Next! (another conference begins)

Another week, another conference. But I brought some things with me from my last conference, Oracle OpenWorld. You can see my prize, a/k/a the book that will make me a PeopleSoft expert (#pexp), plus my OTN building blocks.

If you follow me on Foursquare, you know where I got the Good & Plentys.

I've already given one demo today, and will give a presentation this afternoon - a presentation, incidentally, which will reference SecureFiles and Active Data Guard. But I doubt it will become a YouTube video. (I certainly won't upload it.)

Oracle showed the video star

During Oracle OpenWorld, I participated in three interviews, shot two videos, and did some other things here and there. Oracle has chosen to publish one of the videos on its YouTube channel.



There's actually another Oracle video of me floating around somewhere; I'll have to go dig it up.

I normally don't write a ton about my day job here, but at some point (once I've had a chance to catch my breath), I'll try to write a little bit about some of the 11g technologies that I mentioned here.

The benefits of mind expansion at #oow09

I've been joking, via tweets and blog posts, about the FTC disclosures that I as a blogger am mandated to publish when I receive goods of value that may potentially influence the blog posts that I write. (Would that true newspapers were obliged to do the same - does this mean that blogs are more trusted than newspapers?)

Well, I was joking about it for a while, especially based upon things that have happened here at Oracle OpenWorld (for example, I am typing this on an Oracle-supplied laptop manufactured by Lenovo), but now the stakes got a little higher. Not a lot higher, but a little higher. You see, the Oracle Technology Network (which, at last count, has supplied me with three beers, two cookies, and one Red Bull) held a drawing today for various Oracle Technology Network items.

And I just won a prize.

Now the grand prize was a Flip camera, and the other prizes were technical books. This is, after all, the Oracle Technology Network, where even the toy giveaways serve a technical purpose (the building blocks subliminally emphasize Oracle's stack, after all).

Now I was interviewed earlier today (you see, I don't spend all of my time playing with toys and sitting in bean bags), and the interviewer asked how much of the Oracle stack my employer uses for the biometric products that we deploy. While there are some portions of the Oracle stack that we could use, but don't, there are portions of the Oracle stack that really provide no benefit to our customers. When you're a cop and you want to know whether two biometric samples match or not, some of Oracle's higher-level applications just plain don't make sense to you.

So with that in mind, I will tell you what I won: Judi Doolittle's PeopleSoft Developer's Guide for PeopleTools & PeopleCode: Create and Distribute High-Performance Applications and Reports. Which, incidentally, "Covers Oracle XML Publisher."

Now this is not the first time this week that I've been pretty much out of my depth. I've already blogged about how I would clearly lose in a battle of wits with Daniel Morgan, and I tweeted about how I would clearly lose in a battle of wits with Jonathan Lewis. And I think that I would lose wits with many of the 40,000+ people who are here, including Roger Daltrey and Shooter Jennings.

And of course even that analysis is based upon my role as a product manager in the marketing department. What if my role within my company changes? (More on that later, at the appropriate time.)

But at least I'm not alone. When Arnold Scharzenegger participated in the keynote speech today, he made a point of mentioning the intelligence within Moscone North Hall D, and how his IQ was raised ten points just by being there.

He wasn't kidding.

When you're around people that know things that you don't know, your IQ - or, more accurately, your store of knowledge and your thinking and comprehension skill - IS going to be raised. And it goes both ways. I bet that if Tom Kyte hung out with the Governor, Kyte would learn things about bodybuilding, the movie industry, and politics that he didn't know before. And I probably have some understanding of biometrics and procurement that some of my readers may not have.

So I'm not going to throw Judi Doolittle's book away, even though technically neither I, nor anyone else in my company, can technically use it. I'm going to read it, and while I'll see some things that I understand (I have a bit of knowledge about XML, primarily derived from ANSI/NIST-ITL 2-2008, which can be found here), I'm going to be exposed to things that I have never seen before, and there will be a lot of it that I don't understand, but after a while a little bit of the stuff that I didn't understand will start to make sense. (Assuming Doolittle writes well, but I assume that she does if Oracle Press invested the time in printing her book.)

Perhaps this suggests something that I should do more - namely, investigate something that I know little or nothing about. While my formal education officially ended when I received my MBA in 1991, that's obviously no reason to shut my mind off completely. I don't believe that I've shut my mind off completely, but perhaps I could do a bit more.

Oh, and FTC investigators, the list price of this book is US$69.99, which is more than all four Empoprises blogs have earned in advertising revenue.

