How Oracle World Is Just Like Thanksgiving and New Year'sHow Oracle World Is Just Like Thanksgiving and New Year's

I've been to several Oracle Open World events, and I've experienced more than 50 Thanksgivings and New Year's Eves. But it took a cab driver from a tiny country on the other side of the world-Nepal, to be exact-to draw the connection between the three.When he first mentioned in the taxi that Oracle World is just like Thanksgiving and New Year's, a lot of different ideas went through my preconditioned head: I'm not sure SAP sees the Thanksgiving link, or does the experience give people hangovers, or do attendees walk away making firm but short-term resolutions, such as never coming back or never using anything but Exadata as long as they live?

But he explained that the connection is taxi driver-centric: for San Francisco cabbies, the week-long Oracle World event is right up there with New Year's Eve and Thanksgiving as the best business days of the year-and Oracle World is even better than New Year's because it's just a one-day thing, Oracle World lasts all week.

And sure enough, anybody within a Tiger Woods drive of the Moscone Center last evening might have thought it was New Year's: bars and restaurants jammed with attendees bellying up to overflow bars or slipping in to private functions, and some generally dazed and confused pedestrians trying to figure out where to go.

There was some giving of thanks as well because weather forecasters, who never miss a chance to use a very slim probability to scare as many people as possible, were whipping up fears over the weekend that San Francisco would be hit by a typhoon-not a heavy storm, not severe showers, but a most un-SF-like typhoon-that would drench the city with 8 inches of rain and winds so strong they might detach the entire state of California from the mainland.

But then people woke up today and realized the typhoon didn't happen, but that an even more unlikely event is still in the making for Oracle Open World: Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff, one of the chief skewerers of Oracle's business model and industry outlook, would be addressing Oracle World attendees on the unlikely subject of how they can have "the best of both worlds" via a combination of the two companies' products with Dell as the go-between.

So I thank my new friend from Nepal for his insights linking Oracle World with Thanksgiving and New Year's Eve: three American institutions that generate strong emotions, bring lots of people together, and sometimes lead to hangovers.