Ideas as a precursor to Oracle APEX #JoelKallmanDay

 It seems if I post only once a year, it's for Joel Kallman Day...

Last year I hinted of a small side story to a remediation project that was upgrade the entire stack supporting a (mostly) Oracle Forms application.

Along the way I also had to remediate a little one-Form tool Connor McDonald build for developers, and it had some features of some note.

It should be stated this was written at a time when flip phones were all the rage - and notably before Oracle APEX gave birth to Interactive Reports.

I won't include a screenshot (for privacy concerns), but it's basically a multi-row data block allowing queries and edits of selected records - an Editable Grid, back in the heyday of Forms.

Hmm, let's see a list of default display options, plus the ability to save my own current filter - which stores the values set in Enter-Query mode - remember that?!

Saved Reports

And let's see an ability to re-order the columns, and or even hide specific columns.

Re-order columns

Yes, Connor created a customisable editable grid, in Oracle Forms, a few years before smartphones were a thing.

Editable Grid in APEX

All these highlighted features that come straight of the Oracle APEX box.

An example of great ideas that pre-date the technology that can better support them.

Or is it the ideas that drive the development of better technology?

Or perhaps a bit of both...

Oracle APEX @ Home

The world has obviously lost a number of in-person conferences in recent times, but luckily we have people like Martin who asked the APEX community to jump, and they responded "how high?"

And out comes 24 hours of 24 speakers with APEX @ Home, on April 16th 2020. A lot of regular speakers appear to have pulled out some awesome sessions, and then there's my dinky one on APEX logic suggestions.

It's an AskTOM Office Hours session, so it's also recorded for later viewing, but you'll miss the chance for live Q&A.

And you'll also miss the challenge Connor put out there - to get a virtual selfie with all 24 speakers. Good luck with that.

What I've wanted to do, but haven't had the time, is roughly plot the time zone differences for each speaker. I'm talking at 8pm, but I bet it's all over the shop for every speaker, at various times of the day!

AUSOUG Connect 2019

Australian Oracle User Group (AUSOUG) is holding their annual conference series in Perth & Melbourne this year, again this year, and I'm lucky enough to be at both events.

If you can, hold these days aside for Connect 2019, meet an interesting mix of people, and talk with them about your experiences. Seeing & hearing what other people are up to can be invaluable.

• Monday 14th October – Rendezvous Hotel In Melbourne
• Wednesday 16th October –  Mercure Hotel in Perth

I'll be enjoying sunny Melbourne the weekend before, then flying back home for the Perth event.

Looking at the programs, I see a nice list of international visitors to compliment our ripper Aussie line-up.  This includes, and not limited to

• Aussie ex-pat & Oracle APEX Product Manager Daivd Peake, maybe we'll consider him a hybrid?
• Indexing extraordinaire & Bowie tragic Richard Foote.
• YouTube sensation Connor McDonald
• ODTUG board member Karen Cannell
• Freshly branded Oracle ACE Jeffrey Kemp
• Writer, and Oracle Performance guru Craig Shallahamer
• EBS strategist Nadia Bendjedou
• South American sensation Francisco Munoz Alvarez
• Ride the cloud with DBA guru Gavin Soorma
• TimesTen expert, or is that 10x cloud man Doug Hood
• Go Dutch with Patrick Barel
• Database polymath Guy Harrison
• Got Script? Get Christopher Jones

On the flip-side, currently I'll miss out on seeing both Guy & Connor due to scheduling conflicts. I know I can find Connor at the bar later, but Guy has a flare for infotainment.

And if I'm not mistaken, Groundbreaker & ACE Program Director Jen Nicholson will also join us down under.

Oh, and this doesn't include all the amazing delegates, who always have a tale to tell, even if it isn't up on the stage.

AUSOUG Connect 2016 Presentations

Another conference series over and many new lessons are still churning around somewhere in the back of my brain.

Our Australian conferences still seem a little subdued compared to years gone by, but the thicker community bonds held strong while the economy decides what to do.

The other problem we have is getting all those people out there we know are using Oracle technology out from their cubicles and at these fun events!

My Presentations

I did 2 and a half this year, and I have plenty more ideas for next year. Some of which got cut out of my 5.1 Charts session, which really didn't end up what I intended it to be. In part because APEX 5.1 is still in early adopter, though I hear that there will be no EA3 and it will head straight into apex.oracle.com as UAT. Just not sure when...

