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November 25, 2007
7:00
[misc] ????
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??????misc???2????? ??20?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????1?????????????????????????????????????????????????
7:00
[misc] ???????????? ???
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???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ??????????????????? (??????????????) ???????????
2:47
Eight ways to hack Oracle
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I thought when i started my own company again I would have had time to spedn updating my website and posting to my blog at least under the guise of marketing; so far no such luck. I am very busy....[Read More]

Posted by Pete On 25/11/07 At 07:49 PM
November 24, 2007
22:03
Xiangqi Schweizermeister 2007
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I played the Chinese Chess Championship in Zurich today. It was a all-play-all tournament with Siegfried Huber (2nd with 1.5/3), Luca Rusconi (2nd with 1.5/3) and Beat Sprenger (4th with 0/3). I finished first with 3 wins out of 3 games. It was an intense day, thanks to Beat for the organization and to Luca [...]
21:38
Pete_S
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Tradition dictates a list of sessions to be attended - in part this is to urge the undecided-to-attend to contact the UKOUG organisers for a last minute place, but in part this is list some topics that might come up in future blog posting either during or post-conference
20:04
DOAG conference and my presentation
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On Wednesday and Thursday I have been at the DOAG conference (by German Oracle User Group) in Nürnberg. It was my first time visiting this conference. With more than 2.000 participants, 16 tracks and more than 200 sessions it's not quite as big as Oracle Open world last week in San Francisco. But the food was much better! For me it makes a difference if you get your lunch on a real plate with metal cutlery and not a box with a sandwich and plastic cutlery :-) But that's America... even if it was a green event ;-)

The DOAG conference was a great opportunity to get together with some friends like Denes Kubicek, Dietmar Aust and Carsten Czarski which have the same passion for Oracle APEX then I have. It's always nicer to talk face-to-face with them then just chatting online. But it was also really nice that "totally unknown" persons where walking by and thank me for the help I provided them on the forum, via e-mail or with my blog postings. Once again, sorry for my horrible name memory, but at least most time I remember the problem :-) But I have to do something with my picture on my blog, because most say I look different on the picture...

So how was the conference? I think DOAG has put together a really high quality session program which I can only recommend. I'm sure I will come again next year.

I almost forgot, I did a presentation too ;-)

It's great to see how much interest Oracle APEX has in the German speaking Oracle user base. I had a room with more than 200 seats. It was packed, some people even had to stand! Remember there where 2.000 people, so APEX attracted more than 10% of them... I did a quick survey, all of them where APEX developers and a lot of them had an Oracle Forms Background. So Oracle, go for the Oracle Forms developers! They are an "easy target" or they might switch to .Net, ... if they really going to migrate there Forms applications. Too bad that I didn't have a camera with me to take a picture of the crowd.

I did ok with my presentation "Oracle APEX under the hood", at least the people didn't leave the room in masses :-) Maybe it was a little bit too much information, I think I will have a look on that they next time. I talked a "little bit" longer than the 45 minutes and time was running out. So I was not able to show the ApexLib Framework and my APEX Builder Plugin. But at least I showed the syntax highlighting and the code indent editor I'm currently working on. I think another nice enhancement for the Oracle APEX development environment.

The presentation can be downloaded with my other presentations from "Misc / Presentations". I don't know how much sense it makes without having seen the presentations, because there was much more information between the lines. BTW, it's currently only available in German.

Before taking my flight back home to Vienna on Friday evening, I was walking around in the old city center of Nürnberg. A really beautiful city you should have a look if you have the chance!
16:11
AUSOUG 2007 in Melbourne - My Preliminary Schedule
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While I have another blog post in drafts, I should quickly update on the sessions I’m going to visit in the next two days of AUSOUG 2007 in Melbourne. This was a result of a quick look at the agenda and also couple blog posts from Jeff Kemp. I arrived to Melbourne today and I took [...]
15:37
My Final Day in Perth
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Connor McDonald picked me up at the hotel and took me to some local lake to see the local fauna and flora. Lots and lots of tour buses stop there because they have black swans there and lots of tourists want to see them. There is a whole flock of ducks on the shore that [...]
5:51
Pete_S
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I first downloaded this add-in to report on OWB from SQL Developer some while back and then forgot to blog about it.
2:09
How to Find the CPU and Mother Board Info on Linux and Windows
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How to Find the CPU and Mother Board Info on Linux and Windows

