If you missed my day 6, you can view it here.

All good things come to an end as with CloudWorld 2024, and it was time to return back home to the UK. I had a same flights back as I did coming to Las Vegas but in reverse, so to New York then Manchester. With the only difference when I came due to the timezone difference it was the same day, but going back due to losing so many hours due to timezone difference, I leave Saturday but arrive Sunday morning! 😫

Return Journey

I had an morning flight of 9:25am, so was up early to complete my packing and get to airport for 6:30am. After dropping my bag off, getting through security and grabbing a bagel for breakfast it was time to board my flight.

I really like the Delta flights as the plane are pretty modern with great entertainment system and free WiFi! 😎

Time to take off, 6 hours flight to JFK New York.

After pleasure flight, arrived in New York slightly earlier and had about 1 hour to catch next flight to Manchester.

It took quite some time to taxi to gate and to get off the plane, which only left 30 minutes to board next flight which left in an hour. The shuffle bus wasn’t at the stop next to the gate I came through off the plane, so I decided to walk even though it was about 20-25 minutes walk.

I managed to walk at good pace and even managed to stop at chocolate shop to get brittle peanut which my wife wanted. Arrived at gate and they were about to start boarding. Miss England was the plane I’d be traveling on this time.

It was 6pm in New York but 11pm in UK, and I always look ahead at the destination time to ensure I adjust my bodyclock accordingly and limit the jetlag. So it was case of having food and catching some sleep as when I arrive in UK, it was going to be nearly 7am.

As planned, I had my food and went to sleep as best as I could in a plane and rested. 7 hours later we landed in Manchester which was looking a bit grim!

Was glad to be back and was looking forward to getting home and seeing the wife and kids.

I collected my luggage, thankfully no delayed luggage like in the past and I was off home in a taxi.

As always, a really enjoyable and brilliant trip, many thanks to Oracle Ace Program for the complimentary CloudWorld ticket and to my employer Version 1 for covering travel, accomodation and time out the office.

Till hopefully CloudWorld 25, take care and I hope you enjoyed reading this blog post series and apologies for the delay in writing it all up (it surprisingly take some considerable time) 🙄

If you found this blog post useful, please like as well as follow me through my various Social Media avenues available on the sidebar and/or subscribe to this Oracle blog via WordPress/e-mail.

Thanks

Zed DBA (Zahid Anwar)

If you missed my day 5, you can view it here.

The Oracle CloudWorld conference had finished, but there was still one day left for the Oracle Ace Adventure, whereby Oracle ACEs courtesy of the Oracle Ace Program get taken on trips 😎 Yesterday afternoon was Mob Museum and today was Valley of Fire 🔥

Valley of Fire

It was an early start with a 6:45am coach!

This was out tour guide Jimmy Vegas!

Myself, Sai and Osama enjoying the road trip.

My UKOUG colleague and friend Leona, Oracle ACE in the making 😎

My Version 1 colleague, former ACE mentee and friend Rishin 😃

Pattrick very happy to be here 😀

Time to get some photos in! 👍🏽

Osama looking cool as always! 😎

The ACE ladies Leona and my former ACE mentee Ambili 🙂

Mountain goat!

Myself, Leona and Kamil.

Ambili doing some Bollywood pose! 😆

Extremely rare sighting of an human goat aka Connor! 🤣

Myself and Rishin again!

Nizam, Syed and the person I forgotten his name 😢

Nizam, Syed, myself and Osama 😎

Basheer looking cool 😎

The Queen of ACE! 👑♠️ Jen, who without wouldn’t be possible! ❤️

Myself and Baig.

Rishin and myself.

Me trying to do an Oracle sign!

More mountain goats!

Me looking rather cool 😎

Lunch time!

Myself and DataDuke aka Benjamin 😁

Markings on the wall from many years ago!

Osama looking cool as always!

Myself, Baig and Osama doing a really high climb before we leave the state park!

Some great group photos! 😎❤️♠️

It had been a long day for some 🤣

The waterfall near the Wynn hotel on the strip before going into Fashion Show Mall for some shopping!

What happens when Oracle ACEs (and to be ACE) go shopping in Apple 🤦🏽‍♂️

A meal with Benjamin and Osama at The Cheesecake Factory to finish the day off!

Many thanks for Jen and the Oracle Ace Program for a wonderful day with wonderful company! 😎

Tomorrow will be my long journey back home to UK 🥱

You can view my day 7 here.

If you found this blog post useful, please like as well as follow me through my various Social Media avenues available on the sidebar and/or subscribe to this Oracle blog via WordPress/e-mail.

Thanks

Zed DBA (Zahid Anwar)

If you missed my day 4, you can view it here.

