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UKOUG Day 1

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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...

'MeThis 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 dynamically change reports by adding sorts, filters, computations, charts and colors - and save these reports for later use. The 3.1 versions should be available for production around March 2008.

The second session was about Forms Upgrade, Integration and Lifecycle using PITSS.CON : A repository based addition for Forms and Reports Development. To me, the most interesting part is that PITSS is extending PITTS.CON to extract business rules and the data access layer form Forms and put it in the database. The main reason to do so is to 'service enable' the Forms-business-logic, in order to open it up for other applications. Another use can be : An easy change of the (Forms) UI to another UI - but that's just my addition. Btw : PITSS.CON has some overlap with the Designer functionality, so using both products at the same time may be challenging....
'Tom
Now I just finished my own presentation about the transformation of Oracle Forms to Java. It all went very well. The room was filled for 2/3 with about 75 people (including Grant Ronald and Duncan Mills), I finished right on schedule and even got time to answer some questions. Now waiting for the introduction of Tom Kyte - who happens to sit right behind me in the Speaker Lounge at this moment.

The introduction of Tom went rather well. Luckily you don't see that much of the audience at such a large stage and with all those lights. Marco (of AMIS) took some pictures, I'll post them later on. Tom's session on 11g New Features for DBA's was also very good - even for a non-DBA like me. Some slide pics are here, here and here.

Later that evening the Blogger Meetup was held at a pub close to the ICC. It was nice to meet a lot of those 'virtual' persons in real life (again).

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