Oracle Open World 2009 is now behind us. It is a massive event that attracted 32,000 people and had about 1,900 sessions. It is very well organised by Oracle and partners. It is held in 3 huge convention centres that are across the road from each other. One road is permanently closed to traffic as they have erected big tents to use as lunch and entertainment venue. Almost the whole city of San Francisco is taken over by OOW as you see delegates walking with badges on the street wherever you are in San Francisco.

It was nice to meet up again with old friends and it was also a privilege to meet so many new Oracle DBA’s and Developers. OOW is certainly a place to bring the worlds best Oracle specialists together in one place. It is a great opportunity for networking and sharing knowledge and ideas.

My two presentations went very well and had a good turnout. One presentation was on Disaster Recovery and another on Perl. For details of my presentations and to download the slides and “homework” please go to OOW2009.

I think the Perl presentation hit a chord with many DBA’s as it is a highly effective tool for DBA’s, one that is too often overlooked, and one that many DBA’s would like to learn. But as with many programming languages you need someway to get you started, to learn the fundamentals and for someone to show you the right way to learn the language so that you do not start off with “bad” habits. This presentation was about how to start learning Perl and to go over some of the language fundamentals and best practices. The presentation was very well received as I received many positive comments from the audience. I was asked to submit this presentation for Collaborate 10 in Las Vegas next April which I now have done.

The Wednesday night party had everyone (all 32,000) transported in buses to an island in San Francisco Bay that is reachable by bridge. This was a huge party with 2 large stages. The entertainment was Aerosmith, Roger Daltry, Three Dog Night and The Wailers. What a great party and great food and drinks! I think Oracle hired all the buses, taxis and limos that are available in San Francisco.

What was the top new feature of Oracle 11gR2. For me this is “Edition-based redefinition”. As Tom Kyte said in his presentation: “It is the killer feature Of Oracle Database 11g Release 2. It is worth 2 features!”. It is like version control within the database. Not version control on the data itself but version control on the schema objects. The schema objects types that are editionable include Synonyms, Views and PL/SQL object types (like triggers, functions, procedures etc). So tables are not included in this.

Edition-Based Redefinition or EBR allows significantly less downtime when you are upgrading applications as you no longer need to wait for all the users to stop using the application before upgrading. Currently if releasing new PL/SQL code, the code needs to be recompiled but you cannot recompile until all users have stopped using the code. There are always a lot of dependencies when compiling PL/SQL, so basically it means no one can use the application when this is happening. With EBR, you can now compile the new code without affecting the current application. EBR is available in all editions of Oracle 11gR2.

In summary it was an event that was well worth attending and it was a privilege to be presenting at such a great event. Hope to see you there next year!