Oracle Database 12.2 available now on Oracle Cloud

At the beginning of this month (November), Oracle Database 12c Release 2 (12.2.0.1) was finally available through DBassS on the Oracle Cloud after its first offering as Exadata Express Service in September. Oracle also released 12.2 documentation. 

The ORACLE-BASE Blog from Tim Hall also provided a bit more detail about this new release. You can also check Marco Gralike's blog to get first impression of  Oracle 12.2.0.1 on the cloud.

Oracle Database 12.2 New Features

As I said in my previous blog, at OOW2016 Oracle made clear statement -  "the latest release Oracle 12.2 was officially announced to be first made available in the cloud. " The first available platform is Exadata Express Cloud Service.With this service, the customer can get Oracle Database 12c Release 2 Enterprise Edition plus options running on Exadata in Oracle Cloud.

If you have neither joined Oracle 12.2 beta program nor used Exadata Express Cloud Service, you can at least learn about Oracle 12.2.

Here are some publicly available documents from Oracle:

Database 12.2 New Features Guide – https://docs.oracle.com/cloud/latest/exadataexpress-cloud/CSDBF/toc.htm

Using Oracle Database Exadata Express Cloud Service – https://docs.oracle.com/cloud/latest/exadataexpress-cloud/CSDBP/toc.htm

Oracle 12.2 available on cloud first

“Amazon’s lead is over. Amazon is going to have serious competition going forward. And we’re very proud of our second generation of Infrastructure as a Service. We’re going to be focusing on it and aggressively featuring it not only during Oracle OpenWorld but for the remainder of this fiscal year and next fiscal year and the year after that.” said Oracle Executive Chairman and CTO Larry Ellison in his opening keynote presentation at Oracle OpenWorld 2016.

  

What about Oracle’s new second-generation datacenters? According to Larry, it will offer twice as many cores as Amazon, twice as much memory as Amazon, 4 times as much storage as Amazon, and more than 10 times the I/O capacity of Amazon. Not only that, in order to get your order, Larry also promised you will pay less (than that paid to Amazon).

Is Oracle still a database company? Yes. It still sells its Oracle databases including Oracle Database 12c Release 2, aka, Oracle 12.2. But this time, Larry told the audience, “You will see as we develop features for the cloud, we’ll also start delivering our software in the cloud first. Clearly it’s going to go on-premises, but the first deployment of our database and a lot of our software now is going to go to the cloud first.”No surprise, the latest release Oracle 12.2 was officially announced to be first made available in the cloud. By checking Oracle website, there is no schedule yet for the on-premises version.

As I mentioned in my another article, Oracle has been working hard to convince customers to move to the cloud. Under current strategy, it makes sense for Oracle to attract more customers especially new ones into its cloud service. With its new push into IaaS market against Amazon, Oracle will need more applications and software running on its powerful and cheap infrastructure including its own latest software like Oracle 12c database. By doing this, Oracle will not only demonstrate the new software’s features and functions, but also fully test and fix its new software before shipping its on-premises version.

If your company has used Oracle Exadata machine, you know Oracle had developed “secret sauce” (software function) just for its own hardware to gain more performance. We can then expect Oracle to run its own software much better on its own cloud infrastructure than on other cloud platforms like Amazon.

However, the majority of Oracle’s revenue still came from its non-cloud business. Unlike Amazon, who generated its cloud business revenue from zero (without any legacy non-cloud IT services), Oracle might experience some sort of pain when cloud service eating some of its existing business.

No choice. Amazon is there, so is Microsoft. Larry knows he has to win in the cloud. “Oracle competes at all three levels of the cloud, all three tiers of the cloud.” he said in his keynote speech.

Oracle runs to Cloud, where will DBA go? (3)

If you are an Oracle DBA (at least Oracle DBA in a typical company with IT department), can you think of your responsibilities?

