The Saturday before Oracle Openworld 2011, San Francisco

It's 8.30am on Saturday morning, and it's the day before Oracle Openworld 2011 starts in San Francisco. I've actually been over here since Wednesday so today's my day off, and then the fun starts tomorrow with User Group Sunday down at the Moscone Center.

As part of the Oracle ACE Director programme, Oracle flew me over on Wednesday to take part in two days of briefing by various product managers across the database, middleware and tools product lines. Most of what we were told is under NDA, until the various announcements during next week, but there's a couple of things I can talk about now, that I'll cover in a moment. The ACE Director briefing took place at Redwood Shores, and around fifty of us heard presentations by the likes of Thomas Kurian, Mark Townsend, Ted Farrell, Ron Weiss, Wim Coekaerts and Mike Lehmann on what's coming up with the products, and what will be launched at Openworld.

So one thing that is in the public domain and that we can mention, is the launch of the Oracle Big Data Appliance. Now in Oracle terminology, "appliance" refers to something where Oracle have packaged up and pre-integrated "off-the-shelf" technology, whilst the "Exa-" product line refers to things with additional engineering, where you couldn't just (legally) build it yourself. The Big Data Appliance is an appliance focused on tasks around pre-processing of data; sorting, combining, performing ETL and so on, where technologies such as Hadoop can be used to perform these tasks in a massivly-parallel environment. The Big Data Appliance will use Hadoop, and a Hadoop loader into Exadata, to perform these up-stream tasks on large volumes of structured and unstructured data (web logs, clickstream data, genetics data etc) before it's then loaded into an Oracle database to do the actual analysis work. Oracle Data Integrator will also be packaged up as part of the product, to do the data movement and orchestration between the various components. There'll be quite a lot announced around Hadoop and other "big data" technologies at Openworld, so keep an eye on the blog for more details.

So tomorrow, I'll be presenting and taking part in the User Group Sunday sessions that mark the start of Open World, including speaking at these sessions:

• 10.15am - 11.15am Moscone West 2003 : IOUG: Oracle Business Intelligence Architecture & Internals
• 2pm - 2.45pm Moscone West 2011 : ODTUG : Oracle BI Deployment & Change Management Best Practices

I'm also the lead for the ODTUG BI Sunday Symposium on Sunday afternoon, and apart from my session, there's also sessions from the following OBIEE experts:

• Christian Screen on Oracle Business Intelligence 11g Action Framework: Basic to Advanced Integration
• Jeff McQuigg on Oracle Business Intelligence Metadata Development: Advanced Solutions
• Myself on OBIEE 11g Change Management and Deployment Best Practices
• Stewart Bryson on Aggregation : Oracle Optimizer vs. Oracle BI Server
• Kevin McGinley, winner of the ODTUG KScope'11 Best Paper Award, on Upgrading Your Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition Software

I've been on a big of a blogging hiatus over the past couple of months, as I've been working on the book and also a very exciting new product that's being launched at Larry Ellison's keynote on Sunday evening. Check back here after the keynote for a run-down of just what this new product is...