Last week's Oracle Open World event reminded me just how big Oracle has become. The conference pulled 43,000 people into Moscone Center and shut down traffic for several blocks around the convention center. While I would not say it was on scale with Comdex in its heyday, it was pretty impressive to see so many people attending a conference around just one company. Admittedly, this mega-event combines conferences Last week’s Oracle Open World event reminded me just how big Oracle has become. The conference pulled 43,000 people into Moscone Center and shut down traffic for several blocks around the convention center. While I would not say it was on scale with Comdex in its heyday, it was pretty impressive to see so many people attending a conference around just one company. Admittedly, this mega-event combines conferences from the many acquisitions Oracle has done in the last few years, such as PeopleSoft, Siebel and others.There were some open source announcements at the conference, including Oracle’s news of their Oracle VM offering, based on the Xen hypervisor also used by Sun, Citrix, Red Hat and pretty much everyone other than Microsoft and VMWare. CEO Larry Ellison was positive on the progress made by Oracle Unbreakable Linux, though with only 1500 customers, I’m not sure that it’s making a dent in any existing Linux businesses. It’s a good offering for current Oracle customers who want one-stop shopping, but I don’t think too many companies beyond Oracle have done much in the way of supporting their variant of Red Hat. (And of course, that’s a chicken and egg problem. Not enough users means no incentive for ISVs to test.)Unfortunately, I missed the one open source panel that would have been interesting. Luckily, it’s been blogged by Matt Anslett from the451 Group. (BTW, if you’re not familiar with the451Group, I think they are the best analysts in the business. They get IT and they get open source. A rare combination!) Scale matters in IT, especially at the infrastructure level. As Larry Ellison has said “they get big” over at Oracle. If you take away the marketing fluff, it’s clear that Oracle understands scale. And being big doesn’t necessarily mean boring. There are plenty of interesting technical issues involved in building large scale systems. Oracle is a partner with MySQL on the InnoDB storage engine and they’ve brought a lot of expertise to the InnoBase team to improve scale-out in the latest MySQL 5.1 release.One nice side effect of a big conference is that they also get big-name talent at their customer appreciation party. As Lenny Kravitz said in his keynote, I mean, late night gig, “I don’t know who’s putting on this show, but y’all know how to throw a party.” And I have the photos and videos to prove it. Special thanks to Ken Jacobs (Dr. DBA) from Oracle for the hospitality! Open Source