Notes from TFSOTW - Wednesday

Saw this morning what has to be my favorite session from OOW08: "Build Composite Applications Your End Users Will Actually Use." The upshot of the session was about building composite apps in JDeveloper and presenting them in WebCenter. One of the cool elements in this session was the demonstration of the "Human Workflow" component in building a BPEL process...nice to see those nifty BEA things working their way into the Oracle mainstream so quickly. The other aspect that made this presentation absolutely rock...the presenters took the risk of "driving live", building the BPEL process and the apps itself on the fly even though they admitted they were still working with a "Frankenbuild". They hit a few hiccups along the way, but nothing that detracted from a great session. Wonderful to see this type of thing rather than a PowerPoint deck with screen shots; the session almost had an "Unconference" quality to it. I hope more presenters follow their lead. My hat is off to Oracle's George Maggessy and Maiko Rocha for what has to be my favorite session of OOW08. Sure hope they update their progress at Collaborate 09 or OOW09.

I did have a chance to hang out for a few minutes with new pal Karen Tillman in the real brain-center for OOW08. That's right, I was invited into the inner sanctum of the PR Operations Room. Karen's been a real godsend over the past few weeks, advising me as I navigate the treacherous waters of dealing with literary license and misquotes as folks interpret and spin the posts from this humble little blog (got no problem with being quoted, so long as the person quoting is accurate about it). While I was there, I also got to meet Twitter pal Joan Levy face-to-face...a real treat for me.

Also attended the double-session on "Oracle Fusion Applications: Applications For The Next Generation", conducted by Oracle's Steve Miranda and Chris Leone. It was sure nice for the public to finally get a good flavor of what I've been so excited about for so long. I took lots of really bad shots of the presentation and live demo that you can look at here. Yup, they're red-tinted, at an angle, and somewhat blurry (hey, what do you expect from an iPhone camera at 20 feet?), but I hope it's enough of a taste of the Fusion Apps UI that you'll see what all the fuss is about. You can see the bevy of shots (told you I'd make up for yesterday's photographic slacking) here (the pics look a little better blown up to full size).

Watched the Larry Ellison keynote from a very posh, exclusive and private location (sorry, I'll never tell). Larry's big announcement on "X" turned out to be the HP Oracle Database Machine: a data warehouse appliciance, based on the Exadata Storage Server, that's intended to shift the data-intensive part of query processing away from the database layer and put it on the storage layer.

I'm off to the OAUG Appreciation Event, but I'm bugging out on the Oracle Customer Appreciation shindig. I'm a little tired of the crowds and would like to roam downtown San Francisco without fighting through a stampede of OOW attendees. Dinner with a buddy and a little shopping (maybe at the Apple store) on tap for the evening. I'm looking forward to slowing down a bit...

Late Update: Karen and I actually worked through a brief, light-hearted video interview that she's posted on YouTube. You can watch for yourself here.