The main part of the conference was unfortunately over, with all the keynotes presented. Today was more ACE duties, exhibition hall, a session and ACE Adventure Part 1.

Oracle ACE Duties

Although I had done my Oracle ACE duties the day before, I had only done an hour and was required to do another hour which I had selected to do this morning.

It was quiet, so got to speak to fellow ACEs, some Oracle people and then had a discussion with Jenny Tsai, Senior Vice President, Overall Database Product Management at Oracle. I was explaining to her how it was important for Oracle Product Management to attend the Oracle User Group conferences and in particular UKOUG which I am part of, so they can present Oracle’s direction, roadmap, new features, etc which can only come from them. Also thanked her for her support in allowing the Tech Product Managers to attend so far and tried to convince her to come as it would certainly have gravitas if someone as senior as her attended 😎

I then next went around the exhibition hall with some ACEs, speaking to exhibitors, networking and collecting some SWAG I could give to my kids 😉

Next I went to a session before bumping into Janelle McCain, who I had asked directions on day 1 and then saw several times a day at the conference, so it was only fitting at the end of conference I take a photo with her for my blog 😀.

Top Integrations: Oracle Autonomous Database on Oracle Database@Azure

Due to the only being half a day and with most of morning doing ACE duties and exhibition hall, I only got to fit in one session which was about various integrations in Azure with the Oracle Autonomous database such as Entra ID integration.

Next I had lunch then it was time to leave the conference and finally say goodbye to CloudWorld 🥺👋🏽

The date for next year was already being advertised as 13th to 16th October 2025, so a bit later then this year.

Oracle ACE Adventure Part 1 Visit to the Mob Museum

We was fortunate this year that the Oracle ACEs had not one but two ACE Adventures 😃

The first was visiting the Mob Museum in Old Vegas.

We got to learn about the birth of the mob in the 19th century, in poverty-ridden ethnic neighbourhoods of big cities.

Immigrants forced into crowded slums with worst jobs. Mean streets fostered criminal underworld. Corruption allowed the mob to flourish.

It was organised crime, in highly structured criminal network or syndicate.

St Valentine’s Day massacre wall, where the most horrific shooting in mob history. On St Valentine’s day 1929, seven members of George “Bugs” Moran’s bootlegging gang were lined up and shot dead. Al Capone gang was suspected of ordering the hit but no one was ever prosecuted. When the garage was to be demolished in 1967, the entrepreneur George Patey recovered the bricks from the wall which are displayed here.

The Sing Sing electric chair where people would executed if they received the death penalty!

Various mobs would be on the run, with undercover agents bringing down the mob in 1970s to 2000s.

Various props from various mob movies on display!

And something really cool to me, was the actual hazmat suit that Bryan Cranston who played Walter White in one of the best tv series Breaking Bad!

Then we finally had a tour of the courtroom that actually preserved in the Mob Museum.

To finish of the tour, was some nibbles before heading back to the strip.

It was an early night as we had ACE Adventure Part 2 tomorrow at 7am Valley of Fire Private Tour 🔥😎

You can view my day 6 here.

If you found this blog post useful, please like as well as follow me through my various Social Media avenues available on the sidebar and/or subscribe to this Oracle blog via WordPress/e-mail.

Thanks

Zed DBA (Zahid Anwar)

If you missed my day 3, you can view it here.

Oracle ACE Duties

As part of being an Oracle ACE, you are required to volunteer to be at the Oracle ACE lounge and speak to people about the ACE program, so I did my duties first thing with Kim Berg Hansen, Rachel Barker, Ron Ekins and Andrew Bohnet.

Keynote: Oracle Cloud: AI, Speed, Flexibility, and Security Your Way

Next I went to the keynote from Clay Magouyrk, Executive Vice President of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Oracle.

He used the transportation analogy to explain how cloud still early on in its journey. Still a lot to transform.

Explaining how scale, efficiency and security had improved but was very limited in availability just as container ports. However, OCI was leading the way in cloud transformation. This become a bit more obvious later on 😉

He next welcomed Gregory L. Brentin, SVP Technology at Skydance Animation to the stage who was met with a loud cheer from the audience! Clearly a popular guy 😎

Gregory explained how Skydance Animation needed to respond to creative changes, which OCI allows them, they are able to scale up by burst into the cloud, up to 10x more. He then showed a preview of spellbound which is being created using OCI! It come out later this year and you can see the preview here. He then went onto saying in the future, the studio wanted to entirely be in the cloud. Allowing for global reach and flexibility in animation creation.

