For the last one, the dominant industry gathering for years now has been Oracle Open World.

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Oracle Open World brings together like-minded database-focused attendees, and Strata brings together Big Data geeks!

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For the first time in the memory of most people in the enterprise computing and software business, Oracle Open World took a back seat to a whole new industry event, this one dedicated to the Cloud and to Big Data.

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Oracle first announced support for big data with its new Big Data Appliance and Oracle NoSQL database at the Open World conference, and was followed by Microsoft which announced Hadoop support for SQL Server 2012.

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By buying Sun, Oracle becomes the world's largest open-source company, prompting much debate among developers and users.

ECONOMIST: Computing

Oracle is launching on-demand versions of its apps, and also announced the Oracle Public Cloud last month at the Open World Conference.

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