And, as Larry promised, PeopleSoft will be supported for ten years, although that doesn't mean that 8.9 per se will be supported.

Fusing together while waiting for #oow09 fusion announcement

From OTN Lounge at 4:35 (speech scheduled end time was 4:30).

Eric Harshbarger has nothing to worry about...

...but I now have Oracle Technology Network building blocks. (Geddit?)

FTC DISCLOSURE: I DID NOT PAY FOR THESE BUILDING BLOCKS. AND I DID NOT PAY FOR THE TWO BEERS FROM THE OTN-SPONSORED BLOGGER MEETUP LAST NIGHT. THE BEERS THAT I CONSUMED WERE FROM MEXICO AND THE NETHERLANDS; BOTH COUNTRIES ARE CUSTOMERS OF MY CURRENT EMPLOYER. AND I'M TYPING THIS ON A PHONE MANUFACTURED BY MY FORMER EMPLOYER. I DON'T KNOW WHO MANUFACTURED THE CHAIR I'M USING. DID I FORGET TO DISCLOSE ANYTHING?

2009 #oow09 Blogger Meetup

Shirts by Pythian.

Upward mobility at #oow09 ?

Oracle Exadata V2 (with Sun) on the stairs of Moscone North. Facing in the opposite direction from the Oracle Exadata V2 picture I took previously.

(empo-tymshft) Some #oow09 wisdom from the New York Times and Daniel Morgan

I didn't blog a lot about my activities yesterday (mostly database-related), but I'm at the connection center on Moscone West's third floor at the moment, which gives me the opportunity to share two nuggets of wisdom that I picked up today - one on the way to Moscone West, and one after I arrived here.

WISDOM FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES

Before I left Ontario to come up to San Francisco, I noticed that there was a chance of rain around midweek. It never (well, hardly ever) rains in southern California, so I ended up tweeting the following on Saturday night:

oracle openworld attendees - doesn't the #oow09 registration goodies include an umbrella? save me having to pack one (or find one)

Marius Ciortea was running the @oracleopenworld Twitter account, and he provided this reply:

@empoprises we hope is not going to rain on Wednesday. :(

The latest weather reports indicate that Marius' hopes (which directly impact the Appreciation Event on Treasure Island) will be fulfilled. But he said nothing about Tuesday, and when we all woke up on Tuesday morning it was pouring.

Pouring on a day that I didn't bring my umbrella, I slept in late, and I wanted to catch Daniel Morgan's unconference session on Oracle Database 11gR2. And I figured that 40,000 people were in the same...um...boat, and that the buses would therefore be packed.

So what did I do? I went to a nearby Starbucks, bought today's New York Times, and stuck it over my head as I fast-walked to Moscone West.

Afterwards I tweeted this profound observation:

my #oow09 umbrella this a.m. courtesy new york times. score 1 for print journalism!

Because, let's face it - whatever we may think of the AP and the WSJ and the RIAA and the BBC, B.B. King, and Doris Day, my insightful and witty repartee in Empoprise-BI and the other blogs in the Empoprises empire is not going to keep you dry during a rainstorm. The New York Times did. So there.

WISDOM FROM DANIEL MORGAN

So anyways, I arrived five minutes late to Daniel Morgan's unconference session, which was billed as providing information on Oracle Database 11gR2 that Oracle themselves wouldn't provide. Not that Oracle is necessarily hiding anything - it's just that the database has so much information that some little bits of documented information get lost in the shuffle. (Hopefully that's not a problem with the actual data that's being stored.)

As is usual during the Unconference sessions, and even during the general sessions, much of the information went over my head. In case you didn't know, I'm a product marketer, not a database architect. So when Morgan mentioned Data Pump and SecureFiles, I could nod my head in understanding, but when he got into specific SQL commands and packages and stuff, I was glad that I wasn't being quizzed on the material.

But at the end of his presentation, after he had reviewed a lot of Oracle Database 11gR2 features and discussed their relationships to 11gR1, Oracle 9i, and earlier releases, Morgan concluded with an observation that I captured in 140 character form:

daniel morgan at #oow09 - some run #11gR2 in the same way that they ran 7.3.4 - don't fear future

In fact, Morgan said that he actually feared the people who were still stuck in 7.3.4 mode.

A QUESTION FOR YOU

Needless to say, this doesn't only apply to adoption of database features. While I readily admit that I am not trendy, that doesn't necessarily mean that I'm a complete Luddite. While adoption of a new technology should clearly have a benefit (one doesn't just adopt new technology for new technology's sake), you should definitely adopt a technology if that benefit is clear. And if you're avoiding the technology, you need to have a good reason why.

