Roels Blog

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...

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).

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....

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...

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 ...

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...

Last year, during ODTUG's Kaleidoscope in Washington, John Scott asked me if I was interested in co-authoring a book on APEX. And it wouldn't be just another APEX book, but a book written by the top presenters/bloggers on APEX. So I was deeply honoured... But the best thing, all revenues will go to the memorial funds of two great guys of the APEX Development Team: Carl Backstrom and Scott Spadafore. (For the complete story, see John's blog ). So I immedtiately said: Yes, sure! And now the book is almost there - should be released somewhere in May. So if you're slightly interested in APEX or an APEX geek: This is THE book to order ( click here ). All authors wrote one chapter on an area that they are expert on, and the goal was to write stuff that has never been written before. So the book contains not a lot easy stuff, but more the complex / think-out-of-the-box kind of stuff (with lots of code of course!). So there are chapters on: Security, Configuration Management...

Yesterday it the Dutch Oracle User Group (OGH) organized a full day APEX-only event. And what a day it was! With 250 attendees it was completely sold out. And I guess, if there had been more room, there might have been even close to 300 people there. So APEX gaines more and more interest - and faster and faster...  And where did all those people came for? Before lunch there were three general sessions. The first was by Tony Andrews and Nigel Blair of Northgate, talking about their 1500 Forms-to-APEX conversion project. They succeeded and therewith proved (again) that APEX is capable of running enterprise / large scale / mission critical applications. But as they started some years ago, they couldn't use all the new cool stuff, like Dynamic Actions, and therefor build an own framework. And that might require "some" work to bring it into the APEX 4 world. But that's the disadvantage of being ahead of the curve! Then Hilary went on stage to tell - and show! - us the...

While I was working on my (and Marco's) presentation for Kscope11 about the XFILES, I discovered some trash under the XML DB carpet of my database. If I executed the statement  select * from RESOURCE_VIEW where under_path( res, 1, '/')=1 I got (amongst others) So apart from the standard "images" directory, there where three more...  When you upgrade an APEX instance the old images directory is renamed (a datetime-stamp is added) and a new one is created - just in case you need to fall back on your old stuff. If you use a webserver the presence of that directory is easy to see - and to delete.  When using the Embedded PL/SQL Gateway (EPG) the same procedure is applied, but now you probably wont notice, until you look for it... To get rid of the old stuff run (of course use your own images directory instead of mine): begin   dbms_xdb.deleteresource( '/images_201102071025'                          , ...

A few days back Mike Riley interviewed me (via e-mail) about my ODTUG / Kaleidoscope experiences. You can see the results here .  Hope to see you all soon in Long Beach!

Using the jQuery BetterGrow Plugin , I created a BetterGrow APEX Plugin. The APEX part is just a simple wrapper of the jQuery Plugin - so all the credits go to " The Product Guy " who came up with that one. It just does this: You can see it in action on the demo site . And download it from apex-plugin.com . There already was an similar plugin, created by Martin . On the demo page you can see both, so pick the one you like most!

In my current project I have to create a dashboards that reflects the actual (and historical) situation in a factory. At first I tried something like the dashboards Anychart provides on it's site, like this . It is possible to create that kind of stuff in APEX, but then you have to generate all the XML data by yourself. And the fastest way to do something is...don't do it at all. So, since the subregion-feature of APEX 4, you can achieve the same results by only tweaking the Chart XML itself a "little". And now I have something like this: Kinda cool huh? I also created an example on apex.oracle.com (refreshes every 3 seconds with random data).

Wednesday I started late, because I skipped the first session to prepare for my second one " Tales from a Parallel Universe: Using 11gR2’s Edition Based Redefinitions ". Went also pretty good as well I think, ended nice on time - even, again, with a session chair. And I received some really positive feedback from people like John King and Christian Antognini. Thanks guys! Then there was a funny debate kind of session between Tony Hasler and Jonathan Lewis about " Does Oracle ignore hints? ". In the end it was all about semantics...if you discard bugs, poor or wrong documentation and more or less hidden features and unexpected optimizer processes, Oracle never ignores your hint (which in fact is more a 'directive' than a hint) - otherwise you might say that Oracle actually does  ignore your hint. After lunch - instead of the good hot lunches we received a school-like lunch bag this time - I chaired my second session : " Edition-Based Redefinition: Tes...

Tuesday started of with a two hour Masterclass by Cary Millsap " Thinking clearly about performance ". A really great session that explained clearly what performance actually is (so the content covered the title). Using with a lot of nice stories, examples and analogies Cary has the ability to explain stuff that seems difficult in a way everybody can understand. If you haven't seen this one, it is really a must see if you have the chance! Because the next session on my agenda was shifted to another place and time a had some time to walk through my own presentation for that afternoon before attending the APEX Roundtable . A nice Q&A about what all APEX stuff. Some person from Oracle even gave us some insight on when to expect APEX 4.1, but I won't repeat the schedule, because he actually was not allowed to say that (but if you are really interested, I already tweeted about that...). After lunch I chaired Anthony Ashton's session about " Practical Oracle ...

Compared to some other attendees I had a fairly easy travel back home from another great UKOUG conference. And now I finally have the time to look back and write a blog post about my experiences over seas. As usual I planned to do a daily blogpost, but - also as usual - I can't find the time during the conference to blog. All those "social commitments" in the evening...sigh...  I'll split it in three, otherwise it will become too long. At Monday I started of with Grant Ronald's " The Quick Start Guide to Fusion Development with Oracle ADF ". A good session that covered baby's first steps in ADF Development. As always, as Grant shows is, it seems so easy... But, coming from a Oracle Forms/Designer background, to me JDeveloper is still a huge box with tons of options to me. But I think I've forgotten how impressed I was when I first opened up Designer - with also tons of options! So IMHO developing in JDev might be fast (and definitely can resu...