As is the tradition at Oracle OpenWorld, Sunday night was Larry Ellison's keynote night. If the race results had been different he may not have arrived, but like all rockstars he appeared in fine form and with interesting news.
Ellison's warm up acts received a mixed reception. The intro act attempted a cheer for OracleTeamNZ (with Jimmy and Ben among those in the audience) and got a lukewarm reception similar to that meted out by the average SF local reflecting their enthusiasm for the 34th Americas Cup. Noriyuki Toyoki of Fujitsu did a better job than I would have delivering in Japanese, but it was a little hard going at times. A read through the Twitter stream with #oow13 gives a sense of the restlessness and humour in the audience waiting for the Boss.
Larry had 3 big announcements: First, a new in-memory option for the 12c database. Me thinks the lawyers had even got to Larry with slides claiming 100x faster analysis but when demonstrated the test revealed it as 1370x faster data interrogation compared with last year's model. The secret to this remarkable speed increase is the use of new columnar datastore in addition to the existing and traditional row datastore mechanisms.
Announcement two was the M6-32 machine with 32 terabytes of memory and announcement three was the product with the worse name ever: "Oracle Database Backup Logging Recovery Appliance".
With pricing beyond most New Zealand companies' budgets, the announcements were still of interest showing the impact of Oracle's 200 plus acquisitions in the last year and a coherence in the growth strategy with software and hardware developing capacity and ability in tandem. The vision of the "data centre of the future" did give a glimpse of a model that New Zealand will and should be able to afford in the next few years.