Clay then next went onto surprise announcement of Oracle Dedicated Region 25! Which was conveniently covered on the side of the stage which he then revealed 😎

He explained how it’s now 75% less frontprint, allow for more customers to have better availability! I.e. back to the earlier point of OCI leading the way in transformation 😎

Which is impressive, when you consider Clay announced Dedicated Region at CloudWorld 22 only 2 years ago where I blogged about the 12 rack here.

He next welcomed Kazushi Koga, Fujitsu SEVP Corporate Executive Officer to the stage.

Kazushi spoke about how their sovereign cloud provides more then 100 of OCI services, including gen-AI while keeping operational transparency and controlling data.

Next Clay welcomed Amit Zavery, VP, General Manager and Head of Platform at Google Cloud to the stage.

This was very brief, but they talked about the partnership of Oracle Database@GCP.

Next Clay welcomed Kamran Zargahi, Senior Director of Tech Strategy and Cloud Engineering at Uber to the stage.

Kamran spoke about:

• Profitable growth as a priority
• Technology provides a seamless experience for riders, eaters and drivers
• They tech powers 14M prediction a second and 1M trips an hour!
• Best tech stories stem from balancing scale and efficiency
• That is powering a sustainable growth without increase costs!
• This is the 2nd year of the partnership with OCI
• Out of each 10 trips, a few are powered by OCI
• The partnership has proved it possible to scale

Next Clay concluded the keynote by talking about OCI Supercluster.

He talked about the scale of the network without a single dropped packet (I suspect that not wholly true but I get the sentiment made 😉), how they moved from air-cooled to water-cooled and how all that gave more power with smaller footprint.

Bring Your Own Model to Your Database for AI and ML

I next went to a session on AI and ML in the Oracle database and how you can bring your own model.

My fellow Oracle ACE colleague Abi (Haigh) Giles-Haigh, who is awesome and thinks I avoid her (private joke) was presenting and she always great to listen to and didn’t disappoint.

She explained how she recently became an assistant coach at Newcastle United Women’s under 21s team. She talked about wholistic player development and actually the psychological and social was actually more important than physical and tactical.

Player would fill a form twice a day, but it was a lot of data and was hard for coaches to analyse.

Even thought a player have marked them as low stress, the free text suggests otherwise with high nervousness.

She finished off explaining the high-level architecture.

This was a excellent application of how to use AI and ML for a really life scenario that Abi took her analytic and AI knowable to good use. Well done 😎👏🏽

Solving Industries’ Biggest Challenges with Applied AI

The final keynote was presented by Mike Sicilia, Executive Vice President, Oracle Industries.

He talked about regardless of industry we hear common challenges:

• The need to achieve more in a world that is undergoing rapid change
• The need to spend less
• And a hyperfocus on cybersecurity

He then talked about delivering vital operational services worldwide and applied innovation across industries.

He then welcomed Adrian Butler, SVP and CTO of Foot Locker to the stage.

Adrian talked about how last year they launched their new ‘Lace Up Plan’, to engage customers differently, new store formats, improved loyalty programs and better omnichannel experience.

Mike then welcomed Naveen Manga, Global Chief Technology Officer at Marriott International to the stage.

Naveen talked about the purpose of connecting people through the power of travel and the 3 paths to win:

• Best brand and experience
• Most loyal and engaged customer base
• Be in more places

He also talked about instilling a culture of innovation first, future of travel is technology, and how they just getting started and they are reshaping the industry at large. They did a 48 hour codefest in summer 23 on Gen AI, mission to empower associates, delight guests and drive business value through the responsible deployment of Gen AI.

Mike next welcomed Ty Tastepe, Global Chief Technology Officer at Six Flags to the stage.

Ty talked about delighting customers, with a stock symbol of fun and how that’s in their DNA. Their initiatives that they are undertaking to help create lasting memories for their guests, leveraging AI to enrich and personalise every guest touchpoint.

Mike then next talked about Gen-AI and Cloud with industry context to fuel business innovations.

Mike then introduced Stephanie Trunzo, SVP Global Oracle Industries at the stage.

she then welcomed Andrew De La Torre, Amber Trendell and Josh Kanner from Oracle to the stage.

Is it me, or does Stephanie necklace look like the Oracle symbol 🤔

They talked about using Gen-AI to get insights from data, i.e. identify a person from their transactions, learn their spending patterns, personalise recommendations such as recommending a table at the inhouse restaurant they may have dined before.

Mike then just finished off with how Oracle industry suites were primed for innovation.

Soon as the keynote was complete, the event staff were out in numbers to clear the tens of thousands of chairs for the Oracle CloudWorld party that evening!

Upgrade to Oracle Database 23ai

The final session of the day, was attending a session on upgrading to Oracle latest database version 23ai, more details here.

