RE: Oracle Open World

Since no one seems to be taking the lead on this, why don't we all meet at 7:00PM Sunday in the Welcome Reception Sunday night at Yerba Buena Gardens, next to the Deep Gradient/Suspect Terrain (see http://www.ybca.org/b_ybca.html )?

kathy duret said:

>The keynote presentations don't interest me at all. I
>am trying to schedule thing during that time which I
>am finding hard to do.

Well, of course, we must all watch big bro' then. Personally, I find some of them highly entertaining, especially Larry and Scott McNealy. Some people watch the TV's in the Lobby area, kick back in bean bags. The "multimedia" presentation where the stage is is silly, but I find it entertaining anyways, on scale alone.

Allen, Brandon wrote:

> do you feel it is
> valuable in terms of
> learning new, useful information, skills, etc. or is
> it mainly just a
> sales and exhibition type event,

I think there are enough useful presentations to make it valuable. The sales fluff is kind of hard to ignore, but ignoring it without being annoyed is a valuable skill to learn, too. There are presentations which are just the O education people reading a script (which together would cost more than OOW if taken from O education), but there are many people who work hard to put together an informative presentation and present well. In fact, I find there are usually conflicts of good sessions, sometimes they repeat popular sessions. You can do a cheapo OCP if you are into that sort of thing.

As with so much, what you get out of it is partly determined by what you put into it. Hotsos _does_ sound better for some deeper technical info, but I've never been there so can't say for certain - they will be putting on presentations at OOW too. I pay for these things out of my own pocket (not to mention losing billable hours), so I have pretty high expectations and no fear of being vocal about being disappointed. In years past, I felt that IOUG was much better than OpenWorld, but I don't know if that is so true with the current format - I'll only go to any if they are geographically close to southern california (unless someone wants to pay for me :-) . IOUG will have a presence in OpenWorld, meeting conflicts with Xtreme I think
http://www.oracle.com/openworld/sanfrancisco/conference/user_groups_sche dule.html#i4 . I went last year and I'm going again this year (and IIRC I went in '96 and '99 and ...) FWIW.

Joel Garry http://www.garry.to

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