You can easily Google the term "typical Oracle DBA works" and will get tons of results. I just pick up one from the top search result. From its "Oracle DBA Responsibilities" list, you will find lots of works done by Oracle DBA is to "create", "maintain", "install", "backup", "support" Oracle databases. I will also add "configure", "patch", "upgrade", etc.

Another chart below can also demonstrate the current "Top DBA Challenges" although the survey was a little bit old.

So, in the coming cloud era, what will be changed for the role of DBA? As said in "Cloud Considerations for DBAs", cloud "can alleviate the need for the administrator to install, configure, and provision the database. This enables the database to scale as needed." In other words, Oracle DBA will work less on the administration of Oracle database, at least the typical works of Oracle DBA.

Does it mean the companies will not need any Oracle DBAs if they build Oracle on the cloud?

About 5 years ago, Oracle Guru Julian Dontcheff already wrote an article - The role of the DBA in the Private Database Cloud.  His point is "The cloud will bring more challenges and need for DBA work to the enterprise."

Another recent article - Key Challenges Facing the Modern Database Administrator from Gerardo Dada, Vice President, Database Product Marketing and Strategy, SolarWinds gave more clear answers to the above question: "the cloud, DevOps, and other shifts in technology are making the entire IT department more application-focused. In the end, applications are what matters to the business and to end users. This means DBAs are being held accountable for application performance, not only database performance."

In the end, what will you do as an Oracle DBA in the cloud era? Oracle has some answers for you too.

When moving to the Oracle Cloud, Oracle DBA will need to understand:

• The overall architecture of the Oracle Database Cloud,
• How to migrate to the cloud,
• How to create an instance,
• How to configure connections,
• How to back up and recover databases in the cloud,
• How to use Cloud DBA tools.

For sure, the above list is not enough. As an Oracle DBA, your goal is to deliver better application performance (yes, application performance). So you will:

• Be proactive and align behind end-user experience as a shared objective across the entire IT organization by looking at application performance and the impact that the database has on it continuously, not only when it becomes a major problem.
• Measure performance based not on an infrastructure resources perspective, but on end-user wait times. Wait-time analysis gives DBAs a view into what end-users are waiting for and what the database is waiting for, providing clear visibility into bottlenecks.
• Keep the stability of databases just as other infrastructure teams or cloud providers striving on stabilizing their networks, hardware, software, etc.

Oracle runs to Cloud, where will DBA go? DevDBA. I replace the "Ops" to DBA in the popular word "DevOps". 

Oracle runs to Cloud, where will DBA go? (2)

As an Oracle DBA, you might think why Oracle cares so much about "CLOUD". For years, Oracle has been the No.1 RDBMS in the market.

Rank			DBMS	Database Model	Score
May 2016	Apr 2016	May 2015			May 2016	Apr 2016	May 2015
1.	1.	1.	Oracle	Relational DBMS	1462.02	-5.51	+19.93
2.	2.	2.	MySQL	Relational DBMS	1371.83	+1.72	+77.56
3.	3.	3.	Microsoft SQL Server	Relational DBMS	1142.82	+7.77	+11.79
4.	4.	4.	MongoDB	Document store	320.22	+7.78	+42.90
5.	5.	5.	PostgreSQL	Relational DBMS	307.61	+3.89	+34.09
6.	6.	6.	DB2	Relational DBMS	185.96	+1.87	-15.09
7.	8.	8.	Cassandra	Wide column store	134.50	+4.83	+27.95
8.	7.	7.	Microsoft Access	Relational DBMS	131.58	-0.39	-14.00
9.	9.	10.	Redis	Key-value store	108.24	-3.00	+13.51
10.	10.	9.	SQLite	Relational DBMS	107.26	-0.70	+2.10

Source: DB-Engines Ranking (as of May 2016)

Source: Gartner (October 2015)

However, when you scrutinize the latest company financial report (March 15, 2016), you will know why Oracle worries about its existing database business and cares more about "CLOUD".

