Wednesday at OpenWorld

So, today has been a busy day for me. Several meetings with Oracle execs. IOUG is very fortunate to be supported by such great people within Oracle. The day started with a breakfast meeting with a Director in the BI area. He will be supporting us in our regional BI efforts. Mark is totally supportive of what we are doing and will be helping to promote the event within Oracle.

My next meeting was with a senior manager in Oracle North American User Groups. I have worked with Tina over the last six months on our regional user group programs. She is totally supportive of us and we had a great meeting talking about where we are going with the programs and how to better support the members in the regional areas. This support structure within Oracle has been great for IOUG as we grow our membership. They give us the support we need while letting us remain independent. Excellent partnership...

IOUG president Ian Abramson and I met with a database development director to talk about offerings in the DBA developer space. Oracle has been working on some specific training for DBA's to introduce them to some of the development tools. This training is also good for developers, but in general they are targeting the training to the database development tools. APEX, PL/SQL, JDBC, C, C++, etc are all on the radar screen. Oracle feels they are losing some database development because people are setting up smaller database environments to do the development and then going to production with those instead of moving to the enterprise RDBMS. This makes complete sense and the IOUG can work very will with this team to promote the training and hopefully even deliver some of it.

I did make it to one session today which was PeopleSoft BI Tools. This was pretty good and was timely for me since we are looking at some PeopleSoft BI options at my "real job". There are some great tools out there that can be implemented quickly without building a bunch of new stuff. I also went to my first "unconference" session ever. This was on Oracle Warehouse Builder and even though a lot of it was over my head it was great information.

Larry seems to be finally winding down... wait, maybe not. Anyway, tonight is the big party. I'm looking forward to some more networking opportunities. Last night I was at the Oracle Publisher's reception and met someone from Land's End in Dodgeville, WI. He is an Oracle Press author and wants to get involved with the Wisconsin regional Oracle users group. Amazing how small the world really is and part of why I like being here. Limitless opportunities to meet with peers.

I should be closing out tomorrow as I head home to the family. A couple days away are nice, but it is always better to go home to Mary, Grace, and Abigail. See you tomorrow Sheetz girls!