Firstly, Intel's Paul Ottelini gave us an insight into microprocessor developments. The new 45 nanometer processor is out (today, I think) and the word is it is faster and less power hungry than its predecessors. Power and energy have been key themes this week with all the big players laying out their green credentials. Ottelini quoted some interesting facts: like Data Centre power consumption in the US accounts for over 1.5% of all power consumption. In his view, the exponential growth in data (with data stores growing by at least 50% every year) storage and processing and the amount of power needed to service it is ultimately unsustainable. The big guys are all getting together to reduce power consumption, reduce floor space and reduce heat. According to Intel, this means that every new microprocessor has to be reinvented from scratch. And it is a long drawn out process. To maintain Moore's Law - Moore is an Intel man, apparently - Intel needs to be thinking 4 or 5 years down the line. In fact the next generation of 32nm microprocessors are already on the production line ready for 2009 release.
Only odd note was Otellini's bizarre drawing of parallels between the great architect Frank Lloyd Wright and the guys who work at Intel. And I so much wanted to shout "architect is a noun!".
To keep the green thing going, Oracle's Head of Customer Services announced that Oracle would be joining the Climate Savers initiative. Seems that a couple of big players are all making the correct noises about commitment to low-energy computing. The news was so good I immediately went and blagged myself a free t-shirt.
Next up was Thomas Kurian. He is the man behind Oracle Fusion Middleware and introduced a whole raft of new developments that were simply breathtaking. Oracle has clearly invested an enormous amount of time and effort into the new Fusion Middleware product set and is intent on pushing forward with a strategy of holistic IT provision. Fusion will be the glue that allows Oracle to join all your products together and run them for you whether it's integrating SAP and eBusiness Suite or using mashups and desktop gadgets to enhance the business user's experience. Things to look out for are
- Web Center - an eclectic mix of Frontpage, Social Networking tools and Oracle Portal that allows you to add all sorts of elements to your web site, Intranet and desktop
- Adaptive Access Manager - a security tool that fits into your single signon and learns user habits so that it can automatically identify unusual patterns and force additional challenge responses if required
- Oracle VM - Oracle has worked with the open source Zen project to provide a free (yes that is free) virtualisation product. It's due out tomorrow (you can probably download it right now)
- Oracle Web Services Manager - out of the box ws-security. This is one I will be following up as, at first glance, this looks like a natural successor to the local CAS Gateway
There are many, many more.
I then took the opportunity to have a look around the massive exhibition halls here at Moscone. The usual tat was on hand. Interesting to see Mr Leith at work. The man is a professional freebiehound.
This afternoon saw the much awaited session with Tom Kyte (of Ask Tom fame). He spoke to a packed audience in the Yuerba Buena Gardens Theater and took us through his top 11 (hoho) features of the new 11g database. A lot of this was over my head - hey, I'm not a DBA - but even I was impressed with some of the new things on offer. The main thrust of the 11g database is availability with a whole suite of improvements designed to keep those applications running and allowing you to tweak settings, add instances and optimise SQL on the fly. The biggie is Real Application Testing. This is a facility that allows you to take a slice of production data and replay it against various different hardware and software configurations. There even a scenario where you can run destructive tests against your test system and then restore that test system to its previous state using the flash data archive facilities.
Other improvements such as new partitioning capabilities, encryption for tablespaces, finer grain dependencies and new data compression techniques make this a major new development in the database marketplace. An enthusiastic and knowledgeable audience asked many questions and the man himself received a great cheer at the end. Probably the highlight of the conference so far.
Tomorrow sees a keynote speech from Larry Ellison - I'll try and remember to take my camera this time (or rather try to remember to put the memory card back in it) so I can get some photos to give you a flavour of this amazing event. I am amazed at simple things like how they manage to get lunch to 43,000 people, all the Oracle red-liveried buses and the sheer scale of everything.
A highlight for me today too was the performance of the presenter at the Sun Microsystems booth in Moscone North. He got a member of the audience to handcuff him and lock him in a small, steel box. Said presenter then did an escapology act of which Houdini himself would have been proud, all the time lacing the air with appalling puns about how much Sun did thinking out of the box. A real star.
Big day tomorrow with Larry's keynote and a much-awaited session on the mysterious Oracle Web Services Manager. I'll let you know how it goes.
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