Last week I attended Oracle OpenWorld. This was at least my 10th time attending the event and it continues to grow and change as Oracle does. One thing that does not change is San Francisco, which is always amazing and this year was sunny and warm.
The conference is the annual gathering hosted by Oracle and is the place where the company gets to talk about what is new and what is influencing our businesses. So Oracle made many announcements during the week related to Cloud, Big Data, new hardware and a new release of the Database. Each is hot these days and Oracle continues to bring new and updated offerings to the market to meet this changing landscape.
In the Big Data space as with the Cloud space this year was a year to encourage the adoption and use of the technology. In the area of Cloud Oracle offered plans for people to migrate from in-house systems to the Cloud. They discussed strategies on how to make the transition as easy as possible. The challenge I heard about companies moving to the Cloud has been the fact that the systems people have are old or have been significantly customized and the move is not one which is simple or straightforward. This move for some companies will not be as easy as was described.
The big news for news for me was the fact that Oracle had officially released a new version of the database; version 12c is on the way. This new version has a number of enhancements the biggest for me was the concept of the pluggable database. The pluggable database is a feature which provides significantly better support for databases to be better able to react to hardware, platform and version changes. The pluggable database can be easily moved to another container database which can have many pluggable database within it. Of course Oracle made other changes to the new version of the databases but this was the most significant as it changes the underlying architecture of the database
Of course as usual the big buzz was about Big Data. Oracle continued to sell the concept and help customers to see how Big Data can help. This year the idea transitioned from theory to practice and experiences. People were now discussing use cases (as I did during my Big Data presentation). The why is moving to the how. Below is Andy Mendelsohn, Oracle Senior VP Databases telling us about the Oracle stack for Big Data and how the Big Data Appliance can help.
Overall the event was the usual offering for Oracle OpenWorld which helped many to better understand what is coming and how we need to get ready for it.
