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Showing posts from 2011

APEX app running native on iPhone - the details

A (rather long) time ago, I wrote a blog post showing a demo of an APEX application running native on an iPhone . Now, finally, the moment is there to explain how I did it ;-) The key part of this demo, is the use of PhoneGap . PhoneGap "wraps" any HTML5 code, thereby giving you access to the native API's of your device. This solution is also used by the upcoming ADF Mobile solution, but can already be used now for any HTML5 web application..including your APEX application. Start with downloading the PhoneGap sources from their site and install it in your development environment (I used Apple's Xcode) - see the documentation on the PhoneGap site on the how-to. Within Xcode, you'll get an index.html, which is the starting point of your application. In this, simplified, example, my index.html only contains the following code: <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <title> APEX DEMO </title> <meta name ...

UKOUG2011 Retrospective

Looking back at this weeks UKOUG Conference, a few things strike my mind. At first, there was no snow this time! A lot of wind to make my flight back quite wobbly, but no snow - like last year - that would make travelling very hard (up to almost impossible). Second, there were - again - lots of good sessions to choose from. Several time slots had two or even three sessions I would like to attend. And another pro - as strange as it may sound from an APEX geek - there are not that many APEX sessions. That gives me the chance - or the obligation - to look into other corners of the Oracle ecosystem. So I actually did learn something! And I saw some "ok" sessions, some good ones and a few excellent ones - like Doug's SPM, Connor's Partitioning and Slavik's SQL Injection. But... there was only one really impressive one: Cary's keynote. In a very emotional and personal way, he took the audience by the hand - telling some touching real life stories about his priva...

I've been to DOAG!

This week I attended my first DOAG (German Oracle User Group) Conference. The conference was hosted in a part of the Nürnberg Conference Centre. The venue was excellent : All sessions where in the same area on three different levels - so everything was in a short walking distance. The conference rooms itself where very good as well: a stage, just slightly higher than the audience, perfect lighting, good sound and screen quality and a wireless mic. Everything a presenter - and an attendee as well - needs! Something else that DOAG does better (not necessary healthier) than most other conferences: you can have food, snacks and drinks all day long. Not only during "coffee break" or lunch you can have slices of pizza, hot dogs or sweet cakes, but really all day long. And the quality of lunch and dinner was excellent as well: three courses and plenty stuff to choose from. Then onto the content itself. There were 20 concurrent sessions, all started right at the hour (with a bell...

APEX Application running native on an iPhone

This video shows how native an APEX application can run on iPhone. And yes, it is really an APEX application you see. And the whole movie is just one take. You can see how a customer from the standard APEX Demo Application - "re-templated" to an Mobile APEX Application - is stored as a regular contact on your iPhone.

The "blind auditions": Evaluating Kscope12 abstracts...

Last week (and both weekends) I evaluated all the abstracts for ODTUG KScope12 in two tracks: APEX and Developer's Toolbox. In the APEX track 76 abstracts where submitted, Developer's Toolbox has just a few more, 82. All the abstracts will be evaluated by a team of (around) 8 people, so it doesn't all depend on my rating ;-) For the first time, the abstracts where anonymous. So you don't know who wrote the abstract when rating it. In some cases, you can guess (and some had their own name in the abstract or summary, so that's easy). But I have to say, it makes it more difficult to evaluate. Because, for some people it doesn't really matter what the abstract says, you know it will be good anyhow (and for other ones, it is just the other way round). But luckily we have to rate the presenters as well - as far as you know them. We had to rate every abstract between 0 and 5, where 5 is a top one. My totals are: little under 20% I rated as 5, almost 40% got a 4, 3...

I revamped my blog

I revamped my blog recently by enabling the latest Blogger feature: Dynamic Views . You can pick your own view using the " Magazine " menu on top. I hope you like it. I do ;-).

