ODTUG: Thursday and the day after...

The last day of this great conference had "only" three presentation slots. The first one I attended, but honestly I didn't pay that much of an attention. I was writing my previous post at that time and I was rather familiar with the subject "Forms to APEX conversion". And I totally agree with the conclusions: Converting simple Forms is easy, but the more complex the Forms, the more work it will take to convert it to APEX!

The second one was called "APEX Stimulus Package". In fact it was more or less a list of things you have to consider to improve the performance of your APEX application - also due to the fact that most demo's didn't work because of a failing internet connection.

To name some of the tips: Reduce images sizes and use png instead of gif or jpg; check the Apache log for errors and resolve them; add a favicon.ico; watch out with pagination schemes; tune your Page 0 processes; use Page and Region caching where appropriate; minify javascipt and css files; externalize javascript and css files; refactor PL/SQL etc. Some of the tips where obvious, some of them quite useful.

The last one of this week was rather cool. Roy McLean showed how to use Oracle Data Mining in combination with APEX. I never used the Data Mining stuff before, and you might need a degree in maths to use it properly, but the things you can do are rather amazing. For instance you can predict what probably will happen. As an example Roy showed a sort of Helpdesk application where a call was assigned to a certain (pool of) engineers by the text that you entered when describing the problem!

After the show was over I paid a visit to Obama's house, the Washington Monument and checked out the West side of The Mall.
The day after. Friday, I had until 10PM before my flight was leaving, so I visited the Capitol and "did" the East side of The Mall. The weather was fine (cooler than at home!) and it was good fun.
As in previous years I liked ODTUG very much - the best conference in the world. Hope to be there again next year in Long Beach, California.

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