Day Three Of Open World - Keynotes By Rozwat, McNealy And Ellison

Wednesday is keynote day, and I mentioned before that I watched Chuck Rozwat's and Scott McNealy's keynotes from speaker room as I frantically tried to get my AWM10g / Drake demo working again. If you're coming along tomorrow, it's working again now, the lesson being that you need to revoke your OLAP schema user from the Discoverer Catalog before you drop and recreate the schema, otherwise the catalog permissions get all screwed up. More tomorrow.

I went along to Larry Ellison's keynote over at Moscone South around 1.00pm, and as you'd expect it was standing room only as it got round to 1.30pm. I'll say again that it's worth getting hold of a Club Oracle Gold Pass if the company is paying (it's $100 on top of the conference pass) as you can walk straight in and sit in a reserved area. After the usual rock music intro it was on to Larry, who started off by talking about data hubs.

Data hubs are one of the recurrent themes in this years Open World and were positioned by Ellison as a kind of half-way house between non-integrated legacy systems and a single global database instance running e-Business Suite. Ellison introduced data hubs by saying that they weren't Oracle's invention, but that they'd come across them when they looked at something called the "global credit database", a database put together by all the world's credit agencies that held all their customers' credit records. When someone applies for credit, this global database is checked, and a decision is made based on its contents. This global database is, however, in fact a data hub, with individual institutions copying their credit records into the hub to provide a consolidated view of the credit market.

Ellison then went on to talk about Customer Data Hub, and how this provides a complete view of customer interactions, something that CRM systems (read : Siebel) couldn't do, as they don't have access to orders, supply chain, so on and so on, and then went on to mention other prospective and potential data hubs such as Product Data Hub, Financial Services data hub and so on. Ellison then compared this to data warehousing, saying that with data hubs, the data was constantly synchronised, and therefore presumably better as the data was more up to date. I'm not sure what he's trying to get at with this, as whilst part of the function of a warehouse is to consolidate data, another big part of it is to hold historical data and contain more than just customer data - what he's seeming to compare Customer Data Hub with is a customer data mart that doesn't hold any historical data. Wonder how the Oracle DW product guys feel about this?

Ellison then went on from data hubs to grid infrastructure, saying that the days of big iron were over and it was now time for lots of commodity servers running grid software. Having sat through Scott McNealy's keynote earlier on, it was interesting to note the interaction between the two - Sun are obviously still Oracle's customers' most popular platform, and McNealy's talk was interspersed with little jibes about grid and how "Dell were Oracle's best friend now" - all in a light hearted way but it's obvious that Oracle's embrace of Linux, intel architecture and grid is not generally good news for Sun.

After the talk (which ended much earlier than I expected) it was on to the questions. Now I've done quite a few presentations in my time, and I know from experience that it's actually quite hard to answer questions when up on stage, as you've never really got time to think about a clever answer, and often you end up not quite getting what the question's about and end up missing the point and answering something else. However it was clear from Ellison's responses that whatever the question was going to be, the answer was going to be about data hubs, and it wasn't going to be a short answer. From what I've seen, speakers at conferences tend either to be the visionary or charismatic type (McNealy, Ballmer, Jobs), the terrified (me, most of the techy speakers at user groups), or the politicians, and Ellison was more the politician than the messianic this afternoon. Politicians are taught to keep their presentation to a few key messages, and to repeat them again and again to make the point; they use rhetoric, appear passionate and make the occasional joke so as to not appear too serious - this was definitely the approach Ellison took, and with the questions it was the case that, whatever the question the answer was going to be about data hubs. The only time when he got off of data hubs was when someone asked about Oracle's development plans for Peoplesoft 9 should Oracle win the takeover, and Ellison was at pains to point out that Oracle would "over support" Peoplesoft customers, would complete all of Peoplesoft's development plans and bring out a combined e-Business Suite / Peoplesoft at some point after that.

The questions went on for some time after that, but I had to slip out as I was due at another meeting over at the Marriot. You can watch the keynotes from today online - the earlier ones by Rozwat and McNealy are also worth watching if you get a chance, especially McNealy's as it's quite entertaining. I'm off now to practice my presentation for tomorrow, and that's it for me after then as I've got a CAB meeting for the rest of the day. Check back tomorrow for news on Oracle 10g Release 2 - it's being officially launched tomorrow and there should be lots more details to take a look through.