OOW2008 highlight

I know, I know - many will consider the launch of HP Oracle Exadata storage server as the highlight of OOW2008.
I agree - it looks pretty exiting if you are running a datawarehouse firing a gazillion pq slaves at it. It put a smile
on my face to see that one of the beta testers was the ABSA bank in South Africa as I had worked on their datawarehouse 8years ago.
My buddy Kugendran was one of the lead DBA's.

Anyway - *the* highlight for me was the fact that Oracle had gotten their cool back.
For years now - I think, it started around the last OOW in Europe - it was Paris in 2003 - Oracle have produced lame white T-shirts and polo shirts.
I don't know who's in charge of their clothing line (if you can call it that) - but wake up and smell the coffee... no self-respecting DBA dares showing up at work with a white and red t-shirt with a massive bulls-eye logo to top it off.
Clearly, from a marketing perspective, the goal of giving away (who would buy them?) such shirts, is that people would wear them and thus, promote your product.
It got even worse when they thought - 'hey - this fleece is so white and bright, let's make it completely red!'.
Now - unless there's an Alfa Romeo logo on that fleece ... who would wear it?

As an experiment, Doug Burns, tried on one of these Alfa red fleeces at OOW2007.
Clearly, as shown on the picture below, some people were utterly shocked.
The girl's reaction - on the right - tells it all (and no - she is not dancing ... she's is starting a sprint)