Mastering Dynamic Actions - demonstrating 3 useful patterns I use daily. Certainly my favourite topic at the moment.
https://prezi.com/lko3dxsbzr3i/mastering-dynamic-actions/

APEX 5.1 Charts with OracleJET - more to come on this topic, and I think I'm going to find myself digging into JET over the summer.

https://prezi.com/misgwk4trqhc/apex-51-charts-with-oraclejet/

The Perfect Trigger - this is the 'half', well, only 10 minutes. I shared a slot with Penny & Ray who talked about some of their favourite things.
https://prezi.com/g0cew4clllzk/the-perfect-trigger/
Bonus slide at the end for the Melbourne crowd where I just mentioned some sites people might like but may have missed.

Conference notes

Here are some thoughts from my scratchy notes, included here to help reiterate my learning, and some of you might find something interesting.

Basheer Khan described "Extensibility" as a required feature of a good UX. APEX has that nailed, affirming some of what I was going to say about plugins in my OracleJET session.

Basheer' design philosphy for mobile was: glance, scan, commit. Which translated into workflows of only 3 levels deep. Glancing at choices, scanning results, commiting to action. I think we do a decent job of that already, and so does the documentation. I always feel only 3 clicks away from the information I need.

The final thing from Basheer I have to look up is: UX RDK.

This is not me. I'd never play for Melbourne...

Mark Lancaster gave me something that may help the penny drop with an issue regarding tabular forms, not that I use them often. I'm certainly looking forward to learning all about Interactive Grids.

Connor smashed out some good feels about 12.2 where it seems some good features that weren't quite finished get the treatment they need. Well, almost.

LISTAGG now has features to elegantly handle problems the concatenated string becomes large, but there is still no 'distinct' option.

Validate_conversion sounds like a very useful datatype validation device, but it might has well behave like LNNVL.
Column level collation sounded interesting, but I didn't make enough notes. Connor speaks pretty fast. Case insensitive columns will solve a few issues, but come with caveats.

I love the look of the deprecated pragma. PL/SQL warnings in general I would like to revisit.

External table alterations on the fly complete the picture for the true flexibility of external tables. And doing things on the fly seems to be a bit of a trend with 12.2

JSON generation is a biggy, not just features for reading. It's a shame the ability to read and write came out at the same time, but again, it completes the picture in regard to the JSON lifecycle.

So many other goodies to come in 12.2, including approx_count_distinct() which works in a very interesting manner to help make histogram analysis quicker on large data.

Analytical Views seem like a massive feature attempting to solve the problems with rollup and grouping, but I wonder if it will be a another spruce goose.

Melbourne was also a blast. Trent Schafer showed me how much I really don't know about APEX administration, and Ubuntu for that matter. I've really stalled in my use, and speculating whether I made the right decision. Let's see how I go with my exploration of Atom.

Lino's session on Stripe was a good demonstration on how web services make APEX applications become easily extensible. It also gave me another presentation idea.

And all this is a drop in the ocean to what I hear is coming out of some European conferences right now. Information overload. I feel like those people who know an awful lot about one thing and do it really well... an 'expert', right? One who knows a lot about a little.

Scott.

Charting Predictions, al a AskTom

The 'grand algorithm' favoured this particular tweet from Connor McDonald in my 'highlights'.

Use regression functions in Oracle to do basic forecasts https://t.co/gaKGHafJaQ

— Connor McDonald (@connor_mc_d) June 14, 2016

I found this intriguing considering a side project I've been tinkering on. The solution ended up looking much simpler than a model clause, though I'm going to need to let it digest for a while before I fully understand how it works. Maybe read the relevant documentation.

Trouble is, the final result isn't the sort of thing you want to print out on your dot matrix printer to show the big cheese, right? You want to graph that sucker.

So I create a page in Oracle APEX 5.1 (apexea.oracle.com) and created a line chart.