This was delivered by the Database Upgrades Product Managers Mike Dietrich and Rodrigo Jorge. Joined by the lovely Lucia Hustatyova from Deutsche Telekom IT Solutions Slovakia. I met her at Oracle CloudWorld 23 and was in awe of her. Like me, she has an Oracle Certified Master certification, but whereas I have on older 11g version, she has it on 10g, 11g and 12c. She does all this in her spare time whilst being a wife and mother 😲, pretty impressive!

Mike talked about the lifetime support policy, but didn’t answer the million dollar question of when 23ai was out on-premises! But I suspect very soon now Larry happy with the Oracle Database@AWS announce earlier in the week.

He also talked about consolidation strategies for PDBs.

The importance of update Oracle clients to ensure interoperability!

Then it was Lucia talking about her experience.

She spoke about how to move to Cloud and doing upgrades.

How they saw Oracle 23ai, i.e. best features for them and no performance issues 😀

She then asked me to take this lovely photo of the 3 speakers 😎

Oracle ACE Dinner

After the final session of the day, I went back to the Oracle Ace Lounge and exhibition hall to utilise the time with some fellow Oracle ACEs before the Oracle ACE dinner. We then walked over to the Mercato Della Pescheria in the Grand Canal Shoppes at The Venetian Resort, for a private dinner event for Oracle ACEs hosted by Jennifer Nicholson and the Oracle Database Product Management.

Sandesh Rao, Sai Penumuru, Osama Mustafa and Benjamin Nothdurft.

We was welcomed by Juan Loaiza, Executive Vice President, Mission Critical Database Technologies who thanks us all for our efforts as Oracle ACEs, which he has done for the past few years 😎

Food on the menu looked good 😋

I was hosted by the selfie master himself, Sandesh Rao.

Food was actually really lovely 😋

Oracle CloudWorld Party

After the Oracle ACE Dinner, we all walked to the Oracle CloudWorld party, themed Electric Dreams with the band Journey playing.

Managed to get a UKOUG board photo with James Herbert and Leona Chauhan with funky dressed people at photo stand 😎

Tomorrow will be day 3 of the conference, the last day of the Oracle CloudWorld 🙁

Sorry it’s taken long to get this post up, it’s taken several hours over couple of days 🤦🏽‍♂️. Hopefully have the final days out over next coming days.

You can view my day 5 here.

If you found this blog post useful, please like as well as follow me through my various Social Media avenues available on the sidebar and/or subscribe to this Oracle blog via WordPress/e-mail.

Thanks

Zed DBA (Zahid Anwar)

If you missed my day 2, you can view it here.

Keynote: Customers Winning with the Cloud and AI

Today was the first proper day of the conference with keynotes and sessions. I headed over to the Venetian nice and early, had my breakfast and went to the keynote in hall A.

The hall was rapidly filling up as it was time for keynote to start and Safra Catz the CEO of Oracle to make her entrance.

She mentioned:

• How OCI is built different
• With performance and security at the heart of it
• Open to everyone, in Azure, GCP and now AWS
• Full Stack infused best technologies
• She thanks her employees, partners and the audience

She then welcomed Bill Hornbuckle, Chief Executive Officer and President at MGM Resorts International to the stage.

Safra asked, “How do you stay ahead?”

Bill talked about:

• The digital experience, use of virtual check-in used by 48% of guest
• Less expensive and quicker check-in
• They use Oracle Fusion since 2020, which reduced their labour by 25-30%
• They recieve 15-20k calls a day, and successfully moving 20% of the load to AI digital assistants
• Interesting fact of 50% of their gambling custom comes from 1% of their customers!
• The use of AI to tailor the experience for their customers

She next welcomed La’Naia Jones, Chief Information Officer at Central Intelligence Agency to the stage, who probably had the best trainers on stage 😋

La’Naia talked about:

• Thanking Oracle for the partnership and the shared mission to keep the nation safe using the best technologies.
• How CIA is all Oracle.
• How she used to be an Oracle DBA.
• Innovation, disruptive technology, opportunities to bring best solutions to make best decisions without compromise.
• Shift to cybersecurity focus, using data with GenAI to help what they do.

Safra said, Oracle don’t consider anything GA, if it can’t be available in a classified disconnected manner required for the CIA, as they are one of it’s critical customers.

Next she welcomed both Bernard Gavgani, Group CIO and member of Group Executive Committee and Jean-Yves Fillion Vice-Chairman Board of Directors at BNP Paribas to the stage.