• Cloud software as a service (SaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) revenues were$583 million, up 57% in U.S. dollars and up 61% in constant currency. 
• Cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) revenues were $152 million, down 2% in U.S. dollars and up 2% in constant currency. 
• Total Cloud Revenues were $735 million, up 40% in U.S. dollars and up 44% in constant currency. 

• Total On-Premise Software Revenues were $6.3 billion, down 4% in U.S. dollars and unchanged in constant currency. 
• Total Hardware Revenues were $1.1 billion, down 13% in U.S. dollars and down 8% in constant currency. 
• Total Services Revenues were $793 million, down 7% in U.S. dollars and down 2% in constant currency.

According the report from Fortune, "as for Oracle’s third quarter, sales of new software licenses for products that run on-premises fell 11% year over year. That on-premises category makes up 70% of Oracle’s overall revenue, so there’s reason for concern there." 

Also, when you check the above Gartner Magic Quadrant figure, you will find out Gartner placed Microsoft ahead of Oracle within the LEADERS's quadrant. It is not because of the market share of RDBMS, but the result of Microsoft's recent investments in its data platform, including Azure DocumentDB, the managed NoSQL database in the cloud. Microsoft SQL Server is also popular not only on-premises but in the cloud. In May, Microsoft also announced the SQL Server will soon be available on Linux.

On the other front,  Amazon which is considered as the absolute leader of cloud computing also grabs huge database market share and is surprisingly in the LEADERS's quadrant just below Oracle. As we all know, AWS offers Amazon RDS and Amazon DynamoDB. Last year, Amazon also launched its own database engine called Aurora as a new database service on the AWS cloud.

We don't even mention the competition from IBM (DB2) and SAP (SAP HANA) as well as other vendors like Teradata and tons of open source or NoSQL databases (MongoDB, Cassandra, CouchDB, etc.).

Oracle might still have years to collect money from its traditional RDBMS product and service, but Larry has to fight in the CLOUD. It matters.

Oracle runs to Cloud, where will DBA go? (1)

Although I didn't attend the Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco last year, I could still hear that word "CLOUD" loud and clear. On December 2, 2015, I joined the Oracle Cloud Day in Toronto.

As Larry posted in his slide, 2015 was "A Year of Innovation in the Cloud".

• Oracle goes all in on cloud services by ComputerWorld

• Yes, Oracle is finally serious about the cloud by InfoWorld

In 2015, Oracle was all about cloud. How about 2016?

• Oracle Exec: All Our Apps Will Be Cloud Apps by Fortune

• Oracle’s New Service Turns Cloud Computing ‘Inside-Out’ by The Wall Street Journal

On April 11, Larry Ellison talked with CFOs and HR leaders on the Virtuous Circle of Cloud Innovation in Chicago.

The Oracle OpenWorld 2016 is still months away, I can almost be certain it will be almost if not all about cloud.

If Oracle runs full speed to Cloud, what will Oracle DBAs need to prepare?

Oracle OpenWorld 2014 Summary 3 - Big Data

Before attending this year's OOW, I hadn't paid much attention on Oracle TEAM USA winning 34th America's Cup on San Francisco Bay in 2013. But I did know the story about Larry Ellison skipping OOW keynote for America's Cup sailing last year.

While we know Larry spent more than $150 million on his two sailing boats, we might not know how Big Data helped Oracle TEAM USA won the race. According to the article from Forbes, "Each of its two boats had 300 sensors recording 3,000 variables up to 10 times per second, pumping 30,000 variables per second into an Oracle Exadata Database Machine. Sailors were outfitted with bombproof electronic tablets, wrist displays and Skipper Jimmy Spithill had a heads-up display linked into the on-board wi-fi system to constantly monitor performance and loads on the boat’s components. Comparing boat against boat during training sessions, both the Oracle and Kiwi teams were able to calculate optimal performance in any conditions. All that data gave sailors a second-by-second picture of how well they were doing relative to how well they knew the boat could perform during races."