On Windows download the utility from
http://belarc.com/
http://www.cpuid.com/cpuz.php
http://www.cpuid.com/download/cpu-z-141.zip

on Linux use the command
dmidecode
cat /proc/cpuinfo
2:00
KC ?Kennismaken met Application Express? - Presentation available for download
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On Thursday the 22nd of November 2007 Patrick Sinke and I did a presentation and a small workshop about Oracle Application Express. We gave an introduction of this Oracle Development Tool and showed how basic reports, forms and graphs can be build in only a couple of minutes. The demo’s are history but the slides [...]
1:33
I smell a RAT. An Oracle RAT. Acronyms may or may not be your friend.
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I'm feeling a little silly today so I thought I would discuss acronyms. For example, should we pronounce Oracle's new VM, acronym OVM, as ovum? What got me started along this line of thinking is Oracle's new Real Application Testing (RAT). Yeah, that's what I said. A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, I was a developer for the US Air Force. I worked with human resource budgeting and planning systems. One of the first I worked with was an application called CIVCOST. It was writ
November 23, 2007
8:59
Post AUSOUG - Day 2
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I decided to do Rottsnest Island afterall. I stood beside the captain on the cruise over there, so I could both see on both sides of the ship AND hear his “little bit of commentary”. If you were outside, you did not hear and if you were inside, you could only see one side of [...]
4:44
Oracle Events Google Mashup
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I discovered the Oracle Events web site the other day which I thought was a very good way of keeping us up to date of all Oracle events going on around the globe. It has a Google Mashup which combines event information with the worldwide location as illustrated below.
0:23
Log Buffer #72: a Carnival of the Vanities for DBAs
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The 72nd edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs, makiing its second appearance on Sheeri Kritzer Cabral’s blog, The MySQL She-BA. Eddie Awad is on-deck for LB#73. After him, there’s lots of room, so please send an email to the Log Buffer coordinator (me) if you’d like to edit and publish an [...]
November 22, 2007
21:17
Tuesday, session@AMIS: Report from Oracle Open World 2007: trends, news, analysis, demos
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Last week we had Oracle Open World 2007, a week of sessions, key notes, news, debates, rumours, demonstrations, previews on the latest and greatest from Oracle. AMIS had a team of four presenting, watching, learning at OOW and together with fellow Oracle ACE Director Lonneke Dikmans, they will present their findings.Tuesday, 27th November, from 16.30 [...]
21:14
ADF Faces RC - Implementation strategies for global buttons in page templates
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One of the new features added to ADF Faces in JDeveloper 11 is templating. Its so cool that you might wonder how we could have been so long without. New features however lead to new usecases to document,which is good as it keeps me in the job A usecase that has been posted recently [...]
18:11
Oracle Forms and SOA at DOAG 2007
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Wednesday saw me in Nuremburg, Germany, attending Europe's second largest Oracle user group. As well as some customer meetings it was another chance to roll out our Forms and SOA message to a community, that I know, are big Forms users. It looked like about 80 people made the presentation and I've responded to requests by posting the PPT here. One interesting question came up which I think it is worth repeating here..[...] Read more!
17:42
Integrating Seam with Maven, Netbeans and GlassFish
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The application that resulted from my previous article on Maven, Netbeans and GlassFish uses Hibernate for JPA and Facelets for JSF. This is an ideal situation to make the move to Seam. In the past few weeks I have spent some time on using Seam in GlassFish applications but I haven’t been very successful. However, [...]
16:58
random statements
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I read the ultimate excuse database and checked if I can use model to do generate random statements: with t as ( select '%E and %E are travelling to %L.' fmt from dual union all select 'About %N employees lives in %L.' from dual) select str from t model reference dept on ( [...]
4:15
How an Oracle DBA Works in Sydney
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I’m going to present couple sessions at the Australian Oracle User Group Conference in Melbourne next week. It’s the first time I’m presenting Down Under and I’m looking forward to it, alhough, I?m still not sure if I should start from the last slide and proceed backward . . . Since it?s more than a day of flying only [...]
3:46
Looking Forward to the UKOUG Conference
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It seems so soon after Open World, but in a week or so’s time the UKOUG annual Conference & Exhibition is running at the ICC, Birmingham. There’s going to be quite a big Rittman Mead contingency at the event, with Jon and I joined by Borkur and Peter who’ve been working with us on projects, [...]
3:42
Oracle is Not Compatible with Oracle
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Just a short blog entry about a funny error message I’ve got while trying to activate a physical standby database: SQL> alter database recover managed standby database finish skip standby logfile; alter database recover managed standby database finish skip standby logfile * ERROR at line 1: ORA-00283: recovery session canceled due to errors ORA-01110: data file 1: '/oradata/stage/datafile/system_01.dbf' ORA-01122: database file 1 [...]
November 21, 2007
23:24
Oracle Application Express (APEX) 3.1 ready for your testing
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As some others already blogged... APEX 3.1 beta is public now.