In two weeks: My first DOAG Conference

From November 15 to 17, the annual DOAG (German Oracle User Group) Conference will be held in Nuremberg. I've never attended this conference before, so I am really curious how my experience will be - especially compared to the other big European Oracle event, the UKOUG conference three weeks later. The agenda looks very promising. A very neat and tight three full days, with a new 45 minute session starting on the hour. Just like you expect from Germans ;-). And with 20 parallel sessions it seems about the same size as the UKOUG. The nice thing is, there are a lot of (German) speakers on the list, I've never seen before. So that could be interesting. And there are a lot of APEX sessions as well - see my schedule below, where I colored all the APEX sessions in blue! Some sessions will be translated - from German to English, some of them will be in English, but the majority will be in German. So a good opportunity to dust off my German... In the flyer , sessions are marked when t...

Analytic function to the rescue! Again.

My current APEX project has a requirement to show a chart on one of the pages. No big deal. Usually. Because it should represent some value over time and that value would be stored in the database....could be every second, this chart could contain 10,000's, if not 100,000's points. So generating the XML, transferring the XML to the browser and interpreting the XML by the chart engine....was slow... So I had to come up with a solution to reduce the number of points, without destroying the goal of the chart. Oh, and did I mention that the value could be stored every second, but could also be every minute, hour, whatever? The first thing I came up with was the SAMPLE clause. Never heard of it and never used it before. You can just do a SELECT * FROM EMP SAMPLE(10) and as a result, you'll get 10% of the rows of the EMP table. The only withdrawal with that was, the result could be different every time. So when refreshing a chart, the chart could look really different. Anothe...

"I am running for the ODTUG Board of Directors"

No, not it's not about myself, but that's what my dear friend Martin Giffy D'Souza told me during last Oracle Open World. And I support his nomination whole hearted! I know Martin since about 4 years since we met at one of the KScope conferences. Since then we'll meet each other twice a year, but are in touch more frequently by email, twitter and other social networks. Martin is passionate about his job and, knows really a lot about APEX and is always willing to share his thoughts, ideas and vision with others. And I think nobody is better suited for the ODTUG Board as Martin is! If you wonder what Martin looks like...see the picture below, taken during the OOW Appreciation Event. He is the guy with the blue circle around his head ;-) If you are an ODTUG member, you can vote here . You can read Martin's official campaign and bio below... Campaign Statement I have attended ODTUG Kaleidoscope for several consecutive years and have been a present...

OOW2011 - Announcing the APEX Marketplace

With the Oracle Database Cloud Service, Oracle also announced the APEX marketplace - a sort of App Store for APEX or APpEX Store if you like. When the Cloud Service is released, there will be number of free APEX Applications available for install. These are all created by Oracle itself and are very similar to the "Packaged Applications" that where available on OTN earlier. So if you're wondering why they're not available up there anymore and where they are gone: You got your answer now! Just like any other APEX Application you can (probably) still export that application and install it on your own environment. But they will ne "locked down", although it's not quite clear what that actually means. Probably, to prevent support issues due to your own changes, you aren't allowed to make changes. BTW, not all Markterplace Applications will be available on OTN, some will, others won't .. Another, not yet implemented, idea is that you can also upload ...

Five things you (probably) don't know about PL/SQL

This post is a (live) report from Tom Kyte's session with the title above he did in a packed room on Thursday morning on OOW2011. 1. Trigger trickery A before row trigger uses consistent read. So it uses the situation as it was when the statement started. So during long running updates the actual situation might differ from the 'consistent read' situation. That might lead to a rollback and re-fire of the statement, and thus the trigger as well. So every before statement and row level trigger (apart from the last row) might fire twice! So don't do anything you can't roll back in a trigger. If you call some autonomous auditing function in a trigger, you might encounter rows in your auditing table that didn't actually happen... Direct path loads bypass triggers...so triggers don't always fire! So, if you can avoid triggers...please avoid triggers. 2. Ignore errors Error handling is done wrong more often than it's done right. Only catch exceptions that you a...

