My impressions from Oracle OpenWorld 2018

Hi,

This was my third time at Oracle OpenWorld, and still I was thrilled like the first time. Howard Street was dressed in big, red banners everywhere—just take a picture and share it in a social network.

This time I was also there as part of the Oracle ACE program, a community of Oracle experts and advocates. We all met on several occasions during the conference, giving me the opportunity to meet in person with the people I follow and whose sessions I attend.  

This year’s main keynote by Larry Ellison was about Oracle Generation 2 Cloud, which was built from the ground up for better performance, pricing, and security. I assume that Oracle’s architecture is indeed better than the competitors, as Larry kept saying, because Oracle hired the best minds in the industry - people with deep experience in cloud technology - to build Generation 2. I just hope that Oracle’s implementation will be as good as its design. Oracle announced that version 18c, and later 19c, will be fully independent and autonomous, while in the past they’ve used other words like Automatic…. and Dynamic… Even though Oracle continues to add more automatic features in each version, we DBAs still have much more work to do.

A good opportunity in this kind of conference was to ask Oracle's Senior Directors questions about software, bugs, and even future releases.  I made several contacts who are helping me currently.

Beyond being in many useful technical sessions, I also joined my company’s booth - Axxana. We shared our Phoenix product, which ensures zero data loss and rapid recovery at any distance and in any topology - at a fraction of the cost of traditional disaster recovery solutions.  

An integral part of OpenWorld is the night of festivities at AT&T Park, which was called this year CloudFest.18. I enjoyed the company, food, one song of the band Portugal The Man, and one song of Beck.

Yossi Nixon