Lessons learned: I should have taken a journalism course in college or maybe that shorthand class in high school would have helped, (does anyone still use that..)
The rest of Sunday included a panel discussion of Oracle Apex and the Keynote presentation, which include Oracle CEO Larry Ellison.
The panel discussion included the PM for Oracle Apex, a developer lead, and some non Oracle employees that were experts with the product. In this session I learned some new things and confirmed some stuff that I already was evangelizing with Apex. One person mentioned the direction to use Apex to kill Access. I have not been that strong but I do believe that Apex is a better foundation for departmentalized applications that Access. One of the panel members described how business units needed technical solutions and IT departments were too busy to help so companies ended up with “Miniature little train wreaks” all over the place. Someone mentioned that they scanned their network for .MDB files and had over 100,000, then the question was asked of how many of the Access database files were unique, ( different names). That number dropped to 50-60K. So a lot of data duplication spread across an organization.
Someone asked about a tool to convert Access to Apex. Oracle already has a tool built into sqldeveloper to assist in the conversation process but the person in the audience wanted a one button push to convert all of the forms and reports to Apex. Thinking the ability to convert VB code would be fairly simple and Oracle would make a fortune with it. ( what the..? ) The panel did mention that just because the Access thing was created, the logic and functionality may not be the best. Remember most of these Access db’s were built by non IT people.. If anyone has seen the mechanical equipment Access db’s at my work would see this first hand.
Some discussion on the marketing of Apex was done. It’s still not real clear how to market Apex, as the Access, Excel replacement for centralized data / reporting management, or as the enterprise class development tool. Oracle Open World web site (http://www.oracle.com/us/openworld/036763.htm?src=6896290&Act=46 ) was developed in Apex, also Oracle store, https://shop.oracle.com/pls/ostore/f?p=ostore:home:0 has been converted from Java to Apex. Maybe one direction would be to have an IT shop that does nothing but COTS and Apex. No .Net, Java, PHP, or any other development. (remember the name of this site, it’s just an opinion)
There was some discussion on future enhancements of the product and the PM was taking notes on adding them in future releases. In some cases, the requested feature would be out in 4.1 ( 4.0 is the latest version).
One thing mentioned that I found interesting is the idea that building “things” in Apex should not necessarily be considered enterprise applications. The enterprise application has to go through the development process. I have seen this before where one business unit builds an Access or FoxPro thing thinking it would be good for the enterprise and finding that it just did not scale well outside the department of 2-4 people.
In the 4.0 version of Apex, there are a number of Flash objects available including interactive maps. Cool stuff but it will not work on an iPad..
Keynote speeches
The keynote event had some high points and low points. They did tell us that a record 41,000 people are registered at Open World. Could it really be that even of a number?
The HP presentation by a couple of VP’s turned into quite the sales pitch. I did not realize HP was in the network hardware market and they feel this is an area of growth for them. Guess they feel Cisco has too much of the market share.
By the time Larry Ellison got to the stage I was getting a little bored with the whole smoke on the stage, upbeat music, flashing lights and the High Definition 4 wide movie screens. Before Larry came to the stage we were shown a video of Larry’s yacht sailing in the Americas Cup, which was very impressive. In February, after 3 to 4 attempts, Larry was able to buy, or should I say win, the Americas Cup and bring it back to the United States.. But they did use Oracle hardware and software to help win the cup.
When they announced Larry, he came on stage and I did not see when they rolled out the server rack, ( I was sitting it the cheap, cheap, cheap seats). The rack contained all layers that an infrastructure needs, storage, processors, and networking, to run any business. Fully loaded, the one rack would have enough power to process all of the transactions for facebook, ( wow). This thing is called Exalogic. More information can be found here, Remember I am not a journalism person..)
I did like how Larry jabbed IBM and comparing Exalogic to IBM large P class series hardware. The Exalogic can grow up (within the cabinet) and across (multiple cabinets). The Exalogic is fully redundant in every area,( disk, memory, network, processors). Larry made it a point that the Exalogic comes with two guest operating systems, Solaris and Linux. He did not even mention that Windows would even run as a guest on this thing but I guess that is assumed..
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