If you've seen the demos of the "Interactive Report Regions" you know they are worth trying ;-) You can see here an interactive report on top of the Emp table!

Warning: Use Firefox... in IE7 I still have problems! (Carl Backstrom warned us at OOW, but I would think it was bluf ;-))

You may also have had this mail from the APEX Development team:

The Oracle Application Express Team is pleased to announce the debut of our 3.1 release for public evaluation. To access our hosted instance, please register. If you have participated in a previous evaluation, you will bypass the short survey. After registering, you will be provided with access to the evaluation instance from which new accounts can be requested.

You will need to request a workspace and then wait on the email notification.

The new feature that we would really like feedback on is our new region type - Interactive Report. This is a new SQL query based region type that lets end-users customize which columns they see as well as column order. End users can also, sort, filter, break, sum, highlight, and add computed columns using simple pull down menus.

The full list of 3.1 features available with this Early Adopters release is:
- Application Builder
  - Interactive Report Regions *
  - Templates
    - Improve Searching of templates
    - Replace Templates
    - Publish Templates
    - Bulk Unsubscribe of templates
    - 2 New Themes
  - Wizards
    - Allow for early exit when creating HTML region
    - Create Interactive Report Wizard
    - Remove 32k limit on Create Application on a Spreadsheet
  - Addition of Application Groups
  - Simplification of Page Group pages
  - Addition of Application Date Format
  - Support for Declarative Media Type
  - Can view existence of run-only application (but cannot edit them)
  - Display Application Name in App Builder footer
- Workspace Administration
  - Workspace-specific Builder Notifications
- Runtime Installation
- APIs
  - Augment APEX_MAIL API to support adding attachments to e-mails
Please remember, the success of this Application Express 3.1 evaluation depends on user feedback. All participants are strongly encouraged to provide feedback using the feedback application. The link is also available from within the hosted Application Express 3.1 evaluation instance Home page.
22:48
Oracle 11g: The Perfection of a Masterpiece - Open World 2007
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This was the presentation I gave at Open World 2007. It went pretty well, judging by how full the room was. I estimate more than 300 people attended. Although the title may sound a bit like a sales pitch, the content is more substantial. It covers the features that are ready to use out-of-the-box, [...]
22:31
Oracle APEX 3.1 evaluation version ready for public beta testing!
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Just read the e-mail that the Oracle APEX team has released the Oracle Application Express (APEX) 3.1 evaluation version for public beta testing. As with 3.0, you can do the testing on a hosted environment. So get ready, register for a workspace and start testing the new release. The new "Interactive Report Regions" are really great! So give them a lot of feedback about the new/changed features so that we get a really stable production version as usual!

All the details can be found in the original mail below:

To access our hosted instance, please register.
If you have participated in a previous evaluation, you will bypass the short survey.
After registering, you will be provided with access to the evaluation instance from which new accounts can be requested.

You will need to request a workspace and then wait on the email notification.

The new feature that we would really like feedback on is our new region type - Interactive Report. This is a new SQL query based region type that lets end-users customize which columns they see as well as column order. End users can also, sort, filter, break, sum, highlight, and add computed columns using simple pull down menus.

