Oracle Open World 14 – A Diary

I had the opportunity to attend this year Open World conference in San Francisco. This was my 7th open world and each year my excitement only goes up. And, this year was special – first conference as Oracle ACE. I am thankful to Oracle Publishers Seminar (+ Oracle ACE program) and OneNeck IT for giving me the opportunity.

Sunday:

Sunday is the first day of conference and was eventful for me. (Oh forgot, I got upgraded to business class by American on 767 plane, so the day started really good).

Reached just before noon at the conference, and went straight to the OTN lounge to meet the RAC Attack Ninjas. Though I went to help, I actually did upgrade my virtual box 12c RAC to 12.1.0.2 and learned about the Grid Infrastructure Management Repository (tweet here). Thanks to Seth and Eric for their help. The cluster upgrade is done in a rolling fashion, and thus the database service was unavailable only on the node that is being upgraded. So, the upgrade can be done without a database outage.

After the OTN RAC Attack, did not attend any session on Sunday, went to the hotel the check-in. There also got a surprise upgrade to a room on penthouse floor on the Hilton Financial District, overlooking the San Francisco Bay. Beautiful view!

 

Was lazy to go back to Moscone to watch Larry keynote, so watched him online. Larry was in a real good mood, I enjoyed the keynote.

By the time the keynote was over, was almost late to the Oracle ACE dinner. This was my first OOW ACE dinner, and there were some surprises too (the dance!). Got to meet few friends I only know on the internet… This is a great bunch of people!

Monday:

Attended few sessions in the morning and spent some time at the OneNeck booth.

My 12c OCA certification book was published in May. To my surprise, saw several copies of the book along with Freeman’s OCP book in the book store.

 

Monday ended with a customer dinner… (yum stake!)

Tuesday:

All of Tuesday morning, including lunch was with Oracle Publishers Seminar. Met many authors, and listened to Oracle product leaders. The round table with Oracle product managers was especially good this year.

Spent rest of the day at the Oracle demo grounds visiting cloud and Sparc booths.

Evening was the OneNeck customer appreciation happy hour/dinner at the Hilton. Had a good time.

Wednesday:

Attended several good sessions on Wednesday.

Had opportunity to listen to Jonathan Lewis talking on the technology behind Delphix. Enjoyed the company of Sandesh and Gopal, and it was a special moment to get a photo with JL.

 

Evening was the Pythian/OTN blogger meet up. Met several great folks…

The appreciation event was well attended, this year the weather was perfect. Spent some time, till 11pm…

Thursday:

Had to finish some work emails in the morning… Attended couple of sessions before taking off to Airport. BTW, had my photo with Yury, no jumping though!

 

Flight to Dallas was delayed about 3 hours! so return home was not that fun!! But glad to be home with family…

During the Open World week I did not publish any Oracle Tidbits on the facebook page (and twitter too). This was intentional as I was tweeting a lot from the conference already. I will resume publishing the tidbits again this week…

Have a great day!