I'd be willing to bet that 99% of the people who are truly expert in Oracle databases would agree that Oracle Database 11gR2 offers clear benefits over Oracle Database 7.3.4. And that the latest version of Excel offers clear benefits over the first version of VisiCalc. And that a Honda Accord offers clear benefits over a Model T.

So my question to the readers of this post - are there cases in which it is NOT beneficial to adopt a new technology, even if the new technology offers clear benefits over the old?

Sound off in the comments.

The protesters are out again this year

What do we want? LUNCH!

When do we want it? Not now, Andy Mendelsohn is about to speak...

Eric Harshbarger, LEGO artist, in #oow09 OTN Lounge

The LEGO will be complete by Wednesday. Moscone West, 3rd floor.

Harshbarger has been doing this professionally for a decade.

Oracle Exadata V2

Outside of Moscone North Hall D. One year Larry Ellison's boat was in this spot - something that bent one national tech correspondent out of shape. Presumably this pleases her more.

Finding Rational Markets in the OpenWorld Firehose

My first day at this year's Oracle OpenWorld has come and gone. Due to fog at San Francisco International Airport, my flight out of Ontario was delayed almost two hours, which meant that after arrival, hotel check-in, OpenWorld registration, and OpenWorld goodie pickeup (backpacks were a nice touch this year, and the alumni jacket will come in handy), I didn't get to the Oracle PartnerNetwork sessions until 3:00 pm. And, to tell the truth, I didn't stay for all of the OPN stuff, opting to head back to my hotel room to listen to Scott McNealy online before grabbing dinner at Cafe Mason (yes, I skipped Howard Street last night; plenty of time for festivities later in the week).

For me the chief takeaway from memory lane wasn't McNealy's trip down memory lane, or Larry Ellison's "we were fined by TPC for releasing results too early, so now eat the real results, IBM" speech. I was more impressed with something that I heard during the Oracle PartnerNetwork session...and it isn't even something that I can use.

After hearing several people at Oracle speak about several programs for partners, Dale Weideling brought Mark Hall to the stage. Hall is not with Oracle, but with a company called Rational Markets, and he stated that we Oracle partners were the first public audience to hear what he was about to say.

Based upon his experience with Chief Information Officers (he headed the CIO Executive Council at one point), Hall stated that their number one pain point was that the timing between buyers and vendors was all askew. When a CIO is in the market to get something, the CIO has difficulty finding something who offers what the CIO wants. But when the CIO isn't in the market for anything...that's when all the vendors show up.

Hall then looked at it from the vendor's perspective, and the vendor's desire to find an opportunity right when the purchaser is ready to go into the market.

The common way in which valuable sales opportunities are identified is via a sales funnel. If you're not familiar with the sales funnel, it is a model in which a number of potential sales leads are evaluated, and "funneled" down to one or more real purchasers who will actually buy your stuff.

Hall compared the sales funnel to a meat grinder, and noted that the whole thing is "massively inefficient."

Hall's solution, Rational Markets, is

...a breakthrough community of CIOs whose mission is to establish a new working paradigm between enterprise IT buyers and sellers.

Large amounts of specifics weren't provided during the OPN presentation, other than to note that the buyers can maintain their privacy until they choose to reveal their identity. I guess that helps to remove the pester factor so that CIOs don't have to be bugged by sales reps all day. When you think about this, it also benefits the sales reps, since you can't waste time cold-calling leads if you don't know who they are.

Whether Rational Markets will attract enough business to stand the traditional funnel model on its head remains to be seen. In my case, my products are sold to government agencies who conduct standard open procurement processes, so Rational Markets wouldn't really benefit me, it seems. Still, it's an intriguing idea and worth following.

As for the McNealy-Ellison keynote, here's part of what Oracle had to say about that:

Today, Oracle announced a new world record TPC-C benchmark result for Oracle® Database 11g running on Sun SPARC® servers with CMT technology and the Sun Solaris Operating System (1). This result proves that the Oracle-Sun combination runs faster than IBM DB2 running on IBM’s flagship Power 595(2)....

Oracle and Sun were able to set the world record using eight times less hardware than IBM used for its largest benchmark (3).

The Oracle-Sun configuration consumed four times less energy than the IBM configuration even though it ran 26 percent faster.

The Oracle-Sun benchmark demonstrated 16 times better transaction response times than the IBM benchmark(4).

