VirtaThon

July 16-21 | Registration for VirtaThon 2011 is 100% FREE!
Attend4Free! 100% Virtual - No Travel Required!
Concept, Genesis & Virtual Reality
Attend, participate & learn cutting edge knowledge from recognized domain experts from all over the world: All within the realm of your broadband connection at the largest Independent "Virtual Conference" for the Oracle, Java & MySQL Communities. Aimed at a global audience, VirtaThon was conceived to revolutionize Online Conferencing, focusing on the core goal of facilitating the inexpensive dissemination of expert knowledge to the masses.
Almost everyone of us would like to attend world-class physical conference events but, given these globally tough economic times that we live in, can we afford the costs of attendance, travel, time-off, lodging and such? How about attending a LIVE virtual conference from wherever you choose to be in the world?
The biggest prohibiting reasons in attending physical Professional Conferences translate into various inhibiting factors such as travel, time-off, lodging, not to mention the attendance fees that can easily run into the thousands of dollars. VirtaThon bridges this gap and makes it incredibly easy to attend a 6-day Conference event from the comfort of your PC. All you need is a broadband Internet connect and voilĂ , you are right there: Attending 100+ cutting-edge expert-level sessions and interacting/benefiting from world renowned experts in the Oracle, Java & MySQL domains.  
Best of all, Registration for VirtaThon 2011 is 100% FREE!

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hon spans a world-wide global audience: Sessions will be broadcast LIVE favorable to all time-zones, making it easy for residents in ALL geographical regions to attend VirtaThon.

Conference Advisory Committee
bertscalzoOracle ACE Dr. Bert Scalzo works as a Database Domain Expert for Quest Software and a member of the TOAD Development team. He has worked with Oracle databases for well over two decades. Mr. Scalzo's work history includes time at both Oracle Education and Oracle Consulting. He holds several Oracle Masters certifications and an extensive academic background - including a BS, MS and PhD in Computer Science, an MBA, plus insurance industry designations. He is an accomplished speaker and has presented at numerous Oracle conferences and user groups - including OOW, ODTUG, IOUG, OAUG, RMOUG, BrainSurface and many others. His key areas of DBA interest are Data Modeling, Database Benchmarking, Database Tuning & Optimization, "Star Schema" Data Warehouses, Linux and VMware. He has written many articles, papers and blogs - including for Oracle Technology Network (OTN), Oracle Magazine, Oracle Informant, PC Week (eWeek), Dell Power Solutions Magazine, The LINUX Journal, LINUX.com, Oracle FAQ, Ask Toad and Toad World. Mr. Scalzo has written 10 books.
arupnanda Oracle ACE Director Arup Nanda was given the prestigious Oracle Magazine's "DBA of the Year" award in 2003. He has been working in all aspects of database administration including Modeling, Security, PL/SQL, Performance Assessment, RMAN, Data Guard, RAC and many other technologies. Arup is the author of the extremely popular Oracle Database 10g: Top 20 Features for DBAs series on OTN (as well as several other technical articles). He is a regular and active figure within the Oracle Speaking Circuit and has presented worldwide at many conferences including Oracle Open World, COLLABORATE & others. Arup works as the Chief Database Architect for the chain of Starwood Hotels & Resorts. Arup is a member of the OAK Table Network and an Editor of the SELECT Journal. He has written over 300 articles and is the co-author of four books.
mikeault Oracle ACE Mike Ault has been working with Oracle products since 1990. He has published over 24 books as an author or co-author related to Oracle since 1994. Mike is a frequent, highly rated presenter at local, Regional, National and International Oracle conferences and has worked extensively with Oracle technologies since Version 6. Mike has published numerous magazine article and white papers dealing with Oracle database installation, performance and management topics. Mike has worked in the aerospace, drug, communications and consulting fields dealing with Oracle issues. Mike currently works for Texas Memory Systems, Inc. as their Oracle Guru. 
lewiscunningham Oracle ACE Director Lewis Cunningham has two decades of multi-vendor and open source database experience in a variety of industries and capacities and has worked with Oracle since 1993 including various Cloud Computing platforms. He is an Oracle Certified Professional, Certified PL/SQL Developer, a published author, a frequent conference speaker and a Database Architect. He is a member of ODTUG, IOUG and ACM. Lewis's specialties revolve around databases, data warehousing, business intelligence and most anything having to do with databases. He is the author of  "SQL DML - The SQL Starter Series" and "EnterpriseDB: The Definitive Reference".
