Sun Microsystems and Coherence

So cool.  Just saw the latest Sun Microsystems home page.

Sun have just released their first in depth Oracle Coherence blue-print (white paper) documenting the architecture, performance and scalability impacts seen in a large application.  As a comparison, the document outlines the performance and scalability of an application both with and without using Oracle Coherence.  Apart from the performance numbers (which are obviously good), their independent tests demonstrate near perfect linear scalability to over 80 servers and a 40% resource reduction on the database.  The numbers are very consistent.

The lesson here:  Predictable Performance and Predictable Scalability beats plain old scalability, every time.

Oracle Open World 2009: Application Grids

It’s hard to believe but another year has passed and it’s time again for Oracle Open World in San Francisco. Like last year, it’s going to be big.  Apparently San Francisco is bracing itself for an influx of 85,000 or so delegates, not all talking about Coherence obviously, but there will be a lot more than last year. A lot more!

In terms of agenda the Coherence presentations, panels, tutorials and hands-on-labs all appear as part of the Application Grid theme – think of Application Grids as fully managed and flexible infrastructure for running applications, everything from the operating system to the top of the application stack (including open source stacks).  Perhaps “private cloud” might be a way of thinking about it (typically how our customers are talking about it).

There are over 80 sessions on the topic of Application Grids, covering everything from WebLogic, Tuxedo, JRockit, Enterprise Management, Virtualization and Coherence.  There are over a dozen customer presentations.  Nearly half of these sessions are focusing on Coherence.

Like last year everything is being “demoed” in the DEMOgrounds, the Fusion Middleware Pavillion and the Oracle Technology Network lounge.  All of the areas are staffed by the actual engineers, product managers and/or executives from the product divisions.

So if you’re in San Francisco, be sure to drop by the Coherence booth (and others) to say hi.  We’ve got some really cool demos cooking. We can’t wait to show them off!

A quick guide to Application Grid sessions is available at http://www.oracle.com/goto/appgridopenworld, or if you like as a PDF.

Hope to see you there.

Next London Coherence SIG: Autumn Edition (29th October)

Here’s the current agenda for the next London Coherence SIG event, to occur on the 29th of October, from 2pm to 6pm at the Oracle London Office.

[Updated] Registration is now open at http://www.ukoug.org/calendar/show_event.jsp?id=4563

1. Coherence and Incubator Update
Noah Arliss: Coherence Engineering, United States

In this talk we’ll look at some of the new features in Coherence 3.5.2 and changes since 3.4 and 3.5.  We’ll also outline some of the feature themes for the next set of releases.

2. Simplifying (Server Side) Event Driven Architectures
Brian Oliver: Coherence Engineering, United Kingdom

In this talk we look at the results of the “Seismic” research project – a new way to develop server-side event-driven system with Coherence, without using Backing Maps and other custom extensions to Coherence.

3. Processing Pattern Revisited
Noah Arliss: Coherence Engineering, United States

We’ve done a lot of work since the first release of the Processing Pattern.  In this talk we’ll look at some of the changes and new features to enable “compute-grid” style development with Coherence.

4. Rapid Talk: Building GUIs with Coherence, SWT and JFaces
Brian Oliver: Coherence Engineering, United Kingdom

In this rapid talk (no slides) we’ll look at techniques for simplifying the construction of GUI’s for Coherence when using SWT/JFaces.

5. Rapid Talk: How to use the Command Line utility
Brian Oliver: Coherence Engineering, United Kingdom

In this rapid talk (again, no slides) we’ll look at how to use the Command Line utility, how to perform queries, extract values, define filters and repeat commands.

Hope to see you there!

– Brian