Gosh I really love that word “open”.  When I hear it, I just get all warm inside.  I’ve always liked that Oracle used the word in it’s big annual conference name.  And this year’s show is bigger than ever.  I heard a rumor that there were 50,000 people here this year.  With an ever increasing round of acquisitions, the exhibitor and user communities just keep growing.

As you can see from this photo, they’ve totally blocked off Howard Street.  The video billboard there is at the 3rd street end.  I managed to catch it showing a frame of an open world!

Behind the billboard are tents where the lunchtime cafeteria was, because all the other square footage is now taken by exhibitors big and small.

And wow, were there a lot of vendors.  Even MySQL AB was here, as I blogged about earlier.  Open-source is a huge and growing component to the Oracle landscape now.  Oracle users seem to concur.  In 2000 when I was writing my book “Oracle and Open Source” no one would have believed that.  But the market pressures are working their magic, whether we like it or not.  I talked at length with Anand Pandey, a Senior Consultant with MySQL.  He handed me a very interesting whitepaper “Open Source in the Enterprise: New Software Disrupts the Technology Stack“.  A very interesting read indeed.

Stay tuned for more tomorrow.