Gavin Newsome, mayor of San Francisco, and Ed Begley, Jr. talk about being green, and commend Oracle and Oracle OpenWorld for being green.

Watch the video online or download the 19 Mb flash video file

Watch the video online or download the 18 Mb flash video file

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To start off the conference, the first keynote at Oracle OpenWorld took a break from technology and veered into the world of politics. The official conference description says:

Washington’s best-loved political couple Mary Matalin and James Carville entertain the crowd with a bitingly humorous look at the world of politics.

Indeed, there was humor, and politics. For a light-hearted yet factual look at US politics, watch the video by streaming directly in your browser or download the 176 Mb Flash video file.

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Next week, Dan Norris and I will collaborate on a presentation at Oracle Openworld 2008. Our presentation, entitled So, You Want to be an Oracle ACE?, will be on Monday, 9/22, from 11:30 am - 12:30 pm in Moscone South, room 310 — that’s the very first conference slot.

We’ve already put together our presentation, with input from many Oracle ACEs and Oracle ACE directors, complete with some great video clips. I’m excited and honored to be presenting with Dan. The official description of our presentation is:

The Oracle ACE program recognizes those who provide sustained community contributions, among other criteria. An Oracle ACE director, this session’s speaker emphasizes the value of community involvement and spends much time volunteering. It can be hard to know where and how to start. An intro to what community means (especially to Oracle) and specific volunteer activities may be all some people need to start. The session covers benefits of becoming involved in the community–so you can convince your manager to let you do so on company time.

We will also be presenting Tuesday afternoon as part of the unconference at 3 pm in Overlook I.

As I am a first-time Oracle Open World attendee, I’m a bit overwhelmed — there are over 1700 presentations! I’ll have my coworker, Alex Gorbachev as a guide, but if you see me, say hi — don’t let the speaker badge fool you, I will likely be pretty lost. :)

In case you are attending Oracle Open World 2008, the biggest Oracle conference in the world, and interested in either (or both) MySQL or Oracle Enterprise Manager Extensibility — I posted a proposal for a new presentation:

Extending Oracle Enterprise Manager by Example — Creating MySQL Management Plug-In

I’ve started looking into Oracle extensibility several years ago and since then I’ve seen lots of improvements in Extensibility Guide and many new plug-ins have seen the light of the day. However, creating a new plug-in is still considered to be something special and not available to mere mortals.
In this presentation we will see how easy it is to create a new plug-in. What are the steps and the method to follow. As an example we will work with MySQL Management Plug-in that I have recently released to public.
This session includes a live demo.

If you are interested, you may as well vote for it. If there are enough interested people, Oracle might select it for the conference.

If neither this nor my previous submission make it, well, I’ll go there anyway to have some fun and meet good old and, hopefully, new friends.

Please note: This plug-in has been created and is now available for download:

In the recent month there were several Oracle community web sites created. Well, I remember I registered on one or two but I couldn’t really keep an eye on many so I decided to wait and see which one wins. Turns out that Oracle Mix came out as a winner. Maybe it’s just my impression.

But I digress… I just wanted to make a quick note that Oracle Mix organized an interesting hybrid between call for papers and abstract judging. Anyone registered at Oracle Mix can propose a session abstract to present themselves or as an idea for others. Everyone can give their votes to the proposed sessions. At the end of the voting deadline (25th of June) Oracle will select the top sessions to be included in the Oracle Open World schedule.

So what? Well, I did send mine few days ago — Demystifying Workload Management with Oracle RAC based on my Hotsos Symposium 2008 presentation. I’m not sure how wide is the potential audience for this session — it’s far from beginners session and is specific to RAC. However, I do believe that this topic is often misunderstood and there is very good potential to spread the knowledge. So if you are coming to the Oracle Open World and interested in that topic - go ahead and vote. If not mine, there are plenty of others.

PS: I managed to do 2 (!) typos in the title and can’t edit it anymore. I don’t have any error on update but the title comes back unchanged. I have already filled in a bug report - let’s see if it gets fixed.

Just a quick note to say I’m leaving today for San Francisco to attend Oracle OpenWorld. I’ll be making my presentation on Thursday at 14:30, in Room 304. Look for IOUG: Oracle Database 11g –The Perfection of a Masterpiece (Session ID: S291070).

I’ll be posting more about my OOW adventures here, so please stay tuned.

I hope to see you there!

–Christo