Oracle Database 11g running on the Solaris™ 10 Operating System achieved a record-breaking 7.7 million tpmC at $2.34/tpmC.

Oracle is now the TPC-C world record holder in both major categories – performance(1) and price/performance(5)....

(1) 12-Node Sun SPARC Enteprise T5440 server cluster 7,717,510 tmpC, $2.34/tpmC, available 12/14/09.
(2) IBM Power 595 Server Model 9119-FHA, 6,085,166 tpmC, $2.81/tpmC, available 12/10/08 (Best IBM DB2 TPC-C result).
(3) Hardware size measured in racks of equipment as priced for the benchmarks.
(4) Based on average response time of New Order transaction in TPC-C benchmark.
(5) HP ProLiant ML350 G6 server running Oracle Database, 232,002 tpmC, $0.54USD/tpmC, available May 21, 2009.

But the Oracle press release didn't get around to recording Scott McNealy's comments during the keynote, in which he went after everybody, even zinging Ellison himself at one point by noting that Ellison could have done better marketing when talking about the future of Java.

Well, Monday promises to be a busy day, beginning with an important 8:00 meeting and ending with an important reception, with several database sessions in between. Hopefully I won't feel like I've been through a meat grinder by the time the day's over.

(Pictures: fog (license), funnel (license), meat grinder (license))

Finally headed to #oow09

Flight delayed 2 hours because of SFO fog. Still hoping to make it to Moscone before 3.

Turning phone off now...

Airport musings on the way to #oow09

It's time to really exercise FourSquare...and FourSquare is down.

Possible air traffic delays at SFO.

Is there a de jure standard for receipt width, or is it de facto?

Speaking of width, I found a Sudoku book in trade paperback form.

More later.

Possible dates for Oracle OpenWorld 2010...and 2011?

I've been attending Oracle OpenWorld for five years now (counting my planned attendance next week), and it's always been a game to me to figure out when the next year's Oracle OpenWorld would be. I've always assumed that it was a deep dark secret that I could never hope to fathom, but perhaps I just didn't try hard enough.

There was a discussion on Oracle Mix that asked about the 2010 date - the questioner was trying to plan something else, but it was difficult to do so when the Oracle event could occur at any time between September and November.

Well, I turned to my trusty web search, and located a PDF file at http://www.sf-japan.or.jp/downroad/090514concalendar2010-2015.pdf. (And yes, that's "downroad," not "download," in the URL, but since my Japanese language skills are non-existent, I can't really throw stones here.) Seeing that this came from a source well outside of San Francisco, I didn't immediately take its statements as gospel truth. However, according to this PDF, which purports to be from the San Francisco Convention & Visitors Bureau, there are Oracle OpenWorld dates for the next several years:

Oracle Corporation, Oracle Openworld - 2010 11/07/10 11/11/10
Oracle Corporation, Oracle Openworld - 2011 10/02/11 10/06/11
Oracle Corporation, Oracle Openworld - 2012 09/30/12 10/04/12
Oracle Corporation, Oracle Openworld - 2013 09/22/13 09/26/13
Oracle Corporation, Oracle Openworld - 2014 09/28/14 10/02/14
Oracle Corporation, Oracle Openworld - 2015 10/25/15 10/29/15

But there's a caveat:

The information contained herein is subject to change at all times

Um..."at all times"? Not "at any time"? The phrase sounds...um...foreign.

In addition, the document says:

Please contact our tourism team at tourismsales@onlyinsanfrancisco.travel
for specific questions.

I hadn't run across something in the .travel domain before, so I thought I'd check it out...and it became very obvious that onlyinsanfrancisco.travel was not associated with the San Francisco Convention & Visitors Bureau...unless said Bureau has seen fit to promote tourism in Sarajevo, Cairo, and Cuba. (Well, I could see San Francisco promoting travel in Cuba...)

