Roels Blog

As always it is hard to create a schedule for Oracle Open World. Knowing that there are about 100 concurrent sessions, you'll miss 99% of all the content... Nevertheless, I combined sessions around APEX, Database Development, Cloud etc into an interesting schedule for the upcoming week...spiced up with the social/networking events as usual. So for what it's worth, here it is (and note my own session as almost the closing session of the event..):

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 ...

This morning I arrived rather early at SFO. When checking in I noticed that the first leg of my trip was delayed by almost 2 hours. And, originally, had a 1.5 hour layover in Minneapolis. So that wouldn't work anymore... So Delta rescheduled my whole trip: From San Francisco to Los Angeles to Paris to Amsterdam. With a couple of hours of layover at each stop. Initially I would arrive around 11 AM in Amsterdam, but that will be around 8 PM now! So a nice 9 hour delay. Luckily SFO offers a free 45 wifi service. As I have three wifi enabled devices I am fine for over 2 hours. I must get as much sleep as possible at every leg, to feel just a little bit alive tomorrow. Or the day after that. The one and only positive thing is that I can head straight to bed when I finally get home. I really realty hope no other delays will pop up... (to be continued) The continuation So SFO - LAX took about 1,5 hours, then 3 hours of waiting. Next a 9 hours flight to Paris, and of course I got a s...

Alas I missed the Benelux cocktail part last night, because the dinner took somewhat longer than expected. The dinner was extremely good though. This day started with a session by John Scott Spendolini about "Recovering from APEX mistakes" - I didn't know they existed but nevertheless. Good session on how to undo changes you've made, debugging etc. The next one was by Marco Gralike on XML-DB (what else could it be?). Good, detailed info with some nice examples. Not all demos worked like he meant to, but that's the price you pay when you mess with them the night before! Especially the event firing mechanism when you drop a file in an XML folder are very cool! Marco, we definitely need those for our ODTUG presentation! Then Raj did a presentation on collections, enthusiastic and dynamic us usual. But also his deno didn't turn out as expected. The best take away from this session was the idea to create views on top of your collections, so you can maintain the c...

Yesterday was one of those days. Crossing the Atlantic and ending up with crossing 9 timezones. So that day had 33 hours...(so you can definitely have  more than 24 hours in a day !). I got up at 6 AM, traveled to Schiphol (Amsterdam Airport) by train. At Schiphol it was crowded! People with large bags everywhere, no one standing in line. Giant congestion for the border security etc. And then there is the obligatory chat with a security officer when boarding (did you pack your bag yourself, brought anything etc..). The strange thing is the US carriers seem to be obliged doing that - but only for inbound flights?? But the good thing was: I managed to upgrade my first leg of the trip (to Minneapolis). Never traveled Business Class before, but, man! what a joy!. Imagine long, broad seats with lots of buttons on the armrest. If you use the right ones, you can get the chair in a 100% horizontal position - while massaging your back! And then there is the drinks and the fo...

I just printed out my boarding pass for my 10.50 flight tomorrow morning. From Amsterdam, via Minneapolis to San Francisco takes around 11,5 hours time, with 1,5 hours overlay in Minneapolis. I hope that'll be enough to pass the US-border control! It will be a busy week, with lots of sessions and networking events. I won't put my whole session schedule up here, that might set the expectation that I also will attend all these sessions...  But in short: Sunday afternoon will mostly be filled by the ODTUG APEX sessions, and maybe pick a part of the Welcome keynote alongside. Monday will be a combination of good old PL/SQL, APEX, Fusion, Fusion Apps, Exadata.  Tuesday has a similar picture: APEX, ESB, JavaFX and Tom Kyte's keynote. Wednesday is of course Larry's keynote (with or without Iron Man), and some database related sessions. Thursday I've planned to attend two more APEX sessions, before I have mine: at 12:30 in Hotel Nikko called " Using Edition-Based Rede...

At most Oracle Open Worlds I attended, Larry brings on a " very special guest " during his keynote. Last year it was the Governator , Arnold - I'll be back - Schwarzenegger. This year I'll expect another cool appearance. My bet is on Iron Man a.k.a. Tony Stark a.k.a. Robert Downey jr. Or - that would even be cooler - Larry will make his appearance at his own Stark Expo in an Iron Man suit! There is already a lot written about the similarities between Iron Man/Tony Stark and Larry (see  here , here or here ). But the proof of the pudding is in the eating, so a live appearance will be the logical next step... And what will he announce? I expect it to be the long awaited Oracle Game Console . Not sure about anything above, but someone has to be the first to start a rumor huh?

Just like last year  and the year before that , there will be a (semi) official APEX Meetup during Oracle Open World 2010! And as the APEX Developers - just like every other human being - hang on to a good tradition, even the venue, the day and the time will be exactly the same as in previous years. So write in your agenda / add to your schedule: What : APEX Meetup When : Tuesday September 21, 7.30 PM - ??? Where : Fourth Street Bar & Deli (very close to Moscone) Another not-to-miss event...hope to see you all there!

The day started easy: The first session had similar content as the last one of yesterday - which I didn't like too much - and the second one got cancelled. So a late start, what was fairly convenient because of yesterday's party... The first one was by Arup Nanda about 11g New Features for DBA's . Since 11g is already 'old school', I didn't learned that much: physical / logical / snapshot standby databases (quite handy for testing in a real production environment, performing rolling upgrades and reporting); partition by reference (where you can easily keep master and detail data in the same partition) etc. I was hoping for more R2 stuff, but maybe it is just to early as that version was released just a couple of weeks ago. The second one was all about Data Security . There are so many features and options regarding that subject. To name a few: VPD, FGA, Encryption, Data Masking, Advanced Security, Audit Vault, Database Vault, Label Security, Secure Backup.... I ...