The full list of 3.1 features available with this Early Adopters release is:
- Application Builder
  - Interactive Report Regions *
  - Templates
    - Improve Searching of templates
    - Replace Templates
    - Publish Templates
    - Bulk Unsubscribe of templates
    - 2 New Themes
  - Wizards
    - Allow for early exit when creating HTML region
    - Create Interactive Report Wizard
    - Remove 32k limit on Create Application on a Spreadsheet
  - Addition of Application Groups
  - Simplification of Page Group pages
  - Addition of Application Date Format
  - Support for Declarative Media Type
  - Can view existence of run-only application (but cannot edit them)
  - Display Application Name in App Builder footer
- Workspace Administration
  - Workspace-specific Builder Notifications
- Runtime Installation
- APIs
  - Augment APEX_MAIL API to support adding attachments to e-mails
Please remember, the success of this Application Express 3.1 evaluation depends on user feedback. All participants are strongly encouraged to provide feedback using the feedback application. The link is also available from within the hosted Application Express 3.1 evaluation instance Home page.
21:26
secure network transfers
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An ironic update to yesterdays story about the loss of sensitive data in the UK. My wife who is in the middle of changing her employment status had enquired of HMRC about assistance that they might give to sole traders and small businesses. We got a letter today with some incorrect assertions about her tax status from a lady at our local office. The email address listed was a .gsi.gov.uk address or government secure intranet

From the 2004 press release about the then latest gsi investment

The £40 million new Government Secure Intranet (GSi) has gone live, linking over 140 local and central government departments with over 280,000 users. There are over a million potential users, if & when the GSi is linked to the Criminal Justice Network, the NHS Network and the MOD. It'll be a fundamental backbone for e-Government in the UK for the next few years.

The new GSi, provided by Energis, will enable all central and local Government departments and public sector organisations to communicate quickly, easily and securely.

Hugh Barrett, chief executive, OGCbuying.solutions, said: "The new Energis GSi represents a step change in technology, with the capacity to transform the way government communicates. The new contract, which is available to central civil government and the wider public sector, as well as government suppliers, has the potential to finally deliver joined-up government in a way not previously possible."

So HMRC already have access to a secure internal intergovernmental network, and indeed are advertising it as the method to contact them. They chose however to transmit the sensitive data by CD and Courier.
19:46
AUSOUG - Post-Perth Sight Seeing!!
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Man you can tell I am a geek, when my first inclination is to title this “Site Seeing” !! Boy was it hot today. 34C !! I nearly melted …not used to the big temperature difference. When I left Ottawa it was snowing. Today was my first “off” day where I could spend time dong [...]
15:37
Application Express 3.1 just went public (evaluation)
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If you were at Oracle Openworld and saw the APEX 3.1 demo in the booths then you’ll definitely want to try it out yourself too, if you weren’t at OOW then trust me, you’ll definitely want to try it out anyway, some of the new features are just awesome (in the common day sense of [...]
7:23
Yikes, Leopard took my account away
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I just got around to upgrading my main mac to OS X 10.5; but rather strangely I found that my user account when missing after the first attempt a logging in. Took me a while to fix the problem; but in the end tracked it down to this little treat. Looks like if you have just upgraded since the original version of OS X there is a sting in the tail if you had a nice long secure password. Oh well fixed now.

Permalink for 'More on PHP with DRCP support'

4:20

More on PHP with DRCP support

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I was asked to compare DRCP to SHARED server connections. I've also promised to give some more statistics and comparisons for DRCP and standard connectivity.
First few results to compare to SHARED server as asked in comments to my previous post:

Version	Description	# Requests	Average	Median	Standard Deviation	Throughput
1	oci_connect DEDICATED server						Not tested
2	oci_pconnect DEDICATED server	1200	84	63	116	4077
3	oci_connect SHARED server	1200	280	264	150	1290
4	oci_pconnect SHARED server	1200	82	78	93	3965
5	oci_connect with DRCP	1200	104	94	45	3265
6	oci_pconnect with DRCP	1200	78	78	23	4396

In this case SHARED server is configured to use 4 dispatchers and max process = 1000.

Cheers, Pawe?

