For more details on this. Considering that I was moving around three years worth of blog posts, comments etc., I would not be surprised if a few things here and there are broken. That said, I have put in some serious hours to make sure the transition is transparent for my readers. In any case, do let me know if you see something glaringly broken.

More details on the migration coming soon..

I've been rather quiet for the past few days. Not a big surprise. It's not that I have been blogging every day for quite some time now. However, believe it or not, I actually have been working on the blog. So, what was I doing? Well, something that I first talked about in July of 2004. And I talked about again and again and again, but I just could not get myself around to doing anything about it. Why am I talking about it today? Well, let's just say I am not trying to make any excuses for my rather long procrastination. However, I think the wait is finally over..almost.

Thanks to some much needed push from within (and a deal with my wife), I found myself pouring over Wordpress. Result: I will be launching this blog running under WordPress in a few days. I already have it up and running. The reason I can't go live on it yet is because I have other blogs on the same LAMP instance that I need to take care of.

So what will be in it for you? Well, if I have done this right, you will not notice a thing. Well, almost. You will definitely see a few changes, some new features, but overall, it would look and feel the same with all my previous links working flawlessly. And if I am really in the mood, I might even try to document (or give detailed pointers) on how I pulled it off.

If you use Google Reader as your RSS Aggregator, this is a really cool little utility that will help you manage the RSS feeds you have subscribed to. Very nice.

Cool!

• Basically feels like Firefox with a new interface and some tweaks in the default menu entries
  
• Integrated with del.icio.us, your blog etc. However, integration with my blog was not as easy as it was when I use a blogging client like w.bloggar. The posting interface is wierd at best and editor is buggy. No preview option.
  
• It opens dialog windows with no title. Kinda annoying
  

I am not impressed, but then again, I did not spend much time

Simply put, it was a blast. And yes, I did try to take it all in since this was the first time ever that I had an opportunity to attend one of these. As for why I did not photoblog while at OOW, well, let's just say that the Wi-Fi connection at OOW was as good as my neighbor's Wi-Fi... It barely worked for me, although I must confess that some attendees at the conference seemed to have better luck with it than me. I did take a few snaps, but nothing like the ones I was hoping to take. I may put it up on Yahoo's Flickr service one of these days.

Anyway, so here are a few highlights off the top of my head, as I don't have my copious notes with me right this second:

1. At a personal level, I will have to confess that getting a chance to hear, meet and in some cases even talk to gurus like James Gosling, Thomas Kyte and Steven Feuerstein was perhaps my biggest achievement.. I even got a chance to get Tom and Steve's new book autographed by them. I know, that's really not much of an achievement.
2. I thought the keynotes were pretty decent as it gave me an opportunity to see/listen to folks like Larry Ellison (Oracle), Paul Otilleni (Intel), Mark Hurd (HP), Thomas Mendoza (NetApp) and Scott McNeally (Sun) from a fairly close distance. How did I pull it off? Well, I would usually be in the line for the keynotes at 7:00 am, much before their start time. It was not as easy as I had initially thought, since going to Moscone Center was a 40-mile one way trip for me every day!
3. So, what do I remember the most from the keynotes? Let's see...
   • Paul Otilleni was pretty convinced that "multiple-core" CPUs were the future even for desktops and wanted the audience to understand that although Intel could probably have cranked out a 10GHz chip by the end of this decade (if not sooner), that is not what they're worrying too much about these days. Instead of focussing on "Performance" of the chips, they've decided they will be pouring their R&D money on "Performance/Watt". Both Paul and Scott McNeally spent a lot of time talking about how their customers will see them come up with chips/servers that will do "more" (actually, M-U-C-H more) with same or a lot less power consumption. I was very pleased to hear that since I hail from a country (India) where Performance/Watt would be an absolutely critical factor in spreading the power of Computing and the Internet to the millions living in remote areas/villages.
   • Scott McNeally was being Scott. At times, I felt he was a better standup comedian than perhaps Dana Carvey was on Sunday, although I was not fortunate enough to hear the latter. He talked about us entering the "Participation Age". Kinda like John Chambers and his "Interactions" mantra these days. I also found it sort of interesting to hear that folks at Sun seemed to been so enamored by Steve Jobs and his success at Apple that they have adopted this phrase in their day-to-day lingo at Sun - "having an iPod moment". Essentially referring to a moment when their R&D folks would come up with something, heck anything, that can do for Sun what iPod has done for Apple, if not the industry. I think it was Scott who also said something like - "Do you guys know what is the single most important IT Application that your CIO delivers to you?...Google Search"
   • Thomas Mendoza was new to me as I knew very little about him. He is NetApp's CEO.It was kinda funny the way he started his keynote. For a good few minutes, it was as if he was being a Cisco Marketing Rep. He kept talking about how great Cisco's strategy was and what Cisco did to the networking business. Needless to say, he sounded like someone who was very impressed by us. Infact, one of his remarks were - "We at NetApp tried to do to Storage what Cisco had done to Computer Networks". Turns out Don Valentine financed NetApp too.

     Also, there was another nice observation that he made that I had never really thought much about. He said, and I paraphrase, "IT guys generally fret about Backups. Did we back things up or not? If we did, GREAT. Frankly, we at NetApp think Backup is important, but what is even more important and critical for businesses is Recovery". And then he went on to elaborate why he felt that by giving an example of whether we as consumers would put up with our Bank's IT helpdesk if we could not take money out from our ATM and were told not to worry as things were backed up, except it would take more than 24 hours to recover it!!