So for OOW this year, before you could enter into the exhitition halls (Moscone South and North), you would see Oracle TEAM USA's winning AC72 catamaran parked on Howard Street. I had also got chance to take pictures with the shining trophy and sign the posters by winning team sailors.

Since Larry had taken advantage of Big Data on his own team, how would he sell Big Data to his customers?

On September 30, Thomas Kurian, Oracle’s executive vice president of product development, delivered his keynote speech focus on three major trends in business and culture—big data, mobility, and the cloud. Regarding the Big Data, Kurian introduced a new set of tools called Oracle Big Data Discovery. “It’s the visual face of Hadoop,” Kurian said.

As we all know, Hadoop is a big data platform for many companies, but is also not familiar to many professionals including Oracle DBAs because it requires expertise in a programming model called MapReduce. Oracle Big Data Discovery is a single, easy to use product, built natively on Hadoop to transform raw data into business insight in minutes, without the need to learn complex products or rely only on highly skilled resources. By using Endeca (Oracle’s data discovery engine), it lets users profile, explore, and analyze Big data as well as do prediction and correlation. “With Oracle Big Data Discovery, you will be able to explore and find patterns and problems with your data,” Kurian said.

Combined with Oracle Big Data Discovery, Oracle also brought attendees attention on newly introduced Oracle Big Data SQL. Through Big Data SQL, non-relational data on Hadoop and NoSQL databases can be accessed from within an Oracle Database using standard Oracle SQL. To lots of Oracle developers and DBAs, many of whom are pretty fluent in SQL but much less so in the technologies used to access data on Hadoop – this makes Big Data very accessible. Big Data SQL also includes a unique Smart Scan service that minimizes data movement and maximizes performance. This mechanism is similar to the smart scan facility in Exadata Storage Cells.

Like Exalogic for Middleware following successful Exadata for database, Oracle brought another appliance - Big Data Appliance. This is a specialized appliance that is an 18 node Hadoop cluster in a machine with full rack configuration (including 864 TB of raw storage capacity, 288 cores, 64 GB memory per server).The InfiniBand included in Oracle Big Data Appliance plus the storage and core design of the appliance will enable enterprises to eliminate network bottlenecks for a Hadoop cluster. The appliance includes software often required in big data projects, such as Cloudera's Distribution including Apache Hadoop (CDH) and Cloudera Manager for infrastructure administration; Oracle Linux, the Oracle JDK, the Oracle NoSQL Database (Community Edition) to support advanced analytic queries; and the popular open source R statistical development tool.

Whether to build Big Data project or buy a Big Data appliance, Oracle has both available for its customers. Because Oracle TEAM USA could win America's Cup with Big Data, will Oracle also win his customers to use Oracle Big Data?

Oracle OpenWorld 2014 Summary 2 - Cloud

In the past OOW, Oracle chairman Larry Ellison only had one keynote speech. This time working a new role of CTO,  he delivered another one on Tuesday (Sept.30). He wanted to convince his customers by his passion on Oracle cloud platform, which was called by him a "brand-new, majorly upgraded" platform.

This new “platform 2014” services represent an extension of Oracle’s brand from one of “extreme performance” to one that also encompasses “extreme ease of use” and “extreme low cost,” said Larry.

Since he had said repeatedly that customers will be able to move databases and apps to Oracle's cloud "with the push of a button.", Larry personally handled the live, on-stage demonstration, in which he showed how easy it was for customers to move an Oracle Database 12c database (in the demo it contained the Wikipedia search data)  from an on-premises to cloud deployment and graphically displayed the query performance improvements enabled by the Oracle Database In-Memory option’s in-memory column format capabilities by using Oracle cloud management console. Later he quickly demonstrated a Java application moving to the Oracle cloud and running within a minute or so. As an article from Techworld pointed out, "Oracle's Enterprise Manager tool is involved on the back end, but it wasn't clear from Ellison's talk how involved it is to perform the initial setup between a customer's systems and Oracle's cloud." In other words, it was unclear how exactly Oracle technical support did behind that "button" (or automation).

