I wrote weblog entries about OracleWorld 2002 on Sunday and Monday, but things got a bit hectic for me on Tuesday & Wednesday. I’m back home now, and following are my thoughts on my last two days of the show.

The only press release I read. Doug Pelton stopped by the O’Reilly booth and dropped off a press release for me to read. Oh boy, thanks Doug! I really enjoy reading press releases (not!). But this one I did read. It’s for a product named JAuditor, which audits Java source code for quality. To get comparitive information for their audit reports, Doug and company ran audits of some 50 Java-based open source projects, including: JBoss, Tomcat, and others. If you’re interested, here’s a link to the JAuditor report on JBoss. Even though it’s an ostensibly “objective” report, some of the conclusions still seem subjective. For example, JBoss’s highest value for the number of overridden methods is 42. JAudit lists the “Benchmark Best Range” as 0-20. 42 is so far outside that range as to imply a problem. But without knowing the circumstances, how can one really say whether 42 overridden methods is a problem?

The Oak Table Network. I dropped by the infamous “Oak Table” and had enjoyable talks with such luminaries as Cary Millsap, Dan Tow, and Mogens Nørgaard. Dan Tow came up with the name SingingSQL for his consulting firm. I really like that name. May all your SQL sing, and if it doesn’t, call Dan.

Oracle Publishing Seminar. Oracle is increasingly reaching out to publishers. Tuesday morning found me at a half-day meeting during which various Oracle VPs expounded on their respective products. Of course, Oracle’s hope is that we’ll publish books about those products. While it’s a two-edged sword, I think it’s generally good that Oracle is opening up a bit, as it helps us publish better books. And hey, they gave me this great light-up pen that my kids really like. Also during the Publishing Seminar, I found out that France Telecom has a 65 Terabyte database, which the speaker in question claimed is the largest, single-instance Oracle VLDB database in the world, even eclipsing Walmart’s data warehouse.

Java Stored Procedures. My first Wednesday session was on Java Stored Procedures. It was reasonably well-attended: the room, which was quite large, was about 1/3 full and I estimate 150-200 attendees. One tidbit that caught my attention is that Oracle is studying a way to make Java method invocation possible (from SQL and PL/SQL) without the need for a PL/SQL wrapper. The speaker also mentioned one client who successfully supports 3000 simultaneous Java stored procedure users on a single Oracle instance. Hmmm… I need to find out exactly what that speaker meant by “simultaneous”.

Best attended session. Paul Tsein’s session on Flashback Query, Online Redefinition, and Log Miner, was the best-attended of any session I visited. It was held in one of the large salon’s in the Marriott, and the room was packed.

Oracle10i. Some goals I heard from Mark Townsend for Oracle10i include: making Oracle10i a strong bioinformatics platform, making Oracle10i the fastest XML platform on the planet, doubling Oracle10i’s performance over Oracle9i.

In the “I get no respect” department, Oracle scheduled interviews in the press lounge during lunch. When I went in looking for a place to sit down and eat my box-lunch (the press lounge has tables and chairs) I got thrown out. And I was attending on a press pass! Don Bales, author of our Java Programming With Oracle JDBC, also was sent packing. I guess there must be press and there must be PRESS. Fortunately it was a nice day out, and I enjoyed lunch while sitting on the cement ledge next to a fountain in the Yuerba Buena Gardens.

Monday morning, 8:15 AM

Bad fly-day yesterday. Big storm, lightening outside the plane windows, lots of turbulance–I don’t like it when I look outside the plane window and see the wings flapping.

Remember I mentioned that I decided to useGoToMyPC on this trip to avoid having to move my email onto my notebook computer?Well, now I have some results to report.

First of all, I found that I really missed being able to catch up on email during the long flight from Detroit to San Francisco. To use GoToMyPC, you need an Internet connection to your host computer, and, of course, I didn’t have one on the plane.

Using GoToMyPC is not nearly the same as being there. You’re remotely controlling a PC via the Internet, and even on a fast connection everything you do is just a bit sluggish. I’ve also had reliability problems: connections have suddenly dropped and this morning my connection froze while I was in the middle of editing an important email.

On the plus side, I like the way GoToMyPC is able to the screen image on my desktop (which runs at 1100-something in the horizontal dimenson) down to the 800×600 used by my notebook. The results are surprisingly readable

Nothing at OracleWorld really begins until 9:00am. I’ll update this page throughout the day, as time permits.

Update, Monday @ 2:21 PM

While wandering the show floor today I stumbled across a product named Exodus from Ciphersoft Inc. Exodus automatically converts PL/SQL applications, notably Oracle Forms applications into Java. An Oracle Forms app ends up as an EJB-based application. Ciphersoft is an Oracle Migration Partner, so Oracle is, apparently, actively supporting a product that migrates users away from their own Oracle Forms environment. Interesting.

By far the most interesting thing I encountered today was a booth in the Oracle campgrounds at which Brajesh Goyal was giving a demo of Oracle’s toolkit for Globus. Globus is a platform for grid computing developed jointly by Argonne National Labs, University of Southern California, and other instituions. Oracle databases can be resources on a Globus grid, and scripts and jobs can be submitted to run against those databases. That Oracle supports grid computing fascinates me. Expect to read more from me on this topic.

And what of my problems this morning with GoToMyPC? Those turned out to be the fault of my ISP, which experienced a short outage.

Related link: http://oracle.com/oracleworld/online/

It’s 2:23 AM on Sunday morning, and I just finished packing for my annual pilgrimage out to San Francisco for OracleWorld. That’s an inauspicious beginning, actually, as I’ll be sleep-deprived right from the get-go. I’m sure I won’t get any extra rest at the conference, and I have the red-eye back Wednesday night, so Thursday should a real interesting day for me.

I’m doing something different this trip. Rather than transfering all my email to my notebook so I can keep up while I’m on the road, and then having to transfer it all back again when I return, I’m using GoToMyPC, which allows me to remotely control my office computer from any computer running Internet Explorer, which means I can use pretty much any arbitrary computer I happen to stumble across. Andrew Duncan, author of our upcomming Objective-C Pocket Reference is one of GoToMyPC’s developers. I just installed the software tonight, and my first impression was favorable. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Getting back to Oracle, I just finished up an article on character semantics an multibyte characters. If you’re doing development with Oracle that involves the use of multibyte character sets such as Unicode UTF-8, I’d be interested in hearing from you. You can email me at jgennick@oreilly.com or at jonathan@gennick.com.

Stay tuned! If I stumble across anything interesting at OracleWorld, I’ll post it here.