I decided it was time to find the REAL San Francisco Convention & Visitors Bureau website, which happens to be http://www.sfcvb.org/. I explored the website, and got to http://www.sfcvb.org/convention/calendar.asp, which includes a search facility to find conventions for the next 24 months. So I entered the search term "openworld":

11.12.07 - 11.16.07
Oracle Corporation
Oracle Openworld - 2007
Monday, 11/12/2007 through Friday, 11/16/2007
Attendance: 45000
Peak Rooms: 15000

09.21.08 - 09.25.08
Oracle Corporation
Oracle Openworld - 2008
Sunday, 9/21/2008 through Thursday, 9/25/2008
Attendance: 42976
Peak Rooms: 15300

10.11.09 - 10.15.09
Oracle Corporation
Oracle OpenWorld - 2009
Sunday, 10/11/2009 through Thursday, 10/15/2009
Attendance: 45000
Peak Rooms: 15500

09.19.10 - 09.23.10
Oracle Corporation
Oracle OpenWorld - 2010
Sunday, 9/19/2010 through Thursday, 9/23/2010
Attendance: 45000
Peak Rooms: 15500

10.02.11 - 10.06.11
Oracle Corporation
Oracle OpenWorld - 2011
Sunday, 10/2/2011 through Thursday, 10/6/2011
Attendance: 45000
Peak Rooms: 15700

But even here, a caveat is in order. This is what the convention bureau says are the dates for the next two years - but has Oracle officially signed up to those dates? In the past, I linked to an April 2007 article that noted that Oracle OpenWorld 2008 was almost moved to another city.

An Oracle spokesman downplayed the company's talks with other cities, including one six weeks ago with the mayor of Chicago, as routine. He said the company did not end up seriously considering moving OpenWorld and emphasized the company is "committed to keeping the show in San Francisco."

But article writer Ryan Tate also noted:

There remains a strong possibility that Oracle will pull the show out of San Francisco within the next few years as it continues to grow, [city] officials said.

Now I obviously have no way of knowing the internal workings of the Bureau and Oracle, so I have no idea whether Oracle has agreed to the 2011 dates listed at the Bureau website, much less than 2012-2015 dates that I downloaded from my Japanese source.

But I'm not booking my travel plans for 2010, 2011, or 2015 just yet.

(empo-tymshft) #oow09 #hashtag emergence and standardization FTL

It's deja vu all over again.

I was using Blogger to blog about Oracle OpenWorld one year, and I decided to use Blogger's label facility to tag my relevant blog posts. Having survived y2k, I still had the four-digit year standard instilled in me, and therefore created my mrontemp blog posts with the label openworld2007. See my September 16, 2007 post State a Range and Hope You Hit the Middle for an example of this.

However, after I had already labeled a number of posts with that label, I found out that the community was using a different label. So, despite my inner revulsion at two-digit years, I switched over and began labeling my mrontemp stuff with openworld07, subsequently adding the label to the previously-tagged "openworld2007" stuff and retiring the openworld07 label.

So then we got to 2008. My mrontemp blog was still going strong at the time, so I used the openworld08 label in that blog. And I used the openworld08 label in my then-new Empoprise-MU music blog (and, for the record, I still hate Psychedelic Furs). And I used openworld08 in my Empoprise-NTN NTN Buzztime trivia blog (I had to have my fix at the Beale St. Bar and Grill). And I even managed to sneak the openworld08 label into my Empoprise-IE Inland Empire blog a couple of times.

Well, now it's 2009, and I'm ready. This Empoprise-BI business blog didn't exist until this year, but I've already tagged several posts in this blog with the openworld09 label. And earlier this morning, I even tagged this tweet with the #openworld09 hashtag.

@_Enigma_Inc heard about your Twitter account via email. Not an aircraft expert, but I will be at #openworld09

So, just out of curiosity, I performed a Twitter search for #openworld09 and discovered (at the time) that my tweet to @_Enigma_Inc was the only tweet using the hashtag.

That's odd, I thought. I knew that Twitter search was pretty poor, but it couldn't be THAT poor.

This led me to check Justin Kestelyn's @oracletechnet Twitter account to see what hashtag he was using, and he was using #oow09. I asked him about this, and he confirmed that #oow09 is the hashtag in use this year. I subsequently noticed that the #oow09 hashtag is prominently featured on "The OTN Guide to Oracle OpenWorld 2009." In case you're reading this in 2010 and the page has disappeared, here's what it says as of now:

Official hashtag: #oow09

Pretty clear, except that I never got around to the RTFM stage, and have been blindly #openworld09-ing away since September.

This is easy enough to fix on the blog; I'll just do what I did in 2007 and retroactively apply the "oow09" label to all posts that have the "openworld09" label, and (after posting this) cease use of openworld09.

But in some cases, the label/hashtag will stick. For example, my use of the #openworld09 hashtag in May crept into an account of a Product Management View online seminar.

So was I the only one caught off guard by the #oow09 hashtag? Apparently not. Gwen Shapira used it in a September blog post. Fuad Arshad apparently tweeted it in August. Oh...and it appears on an Oracle wiki page.

