Skip to main content

OOW 2009 : Monday

By
Still suffering from the jet lag I woke up at 6 AM today. Due to all kinds of other 'obligations' I only attended one session today about "How to get 10x improvement of your PL/SQL Application performance time". And that one was all about TimesTen (a.k.a. IMDB - In Memory Database Cache). The session started with a small - alas pre-recorded - demo that indeed showed a 10x performance benefit. But before you all start to move all your applications to TimesTen, be aware that there are 'some' limitations:
- Not all standard PL/SQL packages are available in TimesTen
- You can't call PL/SQL from SQL
- You can't use triggers in TimesTen
- You can't join between tables in TimesTen and the 'real' database
So due to this limitations, you can't run all PL/SQL applications (like APEX!) in a TimesTen database. However it would be extremely cool if you could use TimesTen for APEX (imagine APEX running 10x faster!). So maybe somewhere in the future, but not with the current release.
Next a had a (long) lunch with 16 Logica attendees from all over the world, very well organized by my US colleagues.
After that, I headed to the demogrounds, to take a close look at APEX 4.0. Mark and Anthony where so kind to show me a (private) deep dive into the new features, like enhanced tabular forms (with field validations), Team Development (a sort of integrated packaged application for registering enhancements and bugs, assignments etc), Dynamic Actions and Plug-Ins. This all looks very promising and opens up a whole new set of functionality, that would require a lot of handcraft in the current version. APEX 4.0 is (still) planned for production somewhere in 2010 (I hope it will be in the first quarter!).
Next I went to a hotel where a bus picked me up for a ride to the HP Pavilion in San Jose to see my first ice hockey game: San Jose Sharks v.s Phoenix Coyotes. Very nice to see that sport live in an American ambiance! Thanks to my French colleagues for organizing this!
At the moment of writing this - Tuesday morning - it is very rainy and windy in San Francisco. Rather different from my previous visits at OOW, where the sun always shined... Time to get my umbrella!
Labels:

Comments

Rutger said…
Hey Roel,

Apex 10 times faster? Is that even possible :P Nice to hear it is rainy over there, because the sun is shining in this part of the world... Too bad there's no Apex 4 demo ground though :) I expect a full report when you get back X)

Greets
11:10 am
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Filtering in the APEX Interactive Grid

By
Remember Oracle Forms? One of the nice features of Forms was the use of GLOBAL items. More or less comparable to Application Items in APEX. These GLOBALS where often used to pre-query data. For example you queried Employee 200 in Form A, then opened Form B and on opening that Form the Employee field is filled with that (GLOBAL) value of 200 and the query was executed. So without additional keys strokes or entering data, when switching to another Form a user would immediately see the data in the same context. And they loved that. In APEX you can create a similar experience using Application Items (or an Item on the Global Page) for Classic Reports (by setting a Default Value to a Search Item) and Interactive Reports (using the  APEX_IR.ADD_FILTER  procedure). But what about the Interactive Grid? There is no APEX_IG package ... so the first thing we have to figure out is how can we set a filter programmatically? Start with creating an Interactive Grid based upon the good o...
1 comment
Read more

apex_application.g_f0x array processing in Oracle 12

By
If you created your own "updatable reports" or your custom version of tabular forms in Oracle Application Express, you'll end up with a query that looks similar to this one: then you disable the " Escape special characters " property and the result is an updatable multirecord form. That was easy, right? But now we need to process the changes in the Ename column when the form is submitted, but only if the checkbox is checked. All the columns are submitted as separated arrays, named apex_application.g_f0x - where the "x" is the value of the "p_idx" parameter you specified in the apex_item calls. So we have apex_application.g_f01, g_f02 and g_f03. But then you discover APEX has the oddity that the "checkbox" array only contains values for the checked rows. Thus if you just check "Jones", the length of g_f02 is 1 and it contains only the empno of Jones - while the other two arrays will contain all (14) rows. So for ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Stop using validations for checking constraints !

By
 If you run your APEX application - like a Form based on the EMP table - and test if you can change the value of Department to something else then the standard values of 10, 20, 30 or 40, you'll get a nice error message like this: But it isn't really nice, is it? So what do a lot of developers do? They create a validation (just) in order to show a nicer, better worded, error message like "This is not a valid department".  And what you then just did is writing code twice : Once in the database as a (foreign key) check constraint and once as a sql statement in your validation. And we all know : writing code twice is usually not a good idea - and executing the same query twice is not enhancing your performance! So how can we transform that ugly error message into something nice? By combining two APEX features: the Error Handling Function and the Text Messages! Start with copying the example of an Error Handling Function from the APEX documentation. Create this function ...
Post a Comment
Read more