Why did Larry push so hard to promote Oracle cloud platform? As I mentioned in my other blog, he expects that thousands of ISVs, hundreds of thousands of customers, millions of databases and applications will run on Oracle's cloud in the future.

Anyway, I would like to focus on Oracle Database Cloud Service, aka, Database as a Service (DBaaS)  given DBaaS is considered one of key offerings of Oracle Cloud services.

Oracle DBaaS gives you a complete Oracle database instance in a VM which is hosted by Oracle. As a customer, you have full access to that database and perform some database maintenance and all management operations by using cloud portal or command-line interface. You can even have root OS and SYS database access. You can also get full interoperability with your on-premises Oracle databases.

The main reasons to use database in the cloud are fast (in minutes) and simple (a few clicks) provisioning, cost efficient (pay per use) and more choices (different CPU, memory and storage, database versions, options, etc.).

The security is always one of key considerations for using cloud. Oracle DBaaS has rigorous security practices and procedures on different levels including account, user and database levels.

As we know, Amazon has provided the similar services since long time ago. Oracle is competing with Amazon and other service providers. The prices of Oracle DBaaS are from $400/month (standard edtion) to $5,100/month (Enterprise edition with extreme performance). You can even get Database Schema Service with the price of $175 per month only, but you can only get 5GB storage and 30GB data transfer per month.

As Larry said in his keynote about Oracle Cloud,  "We're just getting started."

Oracle OpenWorld 2014 Summary 1 - General

Oracle OpenWorld 2014 is behind us.  It ran from September 28 to October 2. According to Oracle information, there were more than 60,000 attendees from around the world.

Before the memories about the OOW14 become blurred, I tried to summarize what I learned from the event. In general, the theme of this year OOW was about Big Data on the Cloud or Cloud over the Big Data.

Cloud

As I already predicted in my previous post before the event, in his opening keynote speech on Sunday (Sept.28), Oracle Executive Chairman and CTO Larry Ellison spent most of time talking about Oracle cloud achievements and strategies. Oracle's cloud focus on PaaS and SaaS, which can help Oracle reach more small and mid-size companies and compete with other service providers such as IBM, Google and Saleforce.com.

Oracle has been working very hard to roll out an extensive set of PaaS services in recent years. Oracle is also making Oracle Database 12c as a cloud service (or called DBaaS). As Larry said, its "ISVs have been waiting for this" and its" customers have been waiting for this". Larry also claimed that 19 out of 20 largest SaaS products run on the Oracle platform except Workdays.

Regarding SaaS, Larry claimed Oracle has "the largest portfolio of applications in the cloud of anybody". while you were listening Larry's strong voice about Oracle's SaaS and criticism against its competitors such as Saleforce.com and SAP, your eyes couldn't catch all those names of cloud based applications in the slides showing on the huge screens behind him.

Overall, Ellison emphasized the extent of Oracle’s cloud infrastructure, with 30,000 computers and 400 petabytes of data and supporting 62 million users a day. “Our cloud is bigger than people think, and it’s going to get a lot bigger,” Ellison predicted. “Our cloud strategy has been about building and buying.” Larry also told us.

Big Data

I did a summary about Oracle and Big Data back to 2013. But when people talk about Big Data, they usually think about companies like MapR, Splunk, cloudera, Hortonworks and MongoDB and don't think that Big Data can really work hand-in-hand with relational database. Oracle has been definitely working hard to make Big Data more accessible to its new and old customers and most of them have used Oracle relational databases. By introducing Oracle Big Data SQL, people can create external tables over Hadoop and NoSQL data stores and write SQL against them. So non-relational data can be accessed from within Oracle database using standard Oracle SQL. Oracle also expands its smart scan mechanism (used in Exadata Storage layer) into Big Data Appliance - pre-process data on the Hadoop cluster and move only the relevant data from Big Data world for further processing.

