Oracle OpenWorld 2010 Largest, Greenest Oracle Event Ever

Oracle OpenWorld attendees take San Francisco by storm, but some JavaOne folks feel slighted about accommodations despite this being a "green" conference.

SAN FRANCISCO-It's official. This year's Oracle OpenWorld is the largest conference in Oracle's history, with more than 41,000 attendees, the company said.

Opening up the conference here with a series of statistics, Judith Sim, Oracle's senior vice president and chief marketing officer, said the show has drawn attendees from 116 countries, which means 59 percent of the world's countries are accounted for.

Moreover, this year marks the first time Oracle is holding JavaOne in conjunction with Oracle OpenWorld 2010. Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems last year and now owns Java and must support the Java faithful. And though JavaOne is scaled down from the mega events they used to be when Sun ran them, it is still a formidable event.

Overall, Oracle's presence is huge in San Francisco this week. The combined Oracle OpenWorld, JavaOne and Oracle Develop conferences cover the whole of the Moscone convention center complex-North, South and West-as well as, for the JavaOne sessions and exhibits, the Hilton San Francisco and other local hotels. The city is packed with conference-goers, adding to the coffers of restaurants, taxi drivers and hotels, among others, which began charging premium prices as rooms began to get scarce.

Indeed, the sprawl of the event has annoyed some of the Java faithful who were used to trekking out to San Francisco in the spring or early summer to spend a week boning up on the latest in Java, not schlepping to the city competing for rooms and commodities with a much larger Oracle OpenWorld crowd, only to be relegated to the Hilton and not the Moscone-the scene of every other JavaOne event until now.

In a tweet, Dion Almaer, co-director of developer relations at Palm and a stalwart JavaOne attendee (he cut his IT eye teeth on enterprise Java), said: "JavaOne at the Hilton, not Moscone, is painful. At least it exists, but I will go Devoxx instead." Devoxx, formerly known as JavaPolis, is an annual European Java conference organized by the Belgian Java User Group (BeJUG) that has become increasingly important in Java circles over the past few years. Oracle is a sponsor of this year's Devoxx event, but it can ill afford to have key Java heads defect to another event because they feel slighted.

Sim said Oracle OpenWorld will have more than 2,300 hours of content, amounting to 58 weeks of information. In addition, there have been 67,346 hotel room nights leading up and extending into the show. Moreover, there are 3,622 Oracle experts on hand at the event to help those who need it.

In addition to that, Sim said Oracle will serve 59,000 lunches and has laid more than 275 miles of network cable.

The conference should make green aficionados happy, as Oracle claims it is the largest sustainable event, with a 76 percent reduction in paper used over last year's event. There also will be 800,000 gallons of water saved and 140 tons of waste diverted from landfills, and 60 percent of all the food to be consumed at the event is organic and from local growers, Sim said.