Oracle OpenWorld Day #1
Oracle OpenWorld started yesterday! I was one of the lucky ones from work who was chosen to go (thanks Chris for deciding not to go). The conference is in San Francisco this year again which is awesome because I have never been to the city and have always wanted to see it. I got to Lambert at around 8:30am yesterday (Sunday), took care of the boarding pass and checking luggage, went to the gate only to find out the flight had been delayed until after 11am. I sat around the airport for a while, found the people I am traveling with and boarded the plane. The flight itself was pretty un-eventful (other than being stuck in the middle seat like a sardine on the 757).
$2200 fine for tampering with smoke alarm
Fast forward to the hotel as getting luggage and find the shuttle was a non-event. We are staying at the Hotel Kabuki which is located in the Japantown area of San Francisco. The hotel definitely lives up to its promise of delivering a western style hotel with a Japanese touch. I will get some pictures of the lobby before I leave. The room itself is very nice, two double beds, 15th floor, looking out over the city, small balcony, LCD television, wireless internet. Everything is very clean and well decorated. So far I would recommend looking at this hotel if you are ever in the area.
View from my hotel room #1
View from my hotel room #2
Sliding doors to patio in hotel room
After checking into the hotel we made our way to the Moscone Center to check in to the conference. This was pretty uneventful as well, got our backpacks, schedules, meal tickets and headed off to eat a late lunch (it was 4:30pm local time by the time we actually ate). I can’t remember the name of the restaurant but it is right next to the registration area and had some huge televisions with sports on. I chose the sausage spaghetti, it was decent, some crushed red pepper flakes cooked with the sauce gave it a little bite. After dinner we headed over to the keynote session for the evening.
The evening keynote was delivered by Scott McNealy, the Chairman of Sun Microsystems. Since Sun is in the middle of being acquired my Oracle this keynote was sort of a farewell speech for Scott who is one of the original founders of Sun. The speech was also intended to ease fears of Oracle buying Sun and dropping the technology that made the company what it is (Solaris, SPARC, Java, MySQL, etc). Scott did a couple top ten lists which I will try to find at some point and then went into the future of Java with Oracle. He brought out James Gosling who is known as the ‘Father of Java’ and the two talked about how they were confident that Oracle would continue on the path to deliver great new innovations in the Java space while keeping the core values of platform.
After James and Scott were done, Scott brought Larry Ellison (CEO of Oracle) on the stage to talk. Larry continued on with the theme of how much better computing will become when the merger is complete and how Oracle wasn’t going to destroy key Sun technologies but instead invest more money in developing them and utilizing them to continue to revolutionize computing. I will write more about the keynote and the rest of the evening in the next blog, it is time to get ready for the sessions today. There are several I am really looking forward to including tuning a JVM.
Shot from Keynote Hall
Shot from Keynote Hall #2