OOW2K6 – and Mr. Kyte has left the building…

Tuesday – Getting into the spirit

I am just joking, so far I haven’t seen an Elvis look-a-like in town, but I would be very interested how Thomas Kyte felt about his session this morning for this huge audience.

The conference paper

Mr. Thomas Kyte 

But I will start with the beginning. I started off this Tuesday morning in the Hilton Hotel, with Thomas Kyte’s presentation "Things you think you know". I hadn’t really planned this session, but I am glad, I am really glad I did. Mr. Kyte is a very gifted speaker and knows what he speaking of, which helps ;-).

Despite the fact that I had sometimes the feeling: "OK, what’s the big deal. It should be common knowledge or at least, if you use your common sense, it shouldn’t be a new topic to you". The brilliant metaphors he used, were really priceless, funny and with al lot of wit addressed to the audience, so if that didn’t trigger them to think next time, then I don’t know how you should do it better.

So why did I come up with such a title? Because I got the feeling I was attending a rock concert. The grand ballroom in which it was held was really huge, a heavy bass drum from House / New Age music rolled through the air. Two big screens were setup behind the podium and, when Thomas Kyte went to his desk, a dark heavy voice introduced him to the audience with an ambiance as if it was a big football stadium.

The last bit of a very long queue

 

Starting to fill up

Below is a snapshot I took of him, while he was probably thinking something like, while looking at me (the guy with the camera): "Oh dear, the circus is starting…"

Be-aware of achterhoekers (dutch inside joke)

Mr. Kyte near the EXIT doors.

You are watching me, I am watching you 🙂 – SMILE
 

I don’t know if he held presentations for such big audiences before, but, IMHO, he did brilliantly. If you have the opportunity to go to a Thomas Kyte session, you should not miss it.

For me, the most important item that I could relate to lately, is that we should be very careful with the things you know, but aren’t because: it’s the things you know that just aint so, just aint so anymore or just aint always so…

I while ago I just had a very lengthy discussion on the internet, that lengthy discussion is a good example that proved his point.

Trying to get out

The special effect media (sound) people

XML DB Hands-on Labs 

I quickly went, after this session, to the "Hands-on Labs: XQuery and Oracle XML DB". I was to late, because of the immense crowed that attended Mr. Kyte’s session and blocked all exit routes trying to get to their next sessions, so when arriving at the workshop, there weren’t any desktops available anymore.

I got hold on the manual, which is fortunate because now, I can try it out at home. I saw they also introduced the next XMLIndex voor unstructured XML (schema less) data during this session, so this will give some room to tell about it in the near future. It performs greatly, and I think for this area it is a big step forward.

All in all, this was also my luck, because now I had the opportunity to wander about on the Moscone Center complex. My schedule was to tight anyway, so I had 2 hours to kill with discovering the "DEMO grounds" (which took me a long time to find, btw.).

I am writing this now in one of the Bean bag areas on Moscone Center, who are very comfortable and are a good spot to work on.

Baggy

In the afternoon

Next off to "On demand XML Information Solutions" by Hideki Hiura of Justsystem Inc. and after that, he has hopefully recovered from feeling a little bit ill on Monday, Mr. Wim Coekaerts on "Securing Linux for Oracle"; Should be interesting.

"On demand XML Information Solutions" was a little bit of a bummer, because only an application of Justsystems was demonstrated and not the basic XML DB techniques I expected.

So I skipped out of this one, halfway and went for a coffee. Also in this period of time I thanked Tracie for helping me so much on Sunday regarding my housing problem, and as I suspected she had pulled some strings to work it out. I repaid my dept with two bottles of water for her and her colleague. Outside, drinking my coffee on the stairs, I noticed that everyone was benefiting of the event. The oldest trade in town promoted also their services.

On the stairs outside drinking coffee
 

Potential markets are everywhere…
 

I switched to blogging in between sessions, because it took me too long last night to get everything organized (from 8 pm to 2 am). This hopefully give me room to meet up with my colleague Lucas Jellema, this evening at the, organized by Mark Rittman’s, event: "the 2nd Annual Open World Blogger Meet Up".

You can’t overlook this one

 
 

I am looking forward to tasting a beer at the Thirsty Bear Brewery.      

🙂