As an Oracle DBA, you will not have any excuses to shy away from Big Data by saying something like that you don't know Hadoop, MapReduce, etc. Oracle has made your work on Big Data much easier by using your existing SQL skills. Oracle can also help itself expand market share in Big Data market since those traditional Oracle DBAs normally have some powers on the decision to buy Big Data products.


Besides the cloud and Big Data, In-Memory option for Oracle 12c (available on 12.1.0.2, I will write post separately) was hot topic. It was not a new announcement in this year's OOW, but there were many keynotes and sessions talking about it.


Overall, Oracle OpenWorld 2014 brought Cloud and Big Data to all attendees' attention. Oracle is working hard on them, so should you.

Arrived at SFO and registered for OOW

After around 5 hours flight, I arrived at San Francisco at 12pm local time today (Sept.28). One of my colleague took the same flight. The plane was fully loaded, but we didn't know if it was because of Oracle OpenWorld.

To our surprise, we didn't see any crowd in the airport as well as taxi line. Traffic from airport to the down town hotel was not bad at all.

After check-in and having a late lunch, we walked to Moscone center to do our OOW registration. Again, we didn't see lots of attendees for registration. We were joking where those 60K+ people. Since we had our advance check-in QR code ready, we spent less 2 minutes to get our registration done. So efficient:-) Also we got our OOW package fast (no line).

Walking around Moscone West, South and North, the workers and exhibitors were still working hard to prepare the event.

The weather was really nice in SFO. Sunny and warm!

You can follow my Twitter @wliu211 to see my update and pictures.

OOW14 tips

I have been searching the tips to maximize my Oracle OpenWorld experience. Finally I found one from Alex Antonatos - This year’s OpenWorld expect 70000 attendees, 10 tips to maximize your conference experience.

I like the following tips particularly.

  3) Bring comfortable shoes. You can expect lots of walking and uncomfortable shoes can put a damper on energy very quickly.

  5) Bring business cards for the many drawings that are often offered in the exhibit areas.

For those have attended OOW before, do you any other tips to offer? I am leaving soon.

Update on Oct.11, 2014 after coming back from OOW14:

While I checked the news and blogs about OOW14 at home, I found an article First-timer tips for Oracle Open World written by the OOW14 attendee Robin Moffatt. I wish she could write it before the event, so I could benefit from it:-)

Oracle Database Cloud Service vs. Aliyun RDS

Since I have known (learned)  what Larry is going to talk about, I started to search the information about Oracle Database Cloud Service (ODCS).

From Oracle website about ODCS, "Oracle Cloud provides several Oracle Database offerings giving you the option of a single schema based service, or a virtual machine with a fully configured, running Oracle Database instance". The last option (below) is the "future direction", which Oracle will sell the most.

Database as a Service - Managed

• Essential management by Oracle
• Complete access to dedicated Oracle Database instance
• Full SQL*Net access
• Oracle managed backup with point-in-time recovery
• Oracle managed patching and upgrades

Recently a company named Alibaba is very hot so his founder Jack Ma.  By comparing Oracle's ODCS with Aliyun  (Alibaba's company) RDS (Relational Database Service), they are pretty much same in term of their offerings. The main difference right now is that Aliyun RDS only supports MySQL and MS SQLServer.

With those money getting from largest IPO in the history, Jack Ma can make the RDS business bigger and bigger in China and then compete with Oracle and Amazon directly outside China.

Larry, do you know Jack?

Numbers about OOW 2014

I have been wondering how big the Oracle OpenWorld will be.

According to Oracle OpenWorld 2014 official site, there will be

• more than 60,000 business and technology professionals from around the world
• more than 2,500 business and technology sessions, covering cloud applications, such as marketing, social, service, sales, and HCM as well as big data, database, middleware, and engineered systems

To better support and understand the above numbers, here is another Oracle official fact sheet about Oracle OpenWorld 2013.

