That was down five or six thousand on last year, but most companies would be thrilled to get 6,000 showing up at a corporate event. Few can pack out a convention centre with the equivalent of a sports stadium audience.

But the audience didn't exactly get a cliffhanger event. Though the conference unfolded with military precision as usual, there wasn't a lot of beef in the burger. By OpenWorld standards, it was a fairly bland event, with few chunky announcements.

In large part, that was due to the European Commission. Thanks to its leisurely deliberations over competition implications, OpenWorld was deprived of what should have been its centrepiece, Oracle's (planned) acquisition of hardware giant Sun Microsystems (see panel). Company executives - even the famously mouthy chief executive Larry Ellison - had to remain cautious about making any comments on the ongoing negotiations.

Loic le Guisquet, new executive vice-president of Oracle EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) batted away an Irish Times query on the situation and even Ellison limited his comments to a mild reiteration that Sun - which cut 3,000 jobs this week - was losing $100 million a week due to the delay.

Nonetheless, Ellison made sure Sun was at the heart of OpenWorld. Sun co-founder and former chief executive Scott McNealy kicked off the conference, giving one of the best talks during a special Sun keynote event. Ellison also saved one of the show's major announcements - of a second iteration of its Exadata storage server, built by Sun - for his closing keynote.

Still, the fact that Ellison turned a third of his keynote time over to California "Governator" Arnold Schwarzeneggar's paean to the state's tech companies Wednesday indicated he didn't have a huge amount to say or announce.

However, as always, what he did have to say was frequently pointed and amusing, such as his promise to pay $10 million to anyone who could prove an application didn't run twice as fast on an Exadata 2 compared to an IBM server.