Dave Welch, CTO and Chief Evangelist

This show’s down to about 35K attendees, compared to 45K two years ago. Oracle’s cutting back; no third year of the mega LCD screens with Oracle ads on either end of Howard St.

Surprising trend: In day one of my VMware Pavilion volunteer work, I got asked as many questions about the mechanics of running RAC on VMware, as I did any other Oracle-on-VMware topic.

From Sunday’s Oracle/Sun talk: I noticed Larry Ellison’s defense of TPC fining Oracle a whopping $10K for making a comparative IBM performance claim based on numbers that Oracle hadn’t yet published. In my opinion, Mr. Ellison seems to be saying in so many words that the end justified the means and they made the decision fully anticipating the $10K fine.

I’ll no doubt say more about Oracle’s Sun acquisition later. Out of all of the Sun issues, I probably the most curious about what Oracle will do with Sun’s MySQL business line. Six years ago, we used to laugh at this little database that had no stored procedures and didn’t even have commit/rollback. We stopped laughing at MySQL a few years ago. Now it’s one of our business lines. I keep reminding myself that if Oracle were to attempt to scuttle or ignore (same thing) MySQL with intent to reduce competition for the Oracle database, that someone out there would no doubt take the open source remnants and keep it alive. I just scanned two sheets that I picked up today at the Sun pavilion. The first sheet describes each of their 23 demo stations. The second lists the ~50 Sun-related sessions at the show. Not a word in either about MySQL. That’s a disappointment.
News today that caught my eye since we do a lot with E-Business Suite shops: datango claims reduction of Oracle application rollout and support costs by over 40%.
HP targeted Oracle Apps shops today, announcing a series of new provisioning templates for BladeSystem Matrix users. I’d like to see a vendor step forward with Oracle Apps VMware virtual machine templates.