3:15
Pete_S
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A little time between assignments allows me time to play with Enterprise Linux and Oracle 11g 64-bit. I think I could get to like virtual machines
2:10
How to find out the machine ID on various UNIXes
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It recently came up that it would be helpful if we had a cheat sheet to find out the machine names for any given UNIX. I knew these off the top of my head but it would be great if people added more as comments. HP/HP-UX: /bin/uname -i IBM/AIX: /bin/uname -m SGI/IRIX: /sbin/sysinfo -s Sun/Solaris: /usr/ucb/hostid
0:22
Berkeley DB Java Edition Two Phase Commit Bug Fix
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JE 3.2.65 contains an important bug fix having to do with Two Phase Commit processing, as reported in this OTN Forum posting. Specifically, if a transaction is prepared, but not committed, it is possible over the course of multiple recovery invocations (re-opening the JE environment) to have the transaction disappear (thereby preventing it from ever being committed). If you're using distributed Two Phase Commit transactions, you'll want to pick up this release when it's available.
0:16
Berkeley DB Java Edition and Remote File Systems
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Sometime soon, we'll be posting a new release of Berkeley DB Java Edition (JE) which will have some important bug fixes in it. Probably the most important one has to do with JE configurations which place the environment directory on a remote file system.

A user reported some log corruption at one of their user's sites. Whenever we see log corruption reported, we take it very seriously and investigate as thoroughly as possible. So we groveled through the log files using tools like DbPrintLog and od (the unix Octal Dump tool). This is generally a rather tedious business because it involves looking at very low level data in a rather non-user friendly format. We typically refer to this kind of drill as "archeology" since we're trying to find out what happened in history with rather limited help (only the log and it may be corrupted). In this particular case, we turned up a block of 0's in the middle of the log which happened to be aligned on a sector (512 byte) boundary. Since JE does not do anything with sectors per say, this corruption raised red flags with us. It turned out that the user was using a remote file system (NFS) for the environment directory. Our FAQ on the topic is pretty specific about the limitations and requirements for using JE, and while we used to only talk about the impact of NFS on the je.lck file, we now discuss (or will very shortly) the ramifications of server-side caching. To this end, as of JE 3.2.65, we've added a new flag -- je.log.useODSYNC -- which causes JE environment log files (the *.jdb files) to be opened with O_DSYNC. This parameter should never be used when the environment directory lives on a local disk. The parameter should always be used when the environment directory resides on a remote file system.

If you're reading this before JE 3.2.65 (or later) is available and you are using a remote file system to store your environment, let me know and I'll get you a pre-release with the parameter available in it. (charles.lamb at obvious.com).
November 20, 2007
23:45
OOW 2007: (most) presentations available for download
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Most of the presentations for the sessions presented at Oracle Open World 2007, last week in San Francisco, can be downloaded from the Content Catalog at: [www28.cplan.com] You will need to use the username/password combination cboracle/oraclec6 to download presentations. At [www.oracle.com] are all the keynotes, of which the one by Ed Abbo is probably the [...]
23:39
OLAP Workshop : Basic Overview of OLAP Concepts
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I have recently been working with two of our key OLAP experts (Stuart Bunby and Kevin Lancaster) helping deliver various OLAP workshops. Based on the questions and discussions I had with many people during this years OpenWorld I think it might be useful to share some of information we put together for those workshops via this blog. This series of postings (not sure how many it will be at this
23:06
Simplicity is in the eye of the beholder
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Laurent has posted a particularly succinct method for doing bitwise aggregations on his blog. I don't know what practical use it is, but that's another matter. What I liked was his cheeky sign-off, "It is that easy!". Which reminded me of a story from years ago, when I was still in the Ministry of Defence

I was sent on a CORAL 66 course. CORAL was a 3GL intended for real-time programming and it combined keywords in English with some very low level functionality, including the ability to flip individual bits. As a COBOL bunny with a History degree this was this first time I'd ever had to wrangle bitmasks and it made my brain hurt. I wasn't lucky enough to be sent on the subsequent advanced course (five weeks long, those were the days!) but these who did got to build either a missile guidance system or a safety system for a nuclear power station in their exercises. Even on the beginners' course the exercises were fairly hard going.

One involved translating Morse code into letters. I went for a data-intensive solution. I wrote an array with all the letters in the Morse alphabet. This was hard work but the actual processing was quite simple: start in the middle of the array and shift the index left or right depending upon whether the current character is a dot or a dash, halving the offset each time. When there's no further input the index points to the transmitted letter.

There was a very bright chap on the course. We often talk about junior programmers, but this guy was definitely junior, because he was a lance corporal and so everybody else on the course outranked him. Even me: as a civvy I had a notional rank of lieutenant. Most of the trainers were officers but there was a sergeant whose job it was to answer the questions of the non-comm students (they weren't allowed to ask officers questions or indeed initiate any conversation).