OOW2011 - Announcing SQL Developer 3.1 New Features

The new SQL Developer version 3.1, contains a lot of new functionality. For instance a lot of DBA functionality that was already available within Enterprise Manager is exposed in SQL Developer. The developers are using the exact same code, but with a SQL Developer skin on top of it. Another very neat feature is the SQL Developer Cart. You can drag and drop any object in the cart and it will automagically create a sql script file and zip it. I see certainly a use for that, for instance to deploy an new version of an application : all files neatly packed together... And of course, there is the Cloud Services. You can connect to your Oracle Database Cloud Service from within SQL Developer. Under the covers a RESTful web service is called and the results are processed. There is also functionality implemented to transfer data to and from the cloud, using DataPump. If you upload data into the cloud, the data pump file is automatically created, uploaded en processed. Very neat! Location: Ell...

OOW2011 - Announcing the Oracle Public Cloud

Until this Wednesday, Oracle`s statement was " use Oracle systems to build your own cloud ", but this is changed drastically now! Starting November 1, Oracle does this for you. Just subscribe and within 20 minutes you are up and running in the brand new " Oracle Public Cloud ". So what do you get after this 20 minutes of waiting? It depends on what you ordered ;-). Within the Oracle Public Cloud (OPC), the following options are available: - an Oracle Database Cloud Service - a Java Cloud Service - a Social Connect Cloud Service, based on WebCenter - some Fusion Applications Cloud Services: CRM and HCM. The Oracle Database Cloud Service The Oracle Database runs on Exadata. Within a database you get your own schema(s) and tablespace(s), so while the database itself is shared with others, all data is partitioned and caged. To enhance security, Transparent Data Encryption will be switched on, and DataVault might also be used (still under consideration). You can connect ...

New APEX feature regarding RESTful web services

The upcoming Application Express version 4.2 - date not announced yet - will (or might), amongst other features regarding mobile support, also contain the functionality for managing the Apex Listener Resource Templates. From the SQL Workshop you can access the RESTful web services. And so create new or manage existing services of the APEX Listener. So therefore keep all stuff within one IDE. Very nice. It will enhance the use of the Resource Templates enormously! Location: Howard St,San Francisco,United States

Know your code : Automate PL/SQL standard enforcement

This is a report of Lewis Cunningham's session at OOW11 on the subject t mentioned above. For code you not only need coding and naming standards, but performance and testing standards as well. And of course you need to check wether your code complies with your standards. For analysis you can either do static or dynamic analysis (and instrumentation as well). For static analysis you can use the data dictionary, PL/Scope and the source code itself. For dynamic analysis you have to use profilers. For retrieving the data dictionary you can query the _SOURCE, _DEPENDENCIES, _PROCEDURES and related views. When using PL/Scope you have to recompile the code with a "identifier:all" setting switched on. Then the results are retrievable from the _IDENTIFIERS view. Analysis should be done at the earliest stage, that is during coding. PL/Scope can be very handy for validating naming conventions, impact analysis and identifying scoping issues. For dynamic analysis, you have to set a ba...

OOW2011 - Announcing Oracle`s Big Data Appliance

During the Oracle ACE Director briefing, Mark Townsend, VP Database Product Management, did " State of the Union " on the Oracle database. This post is my report of his talk... At this moment around 55% of the installed base of the Oracle database is on 11.2. Last year, Oracle made more money from selling more database licenses and more options on existing installations. Mark mentioned that there are customers with 1,000`s of databases (and even one with 80,000!) - all using different versions of the database, of the operating system, storage etc. This situation is very hard to maintain and to keep up and running. Inn Oracle`s view, consolidation into a "private cloud" is the solution, and therefore Oracle offers Exadata. One (or less) databases are easier to secure, easier to make high available and easier to upgrade. And when you use Oracle software troughout your application stack, why not use Oracle hardware as well? So Oracle is striving towards a " red st...

