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OOW2010 Wednesday

Alas I missed the Benelux cocktail part last night, because the dinner took somewhat longer than expected. The dinner was extremely good though.
This day started with a session by John Scott Spendolini about "Recovering from APEX mistakes" - I didn't know they existed but nevertheless. Good session on how to undo changes you've made, debugging etc. The next one was by Marco Gralike on XML-DB (what else could it be?). Good, detailed info with some nice examples. Not all demos worked like he meant to, but that's the price you pay when you mess with them the night before! Especially the event firing mechanism when you drop a file in an XML folder are very cool! Marco, we definitely need those for our ODTUG presentation!
Then Raj did a presentation on collections, enthusiastic and dynamic us usual. But also his deno didn't turn out as expected. The best take away from this session was the idea to create views on top of your collections, so you can maintain the code more easy.
Larry's Wednesday's keynote was rather disappointing. No new announcements, just a recap of the things announced earlier this week. And that took rather long, so I missed the Fusion Apps demo as I headed for a session on EBR by Boeing. They already really use it in their mission critical business applications. By implementing EBR they managed to reduce the outage for an application upgrade from 9 hours to less then 1! Very impressive.
Next was the Blogger Meetup. Always a good opportunity to match faces with names. And the. Off to the Appreciation event! It was definitely more crowded than last year, with long lines for the food. And some good bands too! Don Henley may look somewhat older, but his voice still sounds like 30 years ago. And the Black Eyed Peas surprised me, with a very good show. This is the first time I saw the whole crowded joining the band: All yo part people in da house, say yoo-hoo.
I got a bus back around 12, because I need a relative good night sleep for my session tomorrow. I am curious how many people will show up, as I heard a lot of people saying they'll leave on Thursday....

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