Anyway, this corporal's solution consist of a single very dense recursive algorithm which somehow spat out the right answer. However, his code contained just the one comment: "This algorithm is easy to understand so no further explanation is necessary." The trainers didn't understand his algorithm and he knew they wouldn't understand it and they knew that was why he had put the comment in. So they marked him down, for insubordination.
22:44
Personal details for 25 Million people go missing in the UK
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To say i was shocked is an understatement. I was completely gob-smacked that a UK government agency can spend (presumably) millions of our IT pounds storing and using our personal data and then proceed to take it out of its....[Read More]

Posted by Pete On 21/11/07 At 03:40 PM
22:25
Combining Hibernate and Facelets with Maven, Netbeans and GlassFish
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Over the past weeks I have been exploring the possibilities of Maven, Netbeans and GlassFish. Two of my previous blog entries explain the basics of using Maven in Netbeans and how to deploy to GlassFish. By default, GlassFish uses Toplink Essentials for JPA. Also, Netbeans by default uses jsp files for web pages. In this [...]
21:40
Hey Dude - that's my data
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As everyone living in the UK should be aware there has been a serious error in data protection involving the UK Tax Authority , the auditor of UK Central Government as well as a private courier firm. In summary
- The auditor asked for a dump from the UK Child Benefit database. It's unclear whether this was a valid request or not.
- The data was dumped and recorded onto two disks.
- The disks were then sent through the outsourced postal operation. This should never have happened.
- The data never arrived.
- The disks were resent this time recorded delivery.
- The data lost and potentially in the wild includes social security details, dates of birth, names , addresses, bank details and so on for 25 million individuals (including my family).
It seems highly likely to me that the "Junior Official" involved was a DBA, though perhaps a systems administrator was involved.

There has been, and no doubt will continue to be, a significant discussion around the appropriate procedures and technologies in use. Oracle might for example cite their Secure Backup product. The relevant junior minister last night spoke on National radio and played down concerns about our proposed national ID Card on the grounds that it was newer technology and so would not suffer the same problem.

For me though the technology is really rather irrelevant - security here is a people issue. There appear to have been a number of people failings
- First, how does any auditor justify asking for sensitive data on CD.
- Second, what management instructions were given to the official concerned ("co-operate with the auditors" seems to me to be the most likely)
- Third, how does any it professional with access to sensitive data consider burning it to CD and sending it through the post.
It doesn't encourage me that the minister apparently believes both that people won't make mistakes with ID data or that it is OK to go on record as saying that the Child Benefit data is stored on an outdated and inherently insecure system. The first is certainly untrue and one would hope that the second was equally untrue.
16:13
Forms Look and Feel 1.3.3.1 is out
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The new LAF 1.3.3.1 is out with a few new features about the Status Bar and also a bug correction on table-blocks when all items are not located on the same canvas. Get the new 1.3.3.1 version. [?]
15:14
AUSOUG - Day 2
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Today was a much better day than yesterday. I managed to get more than 8 hours sleep and felt very rested when I woke up. Plus my bags arrived at the hotel while I was sleeping. Which was especially fortuitous as my easy buttons were in the suitcase. Last year I asked Connor if they [...]
12:54
Tracking your Oracle client versions in 11g
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I have recently stumbled upon V$SESSION_CONNECT_INFO view and discovered that it provides interesting information about client-side software and settings. Using this view in Oracle 11g you can simplify collecting some statistics about database clients. Here is what can be extracted: Version of client libraries Type of OCI library used (standard OCI, different instant clients and etc.) but no [...]
4:40
Oops - What Just Changed? Production Downtime Ensues.
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There is a story circulating describing how the VA had a simple issue cascade into a full day of production downtime. We can learn from their failures! The initial problem turned out to be an improperly executed change in port numbers, but they wouldn’t determine that until much later. There was no visibility into [...]
4:29
UKOUG 2007 Blogger Meetup : Pitcher & Piano, Brindley Place, 8pm on Monday 3rd Dec
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Hot on the heels of the OOW 2007 Blogger Meetup, we’re organizing something similar for the UKOUG Conference in Birmingham. It’s on Monday, 3rd December at 8pm in the Pitcher & Piano, The Water’s Edge, Brindley Place (just across the bridge from the ICC), and the UKOUG have kindly offered to sponsor the event. There’ll be [...]
4:17
Keeping a Lid on Oracle Licensing Costs while Ensuring Compliance
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If this post seems a bit like an “advertorial”, please believe me — it’s not. Well, at least it’s not an advertisement for Pythian in any way. What it is, however, is a post about a longstanding business partner of Pythian’s who run a very useful service I think more of you should know about. [...]
3:55
AUSOUG Perth conference - from 45k down to 350
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Day 2 of the Australian Oracle User Group (AUSOUG) conference in Perth is before me, and I thought I'd pen a very quick note about how the event is going.

