Tom Kyte's prequel to Guru4Pro

Yesterday over 100 Pro's attended Guru Tom's session on '11 Things about 11g'. But in the hours before that session a small number (about 18) of persons had the honor of listening and discussing with the master himself. As a guide he used an extensive version of his 'Worst Practices' presentation. During - and after - the presentation there was a lot more Q&A than I've experienced in regular sessions - of course due to the small scale of this session.
On a question about the new features and enhancements of 11gR2 Tom told that there will be no export functionality anymore in R2 (import will be available though). For moving data from one instance to another you should use datapump or SQL Developer or APEX. Also he explained a little more about the Online Application Upgrade. This feature will use invisible indexes, cross edition triggers and (a maximum of) two versions of PL/SQL programs and views (tables are not versionable). It sounds like it is not a black box feature, but needs some programming to get things working. By the way, in 11gR1 this functionality is already available and you can turn it on using some hidden initialization parameter (I don't know which). You can see the column edition_name is there in the all_objects view..... 11gR2 is expected to be available in 2009Q1!
For all APEX developers: Tom, as expected from a database man, is truly an APEX supporter - he mentions the power of APEX a lot during his presentations!

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Fix Interactive Report headers issue when using a Region Display Selector

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How to create neatly formatted Excel documents using PL/SQL?

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Refresh selected row(s) in an Interactive Grid

In my previous post I blogged about pushing changed rows from the dabatase into an Interactive Grid . The use case I'll cover right here is probably more common - and therefore more useful! Until we had the IG, we showed the data in a report (Interactive or Classic). Changes to the data where made by popping up a form page, making changes, saving and refreshing the report upon closing the dialog. Or by clicking an icon / button / link in your report that makes some changes to the data (like changing a status) and ... refresh the report. That all works fine, but the downsides are: The whole dataset is returned from the server to the client - again and again. And if your pagination size is large, that does lead to more and more network traffic, more interpretation by the browser and more waiting time for the end user. The "current record" might be out of focus after the refresh, especially by larger pagination sizes, as the first rows will be shown. Or (even wors...

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