Oracle CEO Larry Ellison on Wednesday unveiled a public cloud service that will run its Fusion Applications and others, and while doing so delivered a withering broadside against competitors, with his harshest words for Salesforce.com.

Salesforce.com chairman and CEO, Marc Benioff will on Wednesday speak at a local restaurant in San Francisco, after his keynote at Oracle OpenWorld 2011 was cancelled by Oracle.

It can't be easy working for Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. Just ask John Fowler, the head of Oracle's systems business, who's spent the past two weeks trying to convince customers that Ellison didn't really mean it when he said Oracle is "phasing out" its x86 business.

Oracle's Exadata database machine can deliver the performance improvements the vendor claims, but also demands that IT shops and database administrators undergo a shift in thinking as well as attain new skills, a number of experts said this week at the OpenWorld conference in San Francisco.

Oracle is making the open-source MySQL database more stable and feature-rich through a shift in development philosophy, MySQL Vice President of Engineering Tomas Ulin said during a keynote address Monday at the OpenWorld conference in San Francisco.

Highlights and lowlights from this year's show: Cloud talk eclipsed by real-life rain, too many #oow09 tweets, not enough specifics about Fusion or Java plans, and an action-packed visit by California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Impressions from Oracle's annual get-together: Ellison disses IBM; Where are Fusion Apps?; Charles and Safra on Red Stack integration.

Oracle's annual gathering will have some foxes in the hen house and many recession-weary customers. Can Larry Ellison possibly top his recent rant on cloud computing? Will there be more answers than questions on the Fusion Apps Suite?