Wow, it’s really been over a month since I posted last. Since then I’ve attended VMware VMworld, went on a cycling and camping vacation for a week, attended Oracle Openworld, was at work a week, and dealt with a distant relative dying.

It’s been a bit busy.

During all that however, I’ve just had tons of blog post ideas floating around in my head that need to get out.

First, a housekeeping point. As Paul wrote in the comments of my previous post on Advanced Compression, using the compression and de-duplication aspects of Oracle SecureFiles DOES require licensing advanced compression. This is putting a big crimp in my plans for an end of year conversion to SecureFiles that was going to reduce our space usage, but you’ve got to stay legal.

On to other matters. VMware VMworld was awesome.  It was my third VMworld, and the best I’ve attended. Major changes took place with scheduling sessions (now first come, first serve) and the labs (all now on demand and there were 38 of them compromising about 50 hours of training). It was extremely impressive just to see the 480 on demand lab stations and performance overall was good to excellent. I attended one session on the architecture of the lab systems and I was blown away. Super super impressive.

Oracle Openworld was huge this year – 41,000 people. It’s funny how just different the two conferences feel. VMworld feels to me much more about the underlying technology. How to do cool things with the products, how to make things work faster or better… Openworld… well, it just has that big business feel to it. The sessions although interesting, weren’t generally covering that much new, at least with regards to E-Business Suite.

More on these topics later, I need to get back to providing good technical data.