In essence, this is probably the biggest problem with the decentralized creation of hashtags - it's decentralized. Certainly it's a good thing to let the community decide on the most appropriate hashtag to use, but what happens to the content that uses an expired hashtag - content that cannot be edited? For what I can edit my blog posts to apply the #oow09 label, I can't edit my tweets.

Amy Gahran proposed a solution to this issue:

It’s essential to coordinate, promote, and use hashtags at least a few hours before an event starts. That way, your Twitter followers will know that the event is happening, and how to follow it. They’ll also know how to spread the word of the upcoming coverage.

Ideally, use the hashtag in promotional tweets a couple of times before the event — and include in those tweets a link to the event’s info page, if any, so people know what you’re talking about.

In my view, that is not enough, especially for large events attended by tens of thousands of people. In fact, I began using the openworld09 label on Friday, October 3, 2008. In my blog post which covered the brainstorming session that occurred at Oracle OpenWorld 2008, here's part of what I said:

OK, I have now officially posted my first Oracle OpenWorld 2009 post - and the conference won't start until...well, until late 2009. (October 11-15, according to the OpenWorld 2008 site.)

Not that I was the first one to start asking about Oracle OpenWorld 2009. Somewhere around Tuesday or Wednesday during Oracle OpenWorld 2008, Marius Ciortea and others began talking about holding a brainstorming session during the Unconference. This was scheduled for Thursday morning - as I noted, I attended the session....

And I also said this:

So I've launched an "idea" thread on Oracle Mix to capture additional suggestions for Oracle OpenWorld 2009....Presumably other people have started, or will be starting, similar efforts. (In fact, if you want to start similar things in Mix, just be sure to use the "openworld09" tag.)

Oops. You know what they say about people that ASSUME...

So, what is the best way to let over 40,000 people know what the official hashtag for an event is? And how soon should this information be disseminated?

(Note to self: if I have a pbworks login, I should add this post to this wiki.)

I liked these Quick Sprout suggestions on attending conferences

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sillyjilly/ / CC BY-ND 2.0

Previously I talked about a Quick Sprout list of suggestions, as well as some diverging opinions about said suggestions. Well, I'm now subscribed to Quick Sprout, and Neil Patel recently printed some new suggestions - Beginner's Guide to Attending Conferences. Having attended some conferences over the years, I read them...and like them.

One thing that Patel didn't mention - set goals for the conference. What do you want to get out of it? You'll see that as you go through the items that Patel DID suggest, setting goals beforehand will be of great benefit.

Patel's first suggestion is to have business cards. There are various schools of thought on this, but here's how Patel sums it up:

If you don’t make it easy for people to contact you, no one will.

And if you don't have any business cards, the Ffundercats offer moo.com cards online for your purchasing pleasure.

Patel's second point is that you need to have an elevator pitch. Actually, Patel had three different elevator pitches for the TechCrunch 50 conference that he just attended. Similarly, when I arrive in San Francisco for Oracle OpenWorld 2009, I will have several elevator pitches, depending upon the situation.

Patel's next two points may seem contradictory, but they really aren't. "Knowledge is power" and "Don’t be a networking whore" are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Basically, before you attend the conference - and even before you develop your elevator pitch(es) - you need to determine what your goals are at the conference. That not only shapes your elevator pitch, but also shapes the sessions that you attend, and the people that you meet.

I'll give you a personal example. Two years ago, at Oracle OpenWorld 2007, I attended sessions and networked with people regarding Oracle's Business Intelligence products. We subsequently determined that Oracle's BI product (or, for that matter, any BI product) did not meet the specific needs that we were exploring, so while I'll certainly say hello to any of the Oracle BI people that I met, I'm not filling up my Schedule Builder with Oracle BI sessions.

Patel's fifth point, "Don't eat lunch with your friends," ties in to the other points above. Unless your main goal at a conference is to get to know your friends better, seek out new people. You can see your friends, or contact them online, at any time - you don't need to pay $3,000 for the privilege of meeting them. Now, of course, I will gather with my friends in the early evening, but that's actually one of my conference goals.

Point six - "Walk the floor." Oracle OpenWorld will have exhibition halls in Moscone West and Moscone South, and I wouldn't be surprised if an exhibit pops up somewhere else after Larry Ellison's keynote. There are definitely some exhibitors that I need to visit, both for business and for personal reasons, and Schedule Builder does let you place such visits in your schedule (although I guess improvements could be made, but I give it an A for effort).