     I must say that I thought his presentation was the best in the sense that he really did a good job of laying out why Storage is important and why NetApp is the company that we should consider when we think Storage.

   • Mark Hurd did not impress me at all. Just my personal take. That's probably why I can't remember a thing that he said without referring to my notes.
   • Larry Ellison was so so. Again, nothing that really jumps out, except his trademark impeccable fashion statement..;-)
4. Oracle 10gR2 seems to have quite a few interesting additions. Attended Tom's session on 12 cool things about Oracle 10gR2. So, here's an example...

   Instead of saying this in SQL*Plus

   SET SERVEROUTPUT ON SIZE 1000000

   with 10gR2, you can now say,

   SET SERVEROUTPUT ON SIZE UNLIMITED

   Needless to say, Tom shared that at the end of his preso and said something like, "Well, duh?"..;-)

   They also seem to have done a lot of good work in tweaking the underlying algos to further improve the performance of their SQL and PLSQL engines, have made the trace files a bit more user-friendly, built-in an ability to attach directly to the SGA for DBAs to diagnose an ailing Oracle instance etc. etc.

5. Oracle 10gR2 now natively supports XQuery, which I thought was pretty cool. Since they had already supported XML as a native type in 10gR1 (or maybe even in 9i), the two would probably make Oracle database really easy to use to retrieve, transform and store XML data.
6. Oracle 10gR2 supports Transparent encryption/security. Now this was really really cool!

   Imagine this:

   When you create a table, you now have the ability to tell Oracle to make the values of a column be transparently encrypted. How? Well, just add a new keyword (I forget what it is) while creating the TABLE. When you store data into it, Oracle will transparently encrypt the data inserted into this column. So, at the physical datafile level, the contents of this column is stored in an encrypted fashion. Does the developer using this table care? No. Hence the word "Transparent Encryption".

   Now, when the developer tries to retrieve the data using SQL*Plus, he/she will get the "unencrypted" data back without ever knowing that while retrieving it, Oracle did a little unencryption abracadabra behind the scene.

   Bottomline, if the backup tapes with Oracle DBF files were stolen as has happened far too many times in the recent months, you can rest assurred that the hackers would not be able to get to the data without putting up some fight, and they might still fail

   So, what's the secret sauce that allows the encryption/decryption? It's the Oracle Wallet service. I am not sure what algorithms they support. I would think it's the same standard ones - SHA, MD5 etc. Microsoft does not think MD5 is secure one-way has function anymore because of the many vulnerabilities exposed in MD5's algo. Not sure where Oracle and Oracle's Transparent Encryption feature stands on that.

7. Oracle's support of turning PLSQL packages into Web Service (WS-*) Consumers and Producers was also pretty darn interesting. Using JPublisher, you could basically convert any PL/SQL package/procedure into a SOAP endpoint. Not sure whether they will certify that behavior with other Application Servers. And to consume a web service? Well, let's just say it's fairly trivial. As a matter of fact, we (Kenny and myself) had a chance to see a fairly simple demo where a PL/SQL code consumed Google's exposed Web Services to check for spelling! Yes, it uses the JVM embedded in Oracle kinda like the SMTP solution does.
8. Oracle is working on a TOAD killer. Or that's what it looks like. Don't ask me why? It's called Raptor. Got a glimpse of that. Here's Brian Duff's blog entry with a few screenshots.
9. Oracle's Fusion Middleware Architecture looks promising. Is it any different from say what JBoss or BEA or IBM is trying? Not really. But it still was nice to see a company of the size of Oracle bet their entire future of business applications on SOA & EDA enabled platforms running on top of what they call their "Fusion" Bus. And every layer in their Fusion Tech Stack would be built primarily using Java and will all be completely standards-compliant. So much so that they even plan on certifying their Fusion Middleware Architecture to work with IBM Websphere, JBoss Suite etc. On a somewhat related note, I thought it was kinda interesting to hear JBoss being mentioned so many times both in their keynotes as well as their sessions.
10. It was pretty obvious that the Fusion release of OracleApps will heavily leverage Ajax/DHTML technology and will attempt to bring a kind of richness to their web-based UIs that OracleApps users will find extremely impressive. Especially when they find that it's all standards-based and does not use some stupid Applet or plugin technology. I got a glimpse of it in their new BAM (Business Activity Monitoring) tool. From an Ajax application standpoint, that app was just downright cool!
11. EJB 3 is looking very very nice. And Oracle Application Server 10g Release 3 now supports EJB 3, as does JBoss 4.0 RC3 in case anyone cares. Frankly, the guys behind EJB seemed to have finally learned from folks like Gavin King and Rod Johnson and it's looking really promising. What's the magic mantra which makes EJBs look and smell and feel like good old POJOs? Annotations..;-)
12. Default Oracle Projects that comes standard with 11i8 (11.5.8) will NOT be sufficient from OPAL (Oracle Project Accounting Leverage) project standpoint for Advanced Services users. We will have to look at their J, K, L, M Family Packs and decide which one would suffice our needs.
13. So what were the phrases and words that Oracle wanted almost tattooed on every attendees forehead:

    - Fusion Middleware
    - Information Empowers
    - Oracle is an "Information" company
    - Protect..Extend...Evolve
    - Hot-Pluggable
    - SOA/EDA
    - BAM
    - BPEL

    I am sure there were others, but these are the ones that got tattoed on mine..

Anyways, hope this helps.