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OOW 2009 : Monday

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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!
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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
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