Dave Welch, CTO and Chief Evangelist
I’m happy to report that House of Brick’s most recent event was back in Omaha—our Solid Foundations seminar December 4th. My presentation was “Oracle DB 11g R2 New Features”. This presentation is not a comprehensive list of 11g R2 DB new features. Rather, it is an overview of those features that have caught my eye from our perspective of involvement with our customer base. There is at least one feature in here that isn’t in the New Features Guide: the new Result Cache, that Oracle placed in the Shared Pool, of all places. I intentionally held off in reviewing Tom Kyte’s must-see Oracle Open World ’09 presentation “11 things about Oracle Database 11g Release 2” until I was done with my own new features compilation.
Our Omaha customer/prospect base may have noticed we’ve been a little quiet lately. Lately we’ve been guilty of distraction, and that’s a welcome problem. On the one hand our local customer base continues to expand. On the other hand, our local customer base is getting to be a smaller piece of our total business. Moving forward, we anticipate we will supplement our Omaha-based Solid Foundations live events with webinars to connect with our expanding customer base and prospects out of our local region.
Years ago we faced another welcome problem: House of Brick live events were drawing large crowds while the Nebraska Oracle User Group had as few as 15 at some events. The NOUG board proposed a merger of the events. We were humbled by NOUG’s overture and we agreed. Since then, our Oracle business has grown but at the same time become a smaller piece of our overall activities. Because of this, we suggested that the NOUG re-evaluate if it makes sense to continue to fold into our Omaha live events as Oracle is getting proportionately less of our presentation bandwidth and indeed is no longer even our primary topic. NOUG leadership agreed and have announced that they will combine with the Heartland Oracle Applications User Group (OAUG)’s Omaha events.
When I asked Friday’s Solid Foundations crowd how many shops were running Oracle RAC, easily a third of the hands went up.
