Well, it was a long day but it ended in a fun way.
Today I was back to the normal OpenWorld sessions starting with the general session. It was eye-opening because the speakers described a new CPU chip that they were using in their latest servers. It had some custom elements to support database processing. It was strange because I have recently been studying the latest Intel x86 documentation and it was interesting to compare Intel’s chips with the latest Sun/Oracle chip. I had read about the specialized SIMD instructions in the x86 family that Intel uses to speed up graphics. So, I was not surprised that Oracle is including more complex additions to their new chip with specialized instructions. Still, I question whether people are really going to buy anything but Intel x86 at this point due to the price/performance.
Next I went to a session describing the way a company used a tool called Chef to manage their Weblogic deployments. The session topic interested me because we also use Weblogic at US Foods. But it was a little hard to follow. Maybe it would have helped if I had been exposed to Chef before hearing the talk. Still, it was good to know that there are tools out there to help automate deployment of new systems.
Next I caught a PeopleSoft in the Cloud talk. It seems that you will install the latest version of PeopleTools in a very different way than you did in the past. I got the feeling that this was just a part way step toward fully setting up PeopleSoft to run in the cloud.
Then I went to a really cool talk about how Ticketmaster sells 20,000 tickets in one minute. It was about their MySQL architecture. They have a large farm of MySQL servers supporting the queries behind their ticketing web site. But, they use Oracle for the updates related to ticket purchases.
Then I went to a talk on Oracle ZFS. I get the feeling that I need to learn more about ZFS. It seems that ZFS is an ancestor of Delphix and I know that there is a free OpenZFS that I might play with. I think that Tim Gorman, who works for Delphix, mentioned something about OpenZFS at his Ted talk at Oak Table World Tuesday so there may be some relationship.
Lastly I went to a talk about how you can use Oracle’s Enterprise Manager to support both on site and cloud databases. It sounds good but I think it still need to mature over time to support the cloud systems more fully.
Then at 5:30 pm I went to a fun bloggers party sponsored by Pythian and the Oracle Technology Network (OTN). I’m not a big party person but I had a good time. It was easy to strike up a conversation with people since we had a lot in common.
Anyway, enough for today. One more day Thursday and then my brain will overflow. 🙂
Bobby