OOW2011 - Announcing Oracle NoSQL

NoSQL databases have already been around for a long time. Even Oracle owns one: Berkeley DB. Other well known databases are Voldemort, MongoDB and Cassandra. A NoSQL database contains only key-value pairs and targets on only simple operations: store and retrieve data. Any relationships and other rules should be enforced by the application itself. A NoSQL databases has a small footprint, is embeddable, (very) fast, scalable and easy to use and usually runs on a lot of operating systems. Therefore the sweet spot of NoSQL databases is processing loads of simple and unstructured data, like messaging, queueing and user web clicks. Not surprising that the big social networks, like LinkedIn, Facebook, Google and Amazon are heavy users of NoSQL databases. For some more advanced use some NoSQL databases have options for concurrency, transactional processing and high availability. Of course you can store this kind of data in a relational database, like the "regular" Oracle database as ...

OOW2011 - Announcing the Exalytics machine

After a long rerun about Exadata, Exalogic and the Supercluster, during Sunday`s keynote, Larry finally announced the new Exalytics machine. Extreme speed, due to 1 TB DRAM (holding 5 to 19 TB of compressed data) and 40 cores of Xeon CPUs. It is using a new version of TimesTen - the in memory database - and/or an new version of Essbase (for OLAP) and a new OBIEE. It not only handles relational and multidimensional data, but also "unstructured" data. You should connect the Exalytics machine to your Exadata machine with Infiniband. Then load (all) data into the Exalytics machine and start analyzing and processing in memory. It uses a " Heuristic Adaptive In-Memory Cache ", so data changes are detected and refreshed in the machine. Oracle claims it is around 20 times faster than their current configurations. Price tag? Not mentioned... Location: Howard St,San Francisco,United States

Connecting NoSQL and Oracle Databases

NoSQL databases are very good in storing and retrieving large amounts of data. Analysis, on the other hand, is hardly possible. And you probably need that to actually make money out of Facebook, LinkedIn etc. Therefore you need to transfer the data to a "regular" database, like Oracle. There are two options to do this kind of stuff. The first one is with a MySQL Data Hub, that handles both the NoSQL and Oracle tables as external. Another option is to transfer the data to Oracle directly. Quest offers some (free) products in this area, like TOAD for Cloud Databases . Very interesting and definitely need to try this out. Thinking about APEX talking to a NoSQL database now... Location: Howard St,San Francisco,United States

OOW2011 - Database update

The original blogpost will appear again "soon"... Update : The stuff that was originally up here is now rewritten in the posts on "Oracle NoSQL Database" and the "Big Data Appliance".

OOW2011 - Right around the corner!

Within one week San Francisco will be colored "Oracle red" again for Oracle Open World - including Oracle Develop and JavaOne. Around 50,000 - usually easy to recognize - attendees will cover the streets, while moving from one conference location to the other. And I am privileged to be one of them! In fact, I am even more privileged to attend the Oracle ACE Director briefing at Oracle HQ in Redwood on Thursday and Friday before the big event... So that will make about 1.5 week in the Bay Area. Creating a schedule for OOW is as difficult as ever. No matter what tools they provide, the endless possibilities of picking that most interesting session amongst the 100 in the same time slot is cumbersome. And then there are all the "social events"... it is hard to pick the right one there too, because there is a large amount of overlap as well. But I managed...and created this schedule for that week - where orange = APEX, green = social and the rest is....well, the rest. ...

APEX Application Export from SQL Developer (issue)

I just deployed an APEX Application from one development to a test server. Therefore I used the great "Database Unload" feature of SQL Developer: it generates a script with all DDL and data - or a subset if you wish. I also used the "Quick DDL" option for creating a APEX Export file from with SQL Developer. Installation was a breeze, just run those two scripts and you're done... You think... But then I noticed something strange...in my Interactive Reports I only saw the ID's of the foreign key columns, instead of the description. And it wasn't just one, it was all over the place! It seemed that the SQL Dev export didn't handle the IR-columns that are defined as "Display as Text (based on LOV)" with a Named List of Values properly. The Named List of Values was just missing from the column definition. I don't know if this is solved in version 4.1 (as I was running 4.0.2 on this box), but be aware... Also - and that may be more obvious ...