There is also a 2011 article from NYTimes described how Oracle OpenWorld brought the impact on the city of San Francisco even 3 years ago.

" Commuters driving into this city on Monday morning will discover major downtown thoroughfares closed. More than 129,000 square feet of tents will have sprouted around the city’s convention center, where 4.25 miles of power cables, 300 miles of phone and Internet wires and enough beer trucks to sate 45,000 people are in place."

"The production, which runs through Thursday, requires a quarter-million cups of coffee and 14,700 hotel rooms, filling the city’s supply and spilling down the San Francisco peninsula past Redwood Shores, Oracle’s headquarters. "

What will Larry talk about in his keynote speech at OOW 2014?

Still as Oracle CEO, in his keynote speech at Oracle OpenWorld 2013, Larry Ellison, announced "Oracle Database 12c In-Memory Database and M6 Big Memory Machine".  In the Content Catalog for OOW 2014, there will be lots of sessions talking about in-memory option like the one (Top Five Things to Know About Oracle Database In-Memory) by Maria Colgan.

To go back one more year, at OOW 2012, after telling the crowd about Oracle Cloud 2012, Larry announced Oracle Database 12c and next generation Exadata Database Machine.

On September 18, Larry stepped aside  as Oracle CEO. As a Chairman and CTO, what important announcement will he deliver to the world in this year's OOW keynote speech?

From Forbes'article "Larry Ellison Is Still Here And 7 More Things About Oracle" written by Michael Hickins, a director of strategic communications at Oracle, we can get the taste of Larry's coming speech.

"... the company will roll out its new Database Cloud Service — a new multi-tenant database-as-a-service offering that will let customers migrate their existing apps and databases to the cloud “with the push of a button,” said Ellison. Data will be compressed ten to one and encrypted for secure and efficient transfer to the cloud, with no reprogramming. “Every single Oracle feature — even our latest high-speed in-memory processing — is included in the Oracle Cloud Database Service,” Ellison said. “Hundreds of thousands of customers and ISVs have been waiting for exactly this. Database is our largest software business and database will be our largest cloud service business.” "

Prepare for Oracle OpenWorld 2014

Oracle OpenWorld 2014 is fast approaching. This will be my first time to join this event. I will fly from Toronto to San Francisco on September 27.

Except the registration, hotel and flight booking, the most important preparation work was to schedule the sessions to attend during the event by using Schedule Builder.

There are 2027 sessions (by 3214 speakers) listed in Content Catalog. Which sessions should I choose? A big headache. I don't know how other attendees normally pick the sessions, but I chose the sessions mainly by speakers who I am interested in. As you can also see from the topics, they are mostly relate to Oracle 12c or performance tuning.

Here are some of those speakers and their sessions:

• Using Oracle Multitenant to Efficiently Manage Development and Test Databases by Alex Gorbachev - CTO, The Pythian Group Inc.
• Near-Zero Downtime Database Migration by Arup Nanda - Database Architect, Starwood Hotels  
• Adaptive Query Optimization by Christian Antognini - Senior Principal Consultant, Trivadis AG  
• Reading an Automatic Workload Repository Report by Jonathan Lewis - Sole Proprietor, JL Computer Consultancy  
• Top Five Things to Know About Oracle Database In-Memory by Maria Colgan - Master Product Manager, Oracle  
• How to Upgrade, Migrate, and Consolidate to Oracle Database 12c by Mike Dietrich - Senior Principal Technologist, Oracle  
• The Best New Oracle Database 12c Features by Rich Niemiec - Executive Advisor to the International Board, Rolta International Inc.  
• Expert Oracle Exadata: Then and Now by Tanel Poder - Technology Evangelist, Enkitec  
• What’s New in Oracle Database 12c Release 12.1.0.2? by Tom Kyte - Architect, Oracle  

For sure, I will watch the keynotes by Larry Ellison and Mark Hurd.