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OOW 2009 : SUN-rise on a SUN-day

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This week I am in San Francisco for my third Oracle Oracle Open World. Because it was my second consecutive visit I received an "Oracle Alumni" tag (for my badge) and a nice jacket during registration.
This Sunday the first session (at 800 AM! - OOW is really hard work...) was by...me! There were around 50 to 60 attendees, and IMHO that's not too bad for a session at that time. The session seemed to be interesting enough for 111 people to include in their schedule, but I guess for a few of them it was too early after all...
The session went ok, not great, but ok. I would rather do a session after being a couple of days in the US, because then you're more used to the language. This one was within 20 hours of arrival.
Right after my session - and a well deserved cup of Starbucks coffee with Edwin - I went back to the "Holland ACE House", where I am staying with Marco, Andreas and Jacco, to drop off my laptop. BTW the house, rented by Anjo (thanks mate!), is very nice. You can see the pictures here. Right after that I went back to the Moscone for some sessions within the ODTUG track. They were all about migration to APEX. One company moved from Access to APEX, another from PowerBuilder / Cobol / to APEX. Another proof that APEX is suitable for smaller (Access like) apps as well as Enterprise level applications.
After that on to the Hilton for a presentation by "Mr PL/SQL" : Bryn Llewellyn, about OnLine Application Upgrade. Bryn thoroughly explained the goal and the use of the new 11gR2 feature "Edition Based Redefinition".
Meanwhile I missed the APEX 4.0 session (I have seen the major part of it at last June's ODTUG), but it was very well received. If you're interested you should take a look at Lucas' blog post.
Then off to the impressive Hall D for the opening keynote of this year's OOW by Scott McNealy, the chair man of Sun. He did a good job presenting two top tens - in an almost Oracle-red sweater. Also on stage came James Goslin, the inventor of Java. Dresses in an old jeans and a baggy T-shirt he perfectly fitted the description of a Java nerd. Scott introduced "his hero" (what sounded a little bit sarcastic): Larry Ellison. Larry, again, stated that Oracle will spend more money on the development of SPARC, Solaris and MySQL than Sun would do. Apple already proved that the combination of delivering hardware and software can be successful, so why can't Oracle do something similar?
The main part of Larry's talk was aimed at IBM. Larry stated that IBM is more expensive, uses more electricity (that's why they call it the "POWER" processor ;-) ) and not fault tolerant. Suns runs Oracle twice as fast than IBM. Larry also announced a new chapter in the Oracle - IBM competition: If your database doesn't run two times faster on Oracle/Sun than you'll win 10,000,000!

In the evening the ACE dinner was organized on a nice location near the Bay Bridge.
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