In my case, points seven and eight ARE mutually exclusive - "Take someone out to dinner" and "Attend the after parties." With a month to go before Oracle OpenWorld begins, my evenings are already pretty much booked.

Which brings up to point nine (does Neil ever sleep?) - "Don't forget to follow up." Yes, yes, and yes.

See all of Neil's points here.

When competing company factions render solutions meaningless - a failure in the Oracle OpenWorld Schedule Builder

If you're not familiar with Oracle OpenWorld, you may not know that the conference has tons upon tons of sessions. To make sense out of all of this, Oracle has contracted to provide a "Schedule Builder" that lets you select sessions that you want to attend.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/awads/ / CC BY 2.0

But there are two types of sessions that Oracle selects for you - the keynote presentations, during which no other sessions are scheduled, and the "Executive Solution Sessions," which are sessions that Oracle sponsors hope that you will attend. You can remove the Executive Solution Sessions from your schedule, but you can't remove the keynotes, because you'd obviously want to attend all of them.

The Oracle Schedule Builder also has another facility, "Add Personal Meeting." This allows you to add unconference sessions to your schedule, and also to add networking opportunities. Much of the power of Oracle OpenWorld - or, for that matter, any conference - is the networking opportunities that can occur with people from Oracle, media people, vendors, and people using Oracle. (What, did you think the sole purpose of the blogger meetups was to drink beer? Don't answer that.)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/cote/ / CC BY 2.0

I haven't transferred my session information to my work calendar or any of my personal calendars yet, because the Oracle OpenWorld schedule is often in flux and it would be easier to transfer it all later. So at the moment, everything is in Schedule Builder. This is probably a bonus from Oracle's perspective, since any information service wants you to go to their site to get information. While Oracle provides the opportunity to export Schedule Builder data to a non-Oracle application, they would prefer that you keep your information with them. (Sound familiar?)

So anyways, I have a networking opportunity with various Oracle people during Oracle OpenWorld, and I wanted to make sure that I remembered it. Since my schedule information is still in Schedule Builder, I figured I'd use the "Add Personal Meeting" feature.



Yes, I do already have an event scheduled for that time - one of the keynote presentations. Which I can't delete. In essence, this means that I CANNOT use the Oracle solution to store my schedule, and that I MUST use a third-party solution that gives me greater flexibility.

Now this is obviously a trivial example, but we can learn from it. In this case, there are two competing factions at Oracle with different objectives:

• There's the one competing faction at Oracle that wants to provide this particular networking opportunity, and (I'm guessing here) probably chose this time for the networking opportunity because only one other event was going on at the time. In their minds, the networking opportunity is paramount.


• There's the other competing faction at Oracle that wants to make sure that all Oracle OpenWorld attendees are at the important sessions, and therefore wants to make sure that nothing else is going on during these sessions. In their minds, the keynotes are paramount.

Guess which faction at Oracle was able to influence the specs of Schedule Builder?

These types of things are going to occur at all times. Even if you get 100% of a company's employees to sign an "I love the company's vision statement" manifesto, there are always times when there are disagreements on the details. I'd bet that each of the competing Oracle factions believe that they are guardians of Oracle's vision, and that it's the other side that has deviated. And obviously it's not just Oracle, and it's not even just big companies - if you have a two-person company, the two people could obviously disagree on tactics, even if they agree on strategy.

I'd ask my readers how you can prevent these conflicts, but why bother? You can't. You just need to deal with them and move forward.

And for the keynoter whose session I'm skipping, I trust that your company will provide details about the keynote later.

Empoprise-BI News - 13 September 2009

Empoprise-BI News

The news letter for Empoprise-BI - An Empoprises vertical information service for business news.

Welcome to Empoprise-BI News

If you haven't seen this before, it's an occasional newsletter - sometimes weekly, sometimes not - which covers my Empoprise-BI business blog. And, guess what? The newsletter is posted in the blog itself, for your reading pleasure.

Behind the Scenes

The most important thing about anything that you do is to try to enjoy what you're doing. And, from a personal level, I enjoyed the blog this past week. And I hope it showed. Probably the post that I enjoyed the most was my post on color saturation and lomography. Let me note two reactions.

When Louis Gray saw my Google Reader share of the first paragraph ("Louis Gray may drop science, but by the end of this post I'll be dropping color saturation and lomography..."), his reaction was "Oh dear."

Better still was the reaction of Kim. I don't think that Kim saw my original post, but she saw my Facebook comment about some of the source material behind the post. Kim actually saw one of the two co-workers after reading this, and made a point to tell him that she preferred lower color saturation.