I split the results into two series using Connor's query within an inline view, in part because that was the fastest way I could think to get the graph plotted

select dte
 ,sz as actual
from (
with reg as (
    select regr_slope(sz, to_number(to_char(dte,'j'))) slope,
           regr_intercept(sz, to_number(to_char(dte,'j'))) intcpt,
           max(dte) nxt
  from t
  )
  select t.*, 'actual' tag
  from   t
  union all
  select nxt+r dte,
         trunc(intcpt+slope*to_number(to_char(nxt+r,'j')))
         ,'predicted'
  from reg,
       ( select rownum r
         from   dual
         connect by level <= 30 )
  order by 1
)
where tag ='actual'

The result was compelling.

A picture paints a thousand words

I also like the fact the declarative series name honoured, rather than a double quoted "Column Alias".

It will be interesting to see how this plots more varied data, considering the data variance issues Connor described.

I added a to_char(dte, 'DD Mon YYYY') to get a prettier tooltip, but interestingly, it changed the angle of the line.

TO_CHAR() added

Then I spotted this field here, I could use the query as supplied by Connor without having to think about pivoting the result to get it into the right format the engine requires.

A new declarative option

However the result didn't come out quite right. I think that's more an issue with the communication between APEX and OracleJET that anything else, ie: a bug.

Not quite right

It appears the declarative charting options have been engineered in 5.1 to reduce the amount of hoop jumping with the result set. Charting in general appears more declarative, easier to navigate and work out what's going on.

Nice work APEX team.

SQL Analytics in every day APEX

Looking for way to apply analytical functions to your APEX applications?

I had a classic report where I wanted to dynamically source the column headers from counts in the database (values in brackets).

The ability to do this has been a feature of APEX for a while, but this was the first time I did it in APEX 5.0.

Customise headers via Region attributes

With Connor's recent spate of analytics videos,  I thought I'd mention this use case where LISTAGG() was perfectly apt.

A basic query like this will return a grouped count.

select count(*), catgy
from some_categories
group by catgy

  COUNT(*) CATGY_CODE
---------- ----------
         5 CATGY1    
         5 CATGY3    
         1 CATGY5    
         7 CATGY2    
         1 CATGY4    
         1 CATGY6    

 6 rows selected 

But the string needs to look like
Rep:Catgy1 (2):Catgy2 (4):...

So I need to transpose those rows into a colon delimited string. Here's how you can do it with SQL analytics.

declare
  lc_hdr  varchar2(512);
begin  
  select 'Rep:'||listagg(initcap(catgy)||' ('||count(*)||')' -- just build a fancy string
                        ,':') within group (order by catgy) -- concatenated by ':', listed in order of catgy
  into lc_hdr
  from some_categories
  group by catgy;

  return lc_hdr;
end anon;

An alternative may be bulk collecting the results into a PL/SQL array, then using apex_util.table_to_string(), but not when the problem can be solved with simple SQL ;p

Talking SQL Analytics with Connor

In about 22 hours I'll be talking with Oracle Developer Advocate (or the southern/eastern hemisphere AskTom adjunct) Connor McDonald about one of my favourite part of Oracle, being SQL Analytics.

If you haven't seen any of his YouTube videos recently, this will be a good chance to catch up and see how easy and practical SQL analytics are, and how you end up with simpler SQL.

I like to think of them like Excel calculations you can put in your result set.

Webinar registration details available here. It starts Tue, Mar 1, 2016 6:00 AM - 7:00 AM CST, or 6am for us Perth people.

Yes, my line has been tested and as long as you only hear my voice it should be cool. Connor apparently lives in a neighborhood more favourable to technology.

Kscope ODTUG Interview

The ODTUG booth at Kscope15 had a permanent spot for interviews, and they can all be found on the ODTUG channel.

Martin interviewed me, and here it is, with embarrassing front still and all.



If you want some more Australian accent, and the sound of a local magpie, listen to Connor's little video regarding his move to Oracle. Though he's done quite a few more now since I drafted this post.

I have an idea or two for some videos from myself, finally. All just a matter of time.

Australian 2014 Oracle Conference series suggestions

This morning the kind folks at AUSOUG sent me an e-mail asking who I'd like to see present which topics at the Perth/Melbourne conferences in November this year.

To perhaps help get you started, I thought I'd mention who I submitted - in part as a hint to those nominees that there is at least one person who would like to see you present in Austraila this year.

The survey asks for 2 Australian/2 international/2 topics for DB/Dev/EBus - our typical program spread.

