Roels Blog

The last day of the conference already... The day started with a presentation on Datamodelling using JDev . The presenter showed how JDev could replace Designer for modelling. Imho JDev doesn't support logical modelling at all (he misused Java class models to represent a logical model), there is no repository and no relation between a logical and physical model. For just physical modelling JDev is fine, because all 11g database options are included. This modelling option will become available in SQL Dev also.... After that I went to see my esteemed colleague Peter Lorentzen's talk on How to make your APEX Application Secure . He stated that APEX is secure, but developers make it unsecure . Nice statement Peter! One of his (many) good advices was not to use XE for an APEX (open) production environment as XE is not patched and you will be vulnerable to all kinds of attacks. He also showed a script attack by adding a small "Hello World" script as a value for a database v...

The (rather ambitious) schedule for today was : Lost in JDeveloper by Sten Vesterli : Sten guided the (Forms experienced) audience in creating an ADF Swing Client App ofcourse declaratively (next to AJAX this is the buzzword of the conference : everything should be declarative, you can be a programmer when you' re able in controlling your mouse ;-) ). Programming Real Applications with APEX by Andrew Woodward : Again everything declarative but now using APEX instead of JDev. The point was: you can create simple applications faster than using Oracle Forms but when you need more advanced features you'll need to program Javascript and AJAX. But that's only temporarily, because in the next version(s) you also will be able to create AJAX components declaratively . Modelling on the cheap by Andrew Clarke (I chaired this one) : Andrew sketched out the pros and cons of different modelling tools - from whiteboards to (free) datamodelling tools. As far as he knows the best free da...

After yesterdays Blogger Meetup it was hard to start the day... The first session of the day was Sue Harper's talk on SQL Developer Latest Features . She mainly focussed on the new / enhanced features of version 1.5, that will be production somewhere (early?) 2008. To name some new features : external authentication (OPS$ users), browsing queues and Java, schema differences and schema copy, recall filters and a flashback query tab, formatter enhancements, your own code templates and drill down reports. With very new version SQL Developer looks more like the current TOAD version ;-). After that I visited a session about Building Rich UI with APEX and AJAX . It was pretty impressive what you can do with a combination of APEX and AJAX (look at ajaxpatterns.org . The presenter also showed the use of widgets of the jQuery UI library like an accordion and a fancy date picker ( jquery.com ). The next session about the Roadmap for legacy system migration I chaired. A solution for the up...

After a rough flight yesterday I arrived in Birmingham. The city has a complete Christmans atmosphere, as you might expect at this time of year. There even is a 'real' Frankfurter Christmas market with ' Beer und Bratwurst ' and hot wine - and lots and lots of other more or less Christmas related stuff. I made some pictures, but on my (new) laptop the drivers for the camera are not installed yet, so I'll add the pictures later on... This morning the UKOUG started with two keynotes on '30 Years of Oracle'. The one of Tom Kyte was amusing as ever. At that moment I realised that I volunteered to introduce him this afternoon, probably for an audience of over 1,000 people. I'm more nervous about that than about my own presentation! After that I went to an presentation on APEX 3.1 New Features . This version is already available on OTN (not for download, but to play with) and has a lot of interesting and nice looking features. For instance the end-user can dyn...

The first week of December I'm visiting the UKOUG in Birmingham. This is my first visit, and I will not only attend sessions, but also chairing a couple and even presenting one. Luckily my presentation is on the first day (Monday 15:20), so I can enjoy the rest of the conference without being nervous... My presentation is on the automatic transformation of Oracle Forms to Java, so if you're interested: come to the show in Birmingham (or the Pro4Pro in Amstelveen on December 11). I've got a very interesting - and busy - schedule for this week. And apart from this schedule I will visit the Blogger Meetup on Monday. And besides attending sessions I hope I can make the time and energy to (re)contact a lot of people I met in San Francisco last year or that I know of from the net only. I hope to meet you there! I will post some report back on this conference, so return later on. Monday 08:00 - 18:45 REGISTRATION OPEN 10:30 - 19:40 EXHIBITION OPEN 09:05 - 09:10 Welcome f...

From the 11g New Features Guide: "New in 11.1 is the ability to mark a PL/SQL function to indicate that its result should be cached to allow lookup, rather than recalculation, on the next access when the same parameter values are called. This function result cache saves significant space and time. Oracle does this transparently using the input actuals as the lookup key. The cache is system-wide so that all distinct sessions invoking the function benefits. If the result for a given set of actuals changes, you can use constructs to invalidate the cache entry so that it will be properly recalculated on the next access. This feature is especially useful when the function returns a value that is calculated from data selected from schema-level tables. For such uses, the invalidation constructs are simple and declarative. Concurrent, multi-user applications that use this feature experience better response times. Applications that implement a session-private scheme consume significantly l...

My company took part in the Oracle 11 g Beta test and I also ran some (small) test on the new PL/SQL features. One of them is that access to sequences is allowed in PL/SQL, so no need to "SELECT tst_seq.nextval INTO n FROM dual" anymore! DECLARE   n NUMBER; BEGIN   SELECT seq.nextval   INTO n   FROM dual; END; can now be coded as DECLARE   n NUMBER; BEGIN   n := seq.nextval; END; For "currval" the same solution is possible. So there is no need for a cursor anymore, but more important to me : the usability and readability of the PL/SQL is code is enhanced by this new feature.

In SQL Developer v1.2 the trigger tab for views is missing. You can add this tab (and many many others you can think of) by using User Defined Extensions. Create an XML file with the definition of the tab: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <items>   <item type="editor" node="ViewNode" vertical="true">     <title><![CDATA[Triggers]]></title>     <query>       <sql>         <![CDATA[select table_owner                 , trigger_name                 , trigger_type                 , triggering_event       ...

Yesterday the design environment (JDev) for WebCenter Suite was released. After the demo by Thomas Kurian at OOW2006 I was very curious about this new product. The WebCenter Suite is the first result of the Fusion stack: The Oracle Fusion developers needed it to build the Fusion apps. But now we can use it too! The WebCenter Framework (the runtime environment) will be available any day now. Using the Framework you can use out-of-the-box WebCenter Services, like Content Management, Search, Presense Server, Instant Messaging, Wiki and Forums. WebCenter supports building applications by putting small blocks of UI together. So after modular development in PL/SQL (what every developer should do), and modular development of services - using SOA - we can now develop modular UI blocks and put these all together to build a even more user friendly process driven work environment for the end-user. I hope I can spend some time in the near future to try out this new product. The development team is...

Today I discovered that Firefox crashes when I started up an Oracle Forms application using JInitiator. One thing I noticed that two JVM's were started (two icons showed up in the taskbar). After switching off Java inside Firefox (via Tools->Options->Content) everything works fine. So no need for IE anymore...