Simple script to upload images into XML-DB (EPG)

When you develop your APEX application using the APEX Listener or OHS, it is a good habit to create a separate (sub)folder to serve your images - and other files - into your application. Usually the name of the subfolder reflects the name of the application. So you reference these images, like an "enabled" image in your application by '#IMAGE_PREFIX#my-app/enabled.png'. So far so good. But now you need to deploy this to a server that is using the Embedded PLSQL Gateway (EPG)? How to serve these images into that application without changing your code? Uploading the images the regular way into the workspace or application doesn't help, because you won't get the subdirectory prefix. The only way (I know of) is to upload these images into the XML-DB Repository. So I created this script - feel free to use, edit or whatever you want to do with it (no guarantees!):

Another (hidden) gem in APEX

For one of my current project the customer had the (more than reasonable) requirement that all messages, texts on buttons etc should be displayed in Dutch. And there are really a lot of these messages: Regions, Computations, Validations, Processes etc, they all have their own messages. So that would require a lot of clicking in the APEX Development Environment....until I found out there is a very nice shortcut for that! When you navigate to the Utilities section there is a list on the right side named "Page Specific Utilities". These utilities are subdivided by Region, Button, Item etc.. And when you click on one of those items, there is another menu where you can choose for "Grid Edit...Error Messages". And when using that, you'll be ready in no time! I think it was worth sharing this, just to prevent someone from getting RSI...

KScope 11 - In the rearview mirror

Last Saturday afternoon I arrived back home and after two nights of (more or less) sleep, this morning I headed for the airport again to fly to Stockholm for my current project. So while sitting in my hotel room, I (finally) have some time to blog about last weeks Kscope11.... As always, this Kscope was packed with great sessions too. After Sundays symposium, complete filled by the APEX Development Team - at least for the track I was most interested in - Monday started off with " Web services for the REST of us " by Jason Straub. Jason showed how easy it is in APEX to consume (for instance) Yahoo web services and how to use APEX as a front end for Amazon's cloud storage. If you ever have trouble getting the XPath expression right, you might consider using Altova XMLSpy . This tool (not free though!) can be used for determining the the XMLPath expression, just by clicking on the node you're interested in. And when debugging web services can be quite cumbersome, take ...

KScope 11 - Sunday

The first day (or pre-conference day) was filled with four full day Symposium sessions. The APEX one I attended was completely filled by the APEX Development team itself. Joel Kallman kicked the day off with a nice story about the development of APEX, the tools they used etc. Then there where three more sessions about Tablular Forms, Interactive Report and Webservices - all pointing out the new APEX 4.1 features. The coolest one of the day was Marc'Sewtz's presentation on APEX for Mobile Devices. He showed that, using HTML 5 in your template, you can create real native-looking applications for mobile devices. You can already do that using the current version of APEX, but the 4.1 will also contain support for special mobile actions, like rotate and tap - so you can create Dynamic Actions on these events. As jQuery Mobile, the framework they're using, isn't production yet, probably some of these mobile features will be disabled in the first release of 4.1. Mike Hich...

Uploaded our "XFILES, the APEX 4 version - The truth is in there" presentation ....