I can't say my trip back from OOW was as bad as Babette Turner-Underwood's, but then as an Aussie I can pretty much say I blank the 19hrs of flying out of my life. Yes the flights are horribly long, yes the customs queues are annoying, but I did score a pair of socks from Qantas, so that made it all okay.

As Babette noted in a separate post, the move from OOW with ~45k attendees down to around 350 seems funny. So much so that in the opening keynote by Martin Power we were actually told where the bathrooms are. I don't remember Larry telling the delegates at OOW where the bathrooms were; Larry was rambling something about 30 years of innovation or something..... I guess it's the little things that make a great conference.

This year's Perth conference is up 100 on last year which is great growth over the 50 additional attendees in 2006. And a point I'd like to make is that I always think that at the small conferences, attendees get as much out of it as the larger ones. Presentations are a hit and miss affair, and you can only meet so many people in a day, so basically the end result is the same, though the tickets to the local event are far cheaper. In addition at a small conference like Perth's the atmosphere is much more friendly and far less corporate, which is the way we like it down here.

I can't say I caught too many presentations day 1 as I was hanging out with the SAGE crew, and also introducing speakers. I did sit in on my boss's (Penny Cookson) APEX presentation, where she demonstrated taking APEX to the extreme, and accused me of spending most of OOW at the pub. Strictly not true let me assure you ;) They don't have "pubs" in San Fran Penny, they're called "bars" :P

I also introduced and sat in on Duncan Mill's two JDeveloper presentations. Definitely numbers were up in these sessions this year, and I can see some people looking at the new feature set, particularly the new ADF Faces RC web pages with all the cool AJAX additions, and MDS customisations, and thinking "wow!".

Anyway, onto Day 2 of the conference. Today I present my Load/Stress testing paper "Take a Load Off!" which I presented at the OOW Unconference. Hopefully I've ironed out all the bugs this time. And finally I'll be participating in the "Great Oracle development tools debate" panel session where I'll be defending JDeveloper by tooth and nail.... should be good fun.

Next week is the Melbourne leg of the conference which will be bigger, but with better coffee, so all in all an event worth going to. I hope to see you there.
3:42
Oracle JDeveloper/ADF Real Life Story on Oracle OpenWorld
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Yes, that right - I was presenting Oracle JDeveloper/ADF Real Life Story on Oracle OpenWorld in Unconference section. Everyone was free to come and listen hints I have delivered for Oracle JDeveloper/ADF development based on real life experience. Based on feedback received from auditory, I think session was successful.

I have started session with presentation based on this outline:
- About Oracle ACE Directors
- J2EE Development - JDeveloper 11g and Oracle ADF (future book)
- Oracle JDeveloper/ADF in IBM GBS Norway
- Real Development with JDeveloper/ADF
- Demo of Sample Applications from [andrejusb.blogpost.com]
- Technical Resources
Yes, I'm writing now book about JDeveloper 11g and ADF. This book will based mostly on practical material. I have presented with several slides my current project in IBM GBS Norway and turned to main part of session - Real Development. In this part I was developing Web application with JDeveloper and ADF just on the fly, at the from of auditory. Application development from beginning to testing took for me 45 minutes. And lastly I presented my blog and have talked about technical resources each JDeveloper/ADF developer should know and use in his daily work.

In this post I want to concentrate on application I have developed during real time development. Developed application - OOWUnconference.zip is based on standard HR schema available in Oracle XE database, application contains 3 Web pages - for viewing and editing data from JOBS table, and also for viewing data from EMPLOYEES table.

