Oracle Open World 2009 Day 1

As always, Oracle Open World 2009 remains as intense ever. After a few flight delays, we made it into San Francisco on Sunday in enough time to pick up our conference materials and make it ‘close’ to Fisherman’s Wharf to see the Blue Angels flying in various impressive formations over the bay, very cool. After a brisk 1.5 mile walk down Lombard Street through the Italian district into Chinatown for our favorite Chinese restaurant, I called it a night.

Monday started with breakfast with one of our customers and ended over 12 hours later at Lulu’s with STR Software sponsoring a portion of the Oracle Manufacturing and ALM reception. In-between all of this fun, was a day full of educational sessions that exposed me to the latest and greatest of a lot of different Oracle technology. Educational highlights of the day included sessions on new features in SQL Developer regarding unit testing, gaining a better understanding of Oracle Imaging and Process Management via a hands on lab and learning about the latest features of BI Publisher 11g (to be released at a future date).

As far as BI Publisher goes, the session was focused mainly on BI Publisher Enterprise (i.e. Standalone). Major new features are as follows:

– Layout Editor – completely self contained editor application that provides an intuitive interface to create and edit templates as well as view the final output in real time. Included is an interactive viewer that allows users to sort, filter and generally operate on data much like Excel. I talked with Mike Donohue after the session to determine if the existing plug-in for Word would be replaced with this editor and the answer was a resounding no as the RTF template builder for Word provides a lot of advanced functionality for power users. Apparently the BI Publisher team has been working on this feature for 2+ years. It shows, it looks pretty slick.

– Data Model and Data Engine – The evolution of data templates continues as BI Publisher adds support for more data sources as well as a data model editor.

– Scheduler Improvements – Users will now be able to schedule jobs based on a recurrence pattern that spans hours, days, years and specific dates. Additionally, the ability to edit existing jobs, manage jobs and re-run specific jobs has been added.

– Style Templates – These templates define styles of layout objects for RTF templates. For example, say for some crazy reason your company’s marketing department required you to use Tahoma 10pt font for all customer facing documents, these style templates could enforce that standard across all templates.

– And then of course some miscellaneous additions including new RTF template enhancements, PDF optimization, support for 2GB+ PDF files and JDeveloper integration.

All in all a good day and looking forward to day 2. Also looking forward to the annual major announcement that Oracle has up their sleeves, but so far, no signs of any big surprises so we’ll see what happens. Usually Larry gets to break the news and his keynote is not until Wednesday.

In other news, not exactly sure how many people are here at Open World this year but I have to believe attendance must be lower than the past few years due to travel budgets being cut. During the keynote this morning, it was announced that there were 81,266 hotel nights booked, so taking that number divided by an average of 4 nights per person would be around 20,000 people. Of course, just a rough guesstimate….

Day 2 starts now, off to breakfast.