I started off with a good breakfast with my roomies Marco and Jacco. Because there wasn't any interesting session in the first timeslot (or I couldn't find it), I attended the Exhibition Hall - which is mainly the same as previous years. Everyone wants to 'scan your badge' so they can spam you afterwards. Next there were two sessions I really liked, and - it may or may not be a coincidence - both were 30 minutes 'power sessions'. The first one was by Mark Drake, the Product Manager for XML DB, about Managing XML Content with APEX . Very good job, although having live demo's obviously are a risk...and that's why I like them! The next one was about Row Level Security / VPD and APEX. The presenter had a good demo and explained the stuff nicely. I followed the keynote from the OTN Lounge (it is less boring with a beer). It wasn't a surprise anymore that The Governator would attend. Arnold emphasized that technology will deliver the solution for CO2 redu...

This day started easy by skipping the keynotes. So the first session I attended was at 11:30, called The Life of a Query in which the presenter revealed the details on the internal processing of the Oracle database. Next was Giving your Application Express a Web 2.0 Facelift . Not that many new things, but Raj is always very entertaining to watch. The most interesting thing I saw was a new prototype of the APEX Developer page on Patrick Wolfs laptop: Instead of the current Page Definition view (with Page, Regions, Items, Processes and so on), the same information was presented in an DHTMLX tree view! Patrick showed how you can easily re-order Items, copy buttons etc by just dragging them around in the tree. And on every object you can do a right mouse click that would present the actions you can do with that object. It looked very slick! We shortly discussed whether or not you should expand that tree with one level (Page) or even two (Application), to make it even easier to copy and m...

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,...

This week I am in San Francisco for my third Oracle Oracle Open World. Because it was my second consecutive visit I received an "Oracle Alumni" tag (for my badge) and a nice jacket during registration. This Sunday the first session (at 800 AM! - OOW is really hard work...) was by...me! There were around 50 to 60 attendees, and IMHO that's not too bad for a session at that time. The session seemed to be interesting enough for 111 people to include in their schedule, but I guess for a few of them it was too early after all... The session went ok, not great, but ok. I would rather do a session after being a couple of days in the US, because then you're more used to the language. This one was within 20 hours of arrival. Right after my session - and a well deserved cup of Starbucks coffee with Edwin - I went back to the "Holland ACE House", where I am staying with Marco, Andreas and Jacco, to drop off my laptop. BTW the house, rented by Anjo (thanks mate!), is ve...

Also this year : APEX Meetup @ OOW

All you bloggers out there visiting Oracle Open World this year, let's get together at the traditional annual Blogger Meetup . This time the organizer is Pythian's Alex Gorbachev . Thank you Alex!!

To my suprise I received an e-mail from the Oracle Open World Content Team that my abstract "It's Great to Integrate: Combining Oracle Forms and Oracle Application Express" has been accepted - even though it is still "in the Mix", open for voting (currently 65 votes at the 9th position). Maybe a 'spy' attended my session at ODTUG? Nevertheless, I proudly accepted the invitation and hope to see you all at the next Oracle event in San Francisco!

The above mysterious acronym stands for: Oracle Open World 2009 - Call for Papers. You can be part of the ' greatest show on earth : Submit your papers here . With the risk of reducing my own chances of getting a paper accepted...

As Oracle Open World 2008 is 1,5 week behind us, it is about time to finish up my posts on this subject - and get rid of my notes. So let's take a quick look on the sessions I didn't mention already. Forms2APEX Migration David Peake introduced the "soon-to-come" APEX 3.2 release. The most important new feature (or maybe the only new feature) is the support for migrating Oracle Forms to APEX. He emphasized that there is no need from an Oracle support perspective to move from Forms to APEX. You should only go for this route if there is a sufficient business justification for it. A migration from Forms to APEX has to be considered as a real project, consisting of Analysis, Design, Convert, Post Migration, Acceptance and Training. The Forms2APEX toolkit is in no way a silver bullet. There will be a lot of handcraft involved to achieve acceptable results. Especially for more complex Forms you'll need a lot of effort to get similar functionality in APEX. Luckily the too...

This year the Appreciation Event was held on Treasure Island, a piece of land between SF and Oakland, just below the Bay Bridge. When we arrived there - in one of the 300 buses - we were directly surprised by the all the carnival attractions. It was a really nice fair on a beautiful place - with a great view on San Francisco. And of course lots of good food and drinks, accompanied with really good music: o.a. Seal and Elvis Costello! Both were really, really good... Yeah, Oracle surely knows how to throw a party! And on the way back we didn't even have to wait for the bus!

From the demo's I've seen of the SQL Developer Data Modeller the functionality exceeds the Designer modelling functionality by far. It's support physical and logical modelling as well as multi dimensional models (OLAP). You can import models from multiple sources - also from Designer. The functionality includes domains, glossaries, naming conventions and standards, abbreviations and even a process modeller. There are even more, newer, database types supported than Designer does. The metadata can be stored in a file based repository or in a database repository - that even will include versioning. The tool will (eventually) be available as a stand alone version, as a SQL Developer extension, viewer only and as a web-publishing version. So all in all it seems to be a complete solution for data modelling that can - and probably will - replace Designer... As the presenter said : You can still buy Designer [but]... "Soon" the beta version of Data Modeller will be releas...