Thoughts on GLOC Conference and ORDS/REST Demos

I had a very, very enjoyable time at the Great Lakes Oracle Conference this week in Cleveland (OHIO! – Just in case Joel is reading this.)

About 400 people attended, and I think it’s become one of the best conferences in the US, esp for the bang you get for your buck.

I did two talks.

For the first one, they had me in the ‘big’ room – right after the day’s Keynote. The Keynote topic was technical writing and how to use less BS (except he didn’t say BS).

One of the takeaways that stuck for me was on jargon – and boy do we at Oracle love our jargon. We love our acronyms too. And my REST talk uses a lot of it. So I quickly added a slide on JSON.

I also took a bit more time to talk about what REST is, and how that equates to something like a database.

One of the things I REALLY appreciated as a speaker was a full hour to present the topic. I need every minute of that for a talk like this. I’d like to see smaller conferences aim for hour long talks again. It seems we’re on the slippery slope to 45 minutes, and I feel rushed at that time period.

This talk focuses quite a bit on a feature we offer – the ability to auto publish a REST API for your tables and views. I won’t say it’s controversial, but I will say it’s probably more practical to write custom RESTful Services in the ‘real world.’ But if I’m introducing the concept of REST enabling a database, then this AUTO feature works very nicely to get folks into the game. Thanks again Ric for reminding me that I need to make this point more succinctly.

I need to rethink this talk so that’s more obvious, or I need a 90 minute talk vs the 60!

I ended the conference with another packed room, and I talked about SQL Developer in all of it’s incarnations.

I got one of my least favorite questions in this talk – ‘why is your tool better than ________?’

That’s not my question to answer – I think it’s yours to answer. Some folks want a checklist of things we do that ‘they’ don’t. That’s a really weird game to play, but I get it.

My ultimate answer lies in about 500 or so blog posts here, and I guess you could really say I voted with my feet about 6 years ago when I came over to Oracle took this job.

I don’t normally do conference or travel wrap-up posts, but I always enjoy reading Tim’s, so I figured, why not?

Happy weekend everybody. It’s time to go to the neighbors for a cook-out.