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OOW 2009 : Wednesday

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I started off with a good breakfast with my roomies Marco and Jacco. Because there wasn't any interesting session in the first timeslot (or I couldn't find it), I attended the Exhibition Hall - which is mainly the same as previous years. Everyone wants to 'scan your badge' so they can spam you afterwards.
Next there were two sessions I really liked, and - it may or may not be a coincidence - both were 30 minutes 'power sessions'. The first one was by Mark Drake, the Product Manager for XML DB, about Managing XML Content with APEX. Very good job, although having live demo's obviously are a risk...and that's why I like them!
The next one was about Row Level Security / VPD and APEX. The presenter had a good demo and explained the stuff nicely.
I followed the keynote from the OTN Lounge (it is less boring with a beer). It wasn't a surprise anymore that The Governator would attend. Arnold emphasized that technology will deliver the solution for CO2 reduction - he didn't say that technology was also the cause of all kinds of pollution...
Larry's story - the only presentation from Oracle without the safe harbor slide - didn't contain anything astonishing new: Oracle has Linux and VM (that's a three year old story); has an Exadata machine thats an (undefined) number of times faster than the one form IBM (Sunday's news..); My Oracle Support will get better; Fusion Apps are on their way (with demo).
The last real session of the day was Building a Mashup with APEX. The presenter painted out an architecture where you create webservices on your database objects, and consume those in APEX on XE. The reasons for doing so was that
- you don't need a license for XE (that's true, but you do need a license for the underlying database, so that's a non-argument)
- he thought that APEX itself would have a negative impact on the performance of his database (which is obviously also a non-argument, as APEX adds only a very little bit of overhead - and creating extra layers as he suggested will create more overhead)
- the DBA's didn't like the idea for having an 'application in the database': the database is for data, not for applications... (An misconception that some old school DBA's hang on to).

And at night : The Appreciation Event with Aerosmith. And they rocked - especially when you know that Steven Tyler (the leadsinger) is 61!
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Louis-Guillaume said…
Hi Roel,

What did you learn during "Managing XML Content with APEX" session?

Thanks for keeping us up to date!

L-G
11:50 pm
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