Yesterday, June 15th, Marco and I did our first try-out of this brand new presentation during the AMIS ODTUG Preview. The next real appearance will be in two weeks in Long Beach during KScope11 . It all went pretty well, we received some tips and tricks do it even better - so be there if you can! The presentation can be downloaded from Slideshare or from http://xace.sourceforge.net/ . On SourceForge you can also download the demo application... And we still can use some votes for OOW Suggest-a-Session ... (until June 19th). XFILES, the APEX 4 version - The truth is in there View more presentations from me

OOW Suggest-a-Session : Top Voted Sessions

During the period the Suggest-a-Session for Oracle Open World 2011 on Oracle Mix is open, you can't see the rank of the (or your!) proposal. Only by accessing every proposal and writing down the number of votes, it is possible to get an idea of the rank of a proposed session. This is quite a cumbersome exercise...so why not automate this? Heavily inspired by Wilfred van der Deijl, who wrote a Java program to do that, I created a similar functionality using just the Oracle Database. Who needs Java after all ;-) The first set up requires setting the ACL right for using utl_http. Next I had to import the certificate Oracle is using for that site into the Oracle Wallet Manager and then create a function that retrieves all proposals and filters the title, presenter and the number of votes. This takes a while, so I dumped the results in a table. Next I uploaded the results to my workspace on apex.oracle.com (couldn't run the procedure from that site as the ACL there prevents the ...

Uploaded my "Done in 60 seconds" presentation ....

Done in 60 seconds - Creating Web 2.0 applications made easy View more presentations from me

OBUG APEX SIG 2011

The OBUG APEX SIG, held yesterday in Vilvoorde (near Brussels), was a smashing success. Due to the overwhelming amount of registrations, we even had to disappoint some people... Next year we should look for a venue that can accommodate more people! Due to a long (at least, longer than I expected) driving time, I arrived during Anthony Rayner's presentation on APEX 4.1. It contained lots of demo's, especially the ones about the new error handling features where impressive: this is really a major improvement! The remarkable thing about the presentation itself was, he used a new feature of Websheets: Presentation Mode! Using this, you can (more or less easily) create presentations that contain real live data! After the coffee break, iAdvise did a nice presentation on how to build (and use) Plug-ins. It was a smooth step-by-step approach on how to create a Plug-in. Well done guys! The lunch was excellent, thanks to Oracle... Right after that, John Scott did a presentation on OH...

XFILES APEX Community Edition (XACE)

For the upcoming KScope, Marco Gralike and myself are working on a revamped version of the XFILES application Carl Backstrom and Mark Drake presented 3 years ago during OOW. Using the techniques they presented and the current state of the art (APEX 4), we created a database centric Version Control system for APEX...built in APEX and XML-DB. For a (very brief) preview and some background information, take a look at Marco's blog . For those who can't make it to Long Beach, we will do a preview session on June 14, at the AMIS office in Nieuwegein (The Netherlands, that is).

Expert Oracle Application Express

I have just seen half of the chapters in this upcoming book. And I only can say: WOW ! The content of this book is just so good. So this is definitely a must-have! You can pre-order it already ( click here ). And - again - all revenues go to charity....

ORCAN event

Yesterday I attended an event organised by the Swedish Oracle User Group (ORCAN). They picked a real nice venue for this meeting: the top floor (54) of the Turning Torso. From this top floor you have a stunning view over the Oresund (all the way to Copenhagen) and Malmö and it's surroundings. Might be a little bit distracting from the presentations, but nevertheless... There were two concurrent presentations. The first one I attended was by Moren Egan about Edition Based Redefinitions . As I presented about the same subject at OOW and UKOUG, I was just curious about how he would present this material. More SQL*Plus oriented as I did it, but I think the message came across just fine. The second one was by Randolf Geist, called " Advanced Oracle Troubleshooting ". In fact it was just the first half (the second half was after lunch). Although I could grasp most of he said, some details were a little bit over my head. So I skipped the second part and went to SQL Developer Ne...

Travelling is not always fun!