I have developed this application based on those steps:

1. I created Business Components diagram. I was using declarative approach to create Model layer. Jobs and Employees entities were added to the Model declaration:

2. Second step was to show how test created Model layer with ADF BC Test utility that comes with JDeveloper:

3. Next step was to show how to add validation logic. Jobs entity object was chosen, I added and tested validation rule for MinSalary attribute:

4. When Model layer was done, I moved to ViewController and have created there page structure along with navigation:

5. First page I developed was - jobs.jspx. This page contains one read-only table and two buttons according to logic defined in faces-config.xml file.

6. Second page was editJob.jspx. This page provides a form for data from Jobs entity editing:

7. Third page - employees.jspx. Here employees who belong to specified job are listed in the table:

8. And of course I have tested validation logic in editJob.jspx page, it worked good:

However, there was a question from auditory about how to make Back button work in a case when validation error is displayed. Hint - you should set Immediate=true for Back button:

9. Ok, everything works fine, but one thing is not ok. If you have noticed, it is possible to update minimal salary with some value, even higher comparing to salaries of existing employees. That not good, and I have implemented solution for this as well. At first, I have created new read-only View object that select all employees with selected JOB_ID and SALARY lower comparing to provided value:

10. When View object was created, I implemented custom method in Application Module. This method is used to execute read-only View object and to return result to ViewController:

11. In ViewController I have created methodAction declaration for checkEmployeeSalary method and in editJob page backing bean implemented a call to defined methodAction:

12. Now second validation rule is also implemented:

Oracle OpenWorld was great event, with two Larry Ellison keynotes and a lot of technical material in Oracle Develop. I even don't talk about entertainment part, it was amazing. See you next year in San Francisco ;-).

When running sample application, don't forget to add adf-faces-impl.jar and jsf-impl.jar to application's WEB-INFlib directory.
2:43
Enterprise to Standard?
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OK, it's a little cheeky to use the blog for this when there are so many forums I could post this on and friends I could ask. What can I say? I have a lot of respect for the people who congregate around here, so ....

Does anyone have much experience of migrating their databases from Enterprise Edition to one of the cheaper editions, such as Standard? Did you find it an easy experience or not? Are there any unexpected issues you encountered?

There's no substitute for prior experience here, so feel free to share yours and I'll be grateful
1:22
AUSOUG: Day One
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It is now evening after the first day at the AUSOUG Conference in Perth, Australia. This is my first time attending AUSOUG, and I have found it much smaller and more personal than others I have attended. The food has been excellent, and more importantly (because I really needed it) there was [...]
0:05
Nuremberg - another Forms user
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So, after the buzz of Oracle World in San Francisco its Germany for the German Oracle User Group (DOAG). I'm presenting Oracle's Forms and SOA strategy and expecting to meet a few Oracle Forms customers but I met one Forms customer earlier than I thought. On checking into the hotel I did a quick check over the desk to see the application the hotel is using and low and behold, it was Oracle Forms! Its amazing where you see Oracle Forms popping up!..
November 19, 2007
23:37
What is ROWNUM=1 ?
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Is rownum=1 the first row returned? well, it depends : select rownum, ename from emp order by ename; ROWNUM ENAME ---------- ---------- 11 ADAMS 2 ALLEN 6 BLAKE [...]
22:08
UKOUG and other events...
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I was just catching up on some stuff and read Jonathan's blog posting on the UKOUG. Sure enough - UKOUG is right around the corner. I have two technical sessions and a keynote there before I leave for some other internal events in Europe. I like the UKOUG - have been to the last few (this will be my fifth time there). The event is well organized and the wealth of material available is huge. I highly recommend this if you are in the area.

As for other events... I've finally gotten around to using a new feature of asktom the developers put in for me earlier this year. There is a "where is tom?" bit now on the home page. I'll be using this to display public events I'm speaking at/attending over time. The calendar widget goes out for a year into the future, and the list on the home page shows the next 10 events. I'll be using this in the future to advertise seminars, user groups, and other Oracle related events.

I do have three events in Europe I'd like to point out - at the end of January, I'll be in Madrid, Spain. At the end of February I'll be in London, UK (check back on that one, the date seems to be in question - I'm not sure if it'll be the 25/26th or 27/28th). Lastly, in early May - I'll be in Berlin, Germany. I have been meaning to generate some new content for a while and will be using these seminars as an excuse to finally sit down and do it. As usual - the content will cover things up to the current release - but as much as possible - cover ever

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