ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2009

ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2009 is almost coming to an end at the time of this writing. After some chilly days the sun started to shine in Monterey and turned this great event into an even better one. As mentioned almost every day, ODTUG is one of the few conferences that has grown compared to last year. This was my first visit to ODTUG. I actually thought it would be as big as Open World :-) But it’s about a hundred times smaller. And actually that’s cool; much more intimate. Here you really get the chance to speak to product managers, interact with peers, and meet lots of new and interesting people!

So what were the highlights?

SOA and BPM Symposium on Sunday. For the first time there was a separate symposium and track dedicated to SOA and BPM. It was put together by ACE Directors Lonneke Dikmans, Lucas Jellema and Mike van Alst. Although the APEX and database tracks attracted more audience, we had a very interesting and interactive day with a mix of newcomers and SOA-adepts. The day was split into a business and technology part. Breakout sessions were mixed with great presentations by Demed L’Her, Geoffroy de Lamalle, and Clemens Utschig. Read about the results -SOA and BPM approaches- on Oracle Wiki.

Fusion Apps demo. The first official demo of the upcoming Fusion Apps. It looked really smooth! It’s build on top of the new Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g stack (WebCenter, ADF, SOA Suite). Lot’s of social networking capabilities and interaction. Expect to see more of this. Some technology stats: approximately 11,000 task flows, between 5 and 6 thousand tables, tens of thousands of ADF BC View Objects, and so on.

Oracle ACE dinner. Great dinner followed by a bonfire and s’mores on the beach!

Presentations in the SOA and BPM track. Lots of interesting presentations here. I was an ambassador for Lonneke’s presentation and did a presentation myself on SOA in a database-centric environment. Also great presentations by Roman Dobrik on BPEL development patterns, Chris Judson on canonical data models, Mauricio Naranjo on a government SOA project in Latin America, Samrat Ray on SCA in SOA Suite 11g, Mark Simpson on tools for business processes, and Lucas Jellema on SOA in an Oracle classic stronghold.

Meeting fellow geeks. You want to meet people that drive cars with license plates like “BPEL” or “WEB 2 OH”? Find them at ODTUG!

Great conference! Thanks to everyone and looking forward to meet everyone again at Oracle Open World 2009!