davidkoelleJava Rockstar David Koelle works as a Technical Project Leader at Charles River Analytics. He is the Author of JFugue, an open source Java API for music programming. He architected and led the development of a Social Network Analysis library including initiating and conducting novel research in Social Network Analysis, and developed techniques to reason about social networks to derive insight.  He is an accomplished speaker resulting in 3 JavaOne Rock Star Awards, and integral in a Duke's Choice Award for the innovative use of Java. He is the author of "The Alphanum Algorithm" for sorting strings with numbers in natural order; linked from CodingHorror.com, StackOverflow.com, and other sites. He has also authored "The Complete Guide to JFugue".
mattwarmanJava Rockstar Matt Warman is a 20-year veteran of the IT industry, has been using both Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) and Java Platform, Standard Edition (Java SE) since 1998. He has developed web and desktop applications for clients in various industries, including the airline and banking fields. He was a tester for Java Studio Creator, and was the first Creator Hero, highlighting his emergency responder application. He is currently a Java trainer, presenter, and consultant in the Cincinnati area for STAR BASE Consulting and the owner of JFrets, an open-source guitar teaching and tablature creation application. He is also a guitar player for The Stone Bunnies and bass player for G.P.S.
guyharrison Oracle ACE & MySQL Evangelist Guy Harrison is a director of Research and Development at Quest Software, and has over 20 years of experience in database design, development, administration, and optimization. He is the author of multiple books, articles and presentations on database technology. Guy is the architect of Quest's Spotlight® family of diagnostic products and has led the development of Quests Toad® for Cloud Database. Along with other authored/published books, Guy is the author of the Oracle Performance Survival Guide (Prentice Hall, 2009) and MySQL Stored Procedure Programming (OReilly with Steven Feuerstein) .
brianbexhuff Oracle ACE Director Brian "Bex" Huff is the Chief Software Architect at Bezzotech, an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) consulting firm. Previously a senior Java developer at Stellent, he now specializes in the Oracle Content Management stack (formerly Stellent technology). He has worked with Service-Oriented Architectures since 1999, and is passionate about integrating ECM into new and existing systems. He is very active in the online user groups and speaks at ECM conferences. In his spare time, he blogs about lifehacks and new technology trends. He is the author of 2 books on Oracle Enterprise Content Management. 
 colincharlesMySQL Evangelist Colin Charles is a Director at Grok Sdn Bhd, Advisor at Open Ocean Capital, Council Member (Open Source and Open Standards) at Technopreneurs Association Malaysia (TeAM), Council Member at Malaysian National Computer Confederation (MNCC), Conference Chair - O'Reilly MySQL Conference & Expo at O'Reilly Media, Community Marketing Contact/Team Lead MS Project at OpenOffice.org and  the Chief Evangelist at Monty Program Ab. He has been working with MySQL technologies since 2005. Colin has worked as a Community Engineer at MySQL AB. Before joining MySQL, he worked actively on the Fedora and OpenOffice.org projects. He currently spends a lot of his time making community-based projects happy using the MySQL database.
dariolaverdeJava Evangelist Dario Laverde is a Java Architect, Consultant, Author, Lecturer, and JUG leader based in NYC with his specialties being Enterprise, Desktop and Embedded/Mobile areas focusing on Android. He has been developing with Java technologies since 1995. Dario is the founder of the Skylight1 project. Amongst his various professional roles, he has worked as an Android Instructor at PACE University, Social Networking (Web-based IM) Developer/Architect at RadiusIM and VP at Playlink. He is the founder and architect at mediatracker.com. Dario leads the NYCJava JUG and co-leads the NYC-GTUG.