Safra, Bernard and Jean-Yves talked about how:

• The expansion of the partnership, by BNP Paribas going to the Oracle Cloud.
• They are in 80 countries with 60 currencies.
• The relationship is not vendor and customer, it’s a true partnership.
• Is part of BNP Paribas success.
• Oracle is success when customers are successful.
• They use AI to help prevent cyberattacks.
• Security is top priority for their customers.

Next Safra welcomed Michelle Zatlyn, Co-founder, President and Chief Operating Officer at Cloudflare to the stage.

Michelle blow me away, with how kickass she came across, she a co-founder and really knows her tech! 🤓

She explained:

• They have 157B cyberattacks a day!
• That’s 100M just in time she came to stage! 😲
• All protected automatically without any human intervention!
• Safra said “When a deep technology company choose Oracle, it makes Oracle proud”
• Why did they choice OCI, because it built for performance and security posture.
• Nimble and agile.
• OCI is out there, doing so much!
• Priced for performance yet efficient.
• How they need to ensure it fast and snappy and OCI gives that!
• “Focus on customer and partnership”, says Safra.

Finally, Safra welcomed Antonio Büchi Buc, CEO at Entel to the stage.

Antonio talked about how they:

• Increased revenue by going to Oracle Cloud, increased the user experience, increased NPS.
• Used AI, to predict network quality and performance.
• Taking advantage of what available to get ahead of the market.

Oracle Database Directions

After the keynote I headed to Andy Mendelsohn, Executive Vice President of Oracle Database Server Technologies.

He talked about converged Oracle database, Oracle Autonomous database and talked about the new Multicloud of Oracle Database at AWS, which Andy had alluded at his same session 2 years ago at Oracle CloudWorld 22!

He mentioned how Oracle is going back to core DNA, of we will run our database software anywhere! He explained how C-level make cloud decisions without speaking to the techies, then make a deal with a cloud provider, then tell the techies to use the credits but there no Oracle! ☹️ Now with the partnership, you can use Oracle at public cloud provider and use their credits! 😃

He finished off talking about the new ‘Select AI’ allowing you to query your data in natural language query and ‘AI Vector Search’ allowing for optimised searching of documents, images, patterns and data that have similar semantics.

Keynote: Oracle Vision and Strategy

Next I attended Larry Ellison, the chairman of the board and CTO of Oracle keynote.

He explained how customers use Multiple Clouds and Multiple Applications, but some customers want to move Oracle Exadata Databases and Applications to AWS, use Oracle Exadata Database Services inside AWS.

MultiCloud interconnect makes that possible, but not easy to use and not fast to run.

Thus the announcement of embedding Oracle Datacentres inside AWS, give highest performance, easy of use and fault-tolerant & scalability. Oracle Exadata Database runs inside AWS, going live in December 2024 in Phoenix.

Next Larry welcomed Matt Garman, CEO at Amazon Web Services (AWS) to the stage, which many years ago would been unheard of.

Larry briefly discussed the partnership, “how competitors are now partners”, bringing the best in class to the customer. Then he welcomed Andrew Zitney, Executive Vice President, Chief Technology Officer at State Street to join them on stage.

Andy explained:

• How they are a Big Oracle Exadata customer, but also a big AWS customer
• So Oracle Database@AWS is perfect for them and they very excited to use!
• This will mitigate latency issue, put the data where it’s needed.
• A 2 straw partnership with Oracle and AWS.
• Plan to go live in Virginia first.
• They are in 43 locations, looking to scale back to 30-40.
• Want to move from their data centres to AWS data centres with Oracle databases.

Larry then explained how the Open MultiCloud Era where services on difference clouds work gracefully together. They are open.

Larry then concluded his keynote talking about user identity, how biometrically authenticated login can do away with passwords! And network security with Zero Trust Packet Routing (ZPR).

Oracle ACE Lounge, Exhibition Hall and Evening Meal

The final part of the day was visiting the Oracle ACE lounge and meeting my fellow ACEs.

The Version 1 ACEs 😎 (Rishin Mitra, Graham Smith and myself)

Meeting new ACEs from around the world, here is Manish Naik from USA 👍🏽

Then a wonder around the exhibition hall, talking to vendors and partners, as well as collecting some SWAG 😎

With the very last part of the day, having a lovely italian meal with my colleagues from Version 1 😁 (Rishin Mitra, Charlie M. Yousef, Tim German and Jeremy Simmons)

Tomorrow will be day 2 of the conference. Looking forward to it 👍🏽

You can view my day 4 here.

If you found this blog post useful, please like as well as follow me through my various Social Media avenues available on the sidebar and/or subscribe to this Oracle blog via WordPress/e-mail.

Thanks

Zed DBA (Zahid Anwar)