Roels Blog

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".

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. ...

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 ...

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!):

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...

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 ...

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...

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

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 ...

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

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...