At Orlando airport my original flight via Detroit was delayed by three hours, due to "technical issues". So they rebooked me via Minneapolis. But that one was delayed too, due to "weather circumstances". But as that would affect all planes, the advice was to keep that route. And indeed the initial delay of 1,5 hours (I had a layover of 1,5 hours...), was reduced to 45 minutes when departing. But when the plane rolled back from the gate, the right engine didn't started. They had to replace the fuel filter. So it went back at the gate, they did the replacement and a half hour or so later we where again ready to depart. So rolled back again, but at that moment all electricity went down, because the third engine (used for electricity when the other engines aren't running) went down. Do they had to reboot the plane or something like that (did you know the in flight entertainment system runs on Linux?). So, again 30 minutes later we departed. At that time I had a ...

Collaborate 2011 - Day 5 and Wrap Up

The last (half day) of the conference. Makes me wonder why most (if not all) of the conferences add an additional half day after throwing "the" big party. Why not make it a full day and throw the party at that night - or just end with the Wednesday night party. That will keep everyone at the show. Because these last half days are usually not very well attended anymore, which is not very kind to the speakers. Anyway, the first session of today was Obscure Tools of the Trade for Tuning SQL . The speaker - after handing out, or throwing, candies, discussed tools that are freely available to get insight in how your SQL runs. The first was not that obscure: DBMS_XPLAN. This package can show all kinds of details on your SQL and can even show AWR reports. And if you use it with the gather_plan_statistics hint, you can also show the expected rows vs the actual rows (so your statistics may be wrong). The next one wasTrace Analyzer, a.k.a. TRCA, available via Metalin. It is like TKPROF...

Collaborate 2011 - Day 4

The fourth day already...starting of with APEX, Tales from the Trenches by Paul Dorsey. Paul presented the results from a number of interviews (via email) he did with APEX users. He picked the people that presented on APEX somewhere (like me) and asked everyone things like, what do you like about the tool, what not, what's easy, what's not etcetera. And he presented the results of all this with his own opinions on top of it. One remarkeble quote of Paul (so don't shoot me, I am just the messenger): " APEX has succeeded, ADF has failed ". This based on the "facts" (as Paul sees it) that most ADF projects fail and almost all APEX projects are succesful. Apart from that: The APEX community is growing, while the ADF community stays on the same level - but that probably will change when Fusion Apps will take off. The bottom line of his talk was: there is something way better than all of this and that's my product "Formspider". But alas for Paul...

Collaborate 2011 - Day 3

Day 3 started out with a 8 AM (!) presentation on Mobile Application Development . Didn't cover any APEX specific details, more about the general things to consider when developing these kinds of apps. Like how to handle multiple platforms, like IOS and Android - and over 10 others. Native apps are preferred above browser apps (and any APEX app will be a browser app). The solution for handling all these different platforms is to use a framework (like jQuery Mobile). For data integration, you should use webservices in order to keep the bandwith usage as small as possible. The next session had the (lomg) title Enhancing your Data Warehouse Data Completeness using APEX . The presenter showed a (very simple) application to authorize and monitor Excel uploads and changes made to the master data of a data warehouse. Nothing very new... Then David Peake presented on APEX integrating with E-Business Suite . Since v12, EBS doesn't support mod-plsql extensions anymore. But, luckily, th...

Collaborate 2011 - Day 2

The second day of Collaborate started with a opening general session by Dan Thurmon. Dan is a so called "motivational speaker". And he sure knows is job. In a very American style he promoted his dogma:" Off Balance, On Purpose ", demonstrated with juggling (even with axes on a one-wheeler). A very funny start of this day! The first "real" session I attended was SQL Techniques by Tom Kyte. It was all about Clustering, setting up Index Organized Tables (IOT's) and Partitioning. The goal of all these techniques is to reduce IO. A nice metaphore he used was: You can put your clothes in a closet by just dumping them on the first free spot you see. So inserts are fast, but then retrieval trakes a full scan of your closet. By clustering pants, sweaters and socks together, inserts may be slower, but retrieval is way faster! But not only picking the right storage approach is important, also the retrieval - like using bulk/array fetching - are both important t...