I may return to this topic in the future. Again, you have to enjoy what you're doing.

Special Features

When I created this blog earlier this year, one of the things that excited me was that the blog would serve as an ideal forum for Oracle OpenWorld 2009 coverage later in the year. I previously had a blog (the Ontario Technoblog) that was well suited for such coverage (even if I did use the blog to talk about things like OPN pillow giveaways), but I discontinued that blog and moved to a more "all-encompassing" blog that covered everything; one drawback of this approach is tha the Oracle business stuff could get somewhat lost in the shuffle. Coincidentally, I've also talked about various approaches to blogging this past week, contrasting the focused blog vs. the all-encompassing one.

So anyways, I'm starting to ramp up my Oracle OpenWorld 2009 coverage, and was pleased to learn that there will be an Oracle OpenWorld blogger meetup this year. While several bloggers will be unable to attend this year, I look forward to seeing those who will be there. Again, the registration page can be found at this page at oraclecommunity.net.

Upcoming

Guess what? I'll be blogging about Oracle! Imagine that. I'll also blog about RSS, the North American IT Professionals Association, and Serbian pottery sellers. That last sentence was actually "two truths and a lie" - I won't blog about all of those things. But then again, perhaps I can do some research and blog about all three.

Yes, there WILL be an Oracle OpenWorld 2009 Blogger Meetup!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/oemperor/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Chen Shapira is a simple DBA on a complex production system and, like many DBAs, she is planning on attending Oracle OpenWorld. However, she shared one regret:

This year will be my third time I’m attending Oracle Open World. When you do something every year for 3 years in a row, you develop [a] few traditions around it....

Some traditions do not continue – this year there seem to be no blogger meeting. I guess I’ll need to be a bit more proactive about meeting my online colleagues.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/awads/ / CC BY 2.0

Enter Justin Kestelyn, in the comments:

Au contraire, there IS an blogger meetup; Alex G. is in charge this year.

So Chen turned to Twitter:

@alexgorbachev Where can I find details about the blogger meeting at Openworld? (Justin said you are in charge this year...)

As did I:

.@alexgorbachev i just learned (via an .@oracletechnet comment on .@chenshap 's blog) about #openworld09 meetup. let me know details also.

And Alex kindly responded, providing a link to the announcement. Here is a portion of it:

Are you an Oracle blogger attending Oracle Open World 2009?

If so, you are invited to attend this Oracle Bloggers Meetup during OOW 2009 — a chance to meet your online buddies face-to-face in relaxed and informal atmosphere.

What: OOW 2009 Bloggers Meetup

When: Tue, 13-Oct, 6:00pm

Where: Jillian’s — 4th Floor, 101 4th Street, San Francisco

It’s a big disappointment that Eddie Awad is not going to be with us at the Oracle Open World this year… But the show must go on and Oracle Bloggers Meetup must happen again this year so I’m picking up the baton from Eddie and will organize the meetup this year with the help of Justin Kestelyn and Lillian Buziak (Oracle ACE Wrangler).

But for those of you who have attended in past years, things will be a little different:

This year, the meetup is NOT hosted in a pub but DON’T PANIC. We’ve got it covered. We have booked the special function room and ordered some snacks and, of course, drinks will be served. The meetup is hosted at Jillian’s Billiards Club on the 4th Floor in Natoma Room with a nice view (so I guess smokers won’t be disappointed). This is just couple blocks from the Moscone Center. Address — 101 4th Street, San Francisco. I emphasize again — it’s not in the pub itself but on the 4th floor in one of the function room.

The Oracle Bloggers Meetup is on Tuesday, 13-Oct starting at 6PM. You probably don’t want to be too late and miss the fun (and food). The venue is booked until 8PM so at this point we will most likely move on.

It will be, obviously, easier to talk to each other than if we host it in the pub. We also plan to have a small fun program and we have some ideas.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/awads/ / CC BY 2.0

Frankly, I am very encouraged by this change in plans. I attended the Thirsty Bear blogger meetups in 2008 and 2007, and while I enjoy the Thirsty Bear, it does not really lend itself well to conversation. Hopefully it will be "easier to talk" on the 4th floor of Jillian's.

Read the rest here. And register here.

Thanks to Eddie and to Mark Rittman for organizing past events, and thanks to Alex for taking the lead this year, and thanks to Justin et al for helping out with things.

(P.S. to the licensing police: While the first image in this post was only granted for non-commercial use, I know the photographer very well and will produce a waiver upon request when I get around to writing it.)