went through some other old time myths and legends and axed them. The moral of his story perhaps was it might have been true at one point, but it may no longer be true so figure it out for yourself.

Tom Kyte presenting at Oracle Open World

After Tom spoke I sat in on a hands on lab for using Oracle MapViewer and APEX (Oracle Application Express) to build a "Google like" map website. This was more an exercise in copying and pasting but I enjoyed it anyway.

After cramming down lunch (a horribly tasting sandwich I might add) I sat in on three consecutive "round table" sessions about performance tuning. The first was specifically related to the database itself and things like MTS. The second was SQL related, and the third was focused on PL/SQL, Streams, Oracle Text and XMLDB. These three sessions were led by Andy Mulholland and some of the folks who spoke included Bryn Llewellyn and the like. Jonathan Lewis was among the crowd asking the panel some pretty tough questions (that was cool). He's probably one of the only people in the world who doesn't work for Oracle that truely understands everything the database does.

As I mentioned earlier, I lost my ticket (or I was never provided one) to the show, so I stumbled into the nearest Irish pub (Johnny Foley's Irish House) for dinner and a beer. I grabbed a Prime Rib dinner and had a couple Harp's, two thumbs up to that nice place before heading back to the hotel to go to sleep nice and early.

Until next time...Rich

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