Roels Blog

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...

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...

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...

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...

Travelling to Orlando went smooth. Very smooth even. The first leg to Boston arrived about a half hour early and as I was sitting right in front of the Economy class, I could leave the plane as one of the first. So I arrived at the border securty as the third non-US citizen. So checkin in the US costed about two minutes. I even arrived at the luggage belt before it actually started running - usually my bag is already off the belt when I arrive there. After an almost two hour layover, in the second plane I managed to get two seats at the exit row. So I could move wherever I liked. And at Orlando airport a taxi was immediately available so I arrived at the hotel around 6:30 AM. After some real American food (burger, beer & fries) I hit the sack around 10.  The next morning I managed to stay more or less asleep until 7. From 9 to 12 I sat at the pool until it was getting too hot and went to the registration of Collaborate.The conference is in the Orlando Conference Centre. I thou...

When there is no eruption of an Icelandic vulcano with an unspeakable name, I will be flying out to Collaborate 2011 in Orlando next Saturday. I am really looking forward to this, as it is (still) my first Collab event! Using the Schedule Builder I also created a (preliminary) schedule for next week. There are a lot of good sessions to choose from. I first picked all (or almost all) APEX sessions, and then added the other promising sessions. A lot of SQL and PL/SQL and some Fusion stuff. My own session is schedule at Wednesday afternoon, just before the big party at Universal! I will (try to) write a daily blog post covering the details of the sessions - especially for all those who can't make it to Florida...

I was really looking forward to fly out last Saturday to Las Vegas for my first visit to Collaborate. But the Icelandic vulcano with the unpronounceable name (something like " Eiwjhfdjaajfkjjsirsuj "), threw soot in the food - which is a direct translation of a Dutch saying, the corresponding English saying would be something like: " spoil-sported it ". So both my presentations are canceled, sorry for those who had planned to attend! The good thing is, I got a 100% refund of both flights and hotel from Expedia, with one single phone call of a few minutes on Sunday. A great service, that I didn't expect, so I was happily surprised by that! So at least I got cashes for ashes, bucks for dust .... I really hope the air will be clean before the next big conference, ODTUG Kaleidoscope in Washington, and hope to see you all there!