My Oracle OpenWorld 2008

Well this was my second trip to San Francisco. The first time was in 1989 for a Hewlett-Packard Interex Conference just weeks before the big earthquake! It was my first Oracle OpenWorld Conference though and was able to attend due to getting a speaker ticket. So here's my summary of the weeks events, news and gossip.


Oracle Opening KeyNote was given by Oracle President Charles Phillips and I really got the impression that Oracle is not only a VERY BIG organisation but is also VERY diverse. Consequently Oracle had an audience made up of everyone from hardcore, oily-rag DBA types all the way to thought leaders in relationship marketing. The keynote was therefore pitched accordingly - impossible to engage with everyone in the room. If I went to a VolksWagon owners club then I'd be with thousands of others that owned Volkswagan vehicles - we all have something in common. I'm not sure what an Oracle Java developer and a VP of Finance that uses Oracle applications has in comon?


I have to say before I write more that this was one of the best IT events I have ever attended for quality and volume of content and for the brilliant event logistics and venues. San Francisco was also a great city to host this in - albeit a bit of a culture shock for an Oxford Brit like me.


So down to some useful PeopleSoft and Oracle related stuff. These are in no particular order and I'm going to write in my own "brief" style just to keep this short. I've ranted enough already.

  1. PeopleTools 8.50 (probably out sometime late 2009) looks awesome. AJAX based calls for all the things in PIA that we wanted FieldEdits, RowInserts/Deletes, callapsible areas, warnings/errros, prompt edit lookups, hover pages, a great new looking style (which you only get with a 9.1 apps upgrade) and some lovely grid features that allow dynamic re-sizing of columns, drag and drop column ordering and freezable and scrollable column blocks. A new style header based drop down menu looks great and frees up a load of pixels on the left of every page now. A rich text edit box is now available in PIA and mechanism to keep track of what menu items you visit (a bit like browser history). Read and see more on the Oracle PeopleTools Blog This is an exciting tools release that you can apply to any apps release from 8.4 upwards. Now THIS is the power of meta driven development frameworks like PeopleTools. Without upgrading the application you can apply PeopleTools 8.50 and get a totally revamped user interface experience. Oh yes!!!!!

  2. The Collaboration components of the Enterprise Portal Collaboration Suite are being packaged and sold separatley (for a small "fee") so that customers without the full Enterprise Portal can attach tags, wikis, discussions and documents to everyday transactions like vendors, employees, purchase orders, etc.

  3. Oracle Beehive was announced as a new product for Oracle. This is a WEB 2.0 based collaboration suite and backoffice system. As if Oracle wasn't divers already - now their competing with Microsoft Exchange and IBM's Lotus Notes. Lots of Oracle staff buzzing around wearing black with yellow stripe t-shirts!

  4. The HP Oracle Database Machine was an major announcement by Larry himself taking stage with a big black box with an Oracle badge on it. I'm not a hardware expert so will just direct you to the Oracle blurb.

  5. PeopleSoft Finance 9.1 is planned for release sometime 2009.
  6. All the plastic cups, lunch boxes and cutlery were made from compostable potato and corn starch. Green Oracle!
  7. IBM were sponsoring several spots around the venue where you could plug your phone or laptop into a bike and using pedal power to recharge it. THIS WAS SO COOL - except they didn't have a British 3 pin adapter form me.
  8. Ever wondered how high you can safely set your WebLogic JVM heap size to? Well, the word from Oracle and several PeopleSoft customers who had tried it is 1024MB. Any higher than this and "weird things" start happening.
  9. .... my brain is getting all fuzzy now at the end of this manic week so I'm going to stop and continue this later.

Comments

Unknown said…
Re: Weblogic JVM for Peoplesoft has a max of 1 gig or "weird things" happen.

Odd ... when CRM 8.0 was upgraded to peopletools 8.22, our site had to make sure the JVM heap could grow to at least 1.8 gig. Anything less would run out of heap before the end of the business day.

Nothing out of the ordinary was reported in over two years with these settings.