Pini Dibask reveals how Oracle Aces can benefit from attending Oracle OpenWorld

Oracle ACE Program is about community contributions. It's about doing such activities such as speaking in public events, conferences. It's about writing articles and publishing it in the blog posts. It's about helping other database professionals in their local developer community, answering questions, addressing their challenges. So in general, it's just about involvement, being the one who promotes new Oracle technologies, new Oracle features, always being up to date with the recent technologies, and helping others. What we're seeing today in the market today, the main trends, are growth of open source databases, so both PostgreSQL and MySQL. We're seeing a huge increasing in their demand. Many of our customer base say that they are using Oracle MySQL database. Other use PostgreSQL. And it's mainly about cost reduction. Many organizations are looking to reduce the amount of cost they spend on databases. But we're still seeing Oracle database dominating the database business. It's still the most popular one, according to DB-Engines. It's actually growing in terms of its popularity. But we are seeing some shifting to new open source databases, as I mentioned, PostgreSQL and MySQL. In terms of NoSQL databases, which are also related to non-relational, such as MongoDB and Cassandra, they're also being very popular right now. Their trend is growing in terms of popularity. It's mainly about addressing some of the traditional challenges in Oracle Database, which are more likely to scalability in flexibility of data, although I must say that Oracle did some enhancements in the last releases, which are related to Sharding, to address scalability changes, also, in terms of flexibility in how Oracle supports JSON and JSON-related operations. So I would say that although there used to be some challenges with Oracle in the past when it comes to flexibility and scalability of the data, I think that Oracle did a great job in addressing those challenges. And now, basically, Oracle can address all the market needs and all the different application use cases, even when it comes to scalability and flexibility of data. I think the best advantage or the best thing about being in Oracle OpenWorld for Oracle ACE, but in general, is the fact that you have an access to the Oracle developers. You have an access to the product managers. So you can get live demos here in the demo ground for all of the new features, all of the new technologies which are related to Sharding, Data Guard, Exadata. And as an Oracle Ace, you always would like to be up to date with the recent technologies and features. So the fact that you have the access to those new technologies, and you can speak directly to the people who develop it, you are always up to date with the recent technologies, and you can contribute your knowledge with others. You can do that in speaking events, in blog posting, in articles. So I think the Oracle OpenWorld is the best place to do that, because you have the access to all of that knowledge, and you can also see all the other ACE members. So you can see what are their current challenges? What are they doing today in their day to day business? And based on that, you can get external validation of what's happening in the market. And we in Quest, we help those customers to address those challenges. And by having the access to understand what are the current challenges of the other ACE community members, we can address that in our products, like Quest, SharePlex, Foglight, and Toad, to make sure we help the customers to address all of their challenges.