A keynote covering Oracle's future strategy for Java, as well as a technical Java keynote, are scheduled for Sunday. Later in the week, a keynote covering Java community issues is on tap. This is all on top of some 400 planned sessions.

Ellison also revealed during last week's earnings call that Oracle will announce a new IaaS (infrastructure as a service) offering at OpenWorld, but didn't mention many details.

The CEO may provide more information on Sunday, but it seems more likely that the nitty-gritty details will come on Wednesday during a keynote by Fowler and other executives.

One general question that may be answered is whether Oracle is interested in competing head-to-head with the likes of Amazon Web Services and Rackspace for all sorts of IaaS business, or mostly planning to offer the IaaS to existing customers who would ordinarily use those other services.