danhotka Oracle ACE Director Dan Hotka is a Training Specialist with over 32 years in the computer industry, over 27 years of experience with Oracle products. His experience with the Oracle RDBMS dates back to the Oracle V4.0 days.  Dan’s latest book is the Oracle SQL Tuning: A Close Look at Explain Plans by Amazon.  He is also the author of TOAD Handbook by Pearson, SQL Developer Handbook by Oracle Press, Oracle9i Development By Example, and Oracle8i from Scratch by Que and has co-authored 7 other popular books including the Database Oracle10g Linux Administration by Oracle Press. He is frequently published in Oracle trade journals, and regularly speaks at Oracle conferences and user groups around the world.
 kaiyu Oracle ACE Director Kai Yu has been working with Oracle Technologies since 1995. He specializes in Oracle Database, RAC, Oracle E-Business Suite and Oracle VM with extensive experiences on X86 servers, SAN storage system, network and Linux. He works in the Dell Oracle Solutions Engineering Lab as a senior engineer/architect. He has authored many whitepapers and given numerous presentations at major oracle conferences worldwide such as OOW, Collaborate, UKOUG, OOW Asia. He was the president of IOUG Oracle RAC SIG and featured in Oracle Magazine Sept/Oct 2010 issue. Kai was the IOUG RAC performance tuning bootcamp manager and HA Bootcamp manager at Collaborate 2010 and 2011. He received the 2011 OAUG Innovator of Year award for his innovative work on virtualizing Oracle EBS Systems. He maintains an active Oracle Blog at http://kyuoracleblog.wordpress.com/.
 vinodhaval Oracle ACE & Magazine's 2010 DBA of the Year Award Winner Vinod Haval works at Bank of America as Vice-President - Database Product Management, responsible for Database Product Inception, Product Engineering, Product deployment, Product Marketing and Communication. Vinod has more than 13 years of IT experience including over 10 years using Oracle products and has worked on a variety of database platforms for small to very large implementations, designing databases for high volume, machine critical, real time OLTP systems. His expertise is with Oracle Exadata, Oracle Real Application Clusters, Oracle ASM, Data Guard and so on. He is Vice President of of the IOUG Oracle Exadata SIG and is a regular speaker at industry conferences, including the Oracle Open World, IOUG Collaborate and many more. He was winner of the Oracle innovation award in 2009 and runners up of Oracle CIO's Iron Man contest.
riyajshamsudeen Oracle ACE Riyaj Shamsudeen has 18+ years of experience in Oracle with 16+ years as an Oracle DBA/Oracle Applications DBA. He is the principal DBA behind ora!nternals (http://www.orainternals.com - performance/recovery/EBS11i consulting company ). He specializes in RAC, performance tuning and database internals and frequently blogs about them in http://orainternals.wordpress.com . He has authored many articles such as internals of locks, internals of hot backups, redo internals etc. He also teaches in community colleges in Dallas such as North lake college and El Centro College. He is also a proud member of OakTable network. He is the co-author of "Expert Oracle Practices" and "Pro Oracle SQL". 
syedjaffarhussain Oracle ACE Syed Jaffar Hussain has over 18 years of IT experience including 10+ years as a Senior Oracle DBA. He is the first and only Oracle 10g Certified Master in Saudi Arabia. He currently works as the chief database architect at one of the largest financial institutions in th Middle East. His expertise includes Very Large Database (VLDB) High-Availability database environments and deployments. Syed is a Oracle RAC Certified Expert, Oracle 8i, 9i, 10g and 11g OCP DBA. He is an active speaker and a regular contributor within the online Oracle freelists, forums and blogosphere. He is the co-author of the "Oracle 11g R1/R2 RAC Essentials" book.  
tariqfarooq Oracle ACE Tariq Farooq is an Oracle Technologist/Architect and has been working with various Oracle Technologies for 16+ years. He is the founder of BrainSurface, a Social Networking & IT Collaboration site for the Oracle & Java Community. Tariq is a Oracle RAC Certified Expert and also an active community organizer, speaker, author, forumizer and blogger. He has played multiple high-profile roles in Project Management, Maximum Availability Architure/High Availability Solutions, Real Application Clusters, Database Disaster Recovery/Automatic Failover Strategies, Data Warehousing, Business Intelligence, Performance Tuning, Systems & Application/Infrastructure Analysis & Large-Scale Application/Product Development. He is the author of 100+ articles and is in the process of writing multiple books on Oracle RAC and Oracle VM.