Database:

• Connor McDonald - he's like the little bit of sugar that helps the medicine go down - a must have at every event.
• Yury Velikanov - I enjoy his passion, though I don't always understand his topics - but we're there to learn, right?
• Arup Nunda - I've always enjoyed his blog, but never seen him present. I'm sure it would be quality.
• Tim Hall - in Australia we might call him a cheeky b-st-rd - but here that's a term of endearment. Surely he's got nothing better to do than come over? ;-)

I'd be happy with anything tuning or technical talks on 12 features & concepts.

Development

• Mark Lancaster - always pushes my boundaries with APEX use, bring it on.
• Jeff Kemp - He's got my kinda topics, plain & simple
• Martin Giffy D'Souza - I see him once in Melbourne and would like to repeat the experience.
• Patrick Wolf - APEX use down under is growing fast, and I'm sure everyone down here would like to see what he has to say.

Can't go past APEX content, particular version 5 stuff. 

Anything PL/SQL is a treat these days - new fodder in 12c...

E-Business

I have no particular interest in this area, so I'll just say Phil Robinson - and anything he'd like to present.!

But I tell you what, it was tough pinning it down to just 2 people!

You can find the survey here
https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/ZPNVHXD

Scott

Perth Insync13 Conference Review

From my employer's perspective we had a very successful year at the Perth Insync13 conference. Sage had 7 papers from 4 of our team, and as usual our exhibition booth was very popular.

We were pushing the mobile theme this year to help stand out to enter our giveaway you needed to use an APEX application, instead of the usual business card in a bowl.  It seemed we were going against the grain of some old habits, but this is 21st century IT so we encouraged all visitors to give it a go.

SAGE exhibition booth

Day 1

I was a busy boy with a half-day workshop and two presentations so I didn't get to see many other papers, but I had already seen quite a few at the Melbourne and Brisbane legs.

So I ended up being rather selective, and I was pretty happy with the ones I attended. First off the rank was an international guest Bjoern Rost Tackling Time Troubles. He was entertaining, engaging and a nice fellow - so we felt me must teach him some Australian vernacular.

I had already seen Penny's 12c optimizer [pdf] presentation but listened to the first few lego star wars jokes and she was well received - so I snuck in to see most of Chris Muir talk about UX design patterns.

I then had to prepare for my half-day workshop on consuming APEX plug-ins. My laptop started to get clammy and freeze which gave me a little scare, but I ended up kicking off in time. Attendees would claim a workspace from my laptop, but in hindsight I now know a much better way to arrange this - next time...

Interaction was good, and my main mission was accomplished - more awareness of the capability and availability of APEX plug-ins. I'll write a separate post on this with all the relevant links.

I finished the day with Phil Robinson talking about testing - I would have liked to see more developers at this very informative session.

Unfortunately I had to leave early on the best session of all - networking drinks, so I didn't attend any dinners. I did bump into Tariq Farooq, great to put a face to an online entity!

Day 2

Andrew Rosson from Lansen started the day with a comparison of GlassFish & WebLogic, which also included some very interesting news about GlassFish.

I took a break before the feature from Connor McDonald on CloneDB. It delivered much more than I was expecting, including 7 very impressive demonstrations.

Once again I did some presentation hopping, listening to Chris' perspective on the future of Oracle Forms before listening to Phil Robinson talk about mind maps and rich pictures - all conferences should have more presentations like this.

It was my turn again with my talk regarding an APEX tablet application. I had the pleasure of including an introduction on the issues at hand from our client Craig Purser from Ventura Home Group.

My prezi is available here: APEX in your hands - lessons learned from an APEX table project
Again, I'll write a separate post later summarising things we've learnt.

Jeff Kemp followed up with more APEX content using row level security, a paper inspired by information received from Connor earlier in the year.

Penny & I finished the day with a light hearted session on Being Productive in IT [pdf]. This was originally presented in Brisbane by Tim Daniell from Fresh Computer Systems, and he kindly gave us permission to offer our perspective on left-right brain issues. Penny was the left brain and I acted as the right - it was entertaining and well received.

While Sage wound down with a beer at the pub next door, I came up with an idea for a similar presentation next year - focussing on one of the issues we covered, stay tuned ;-)

It was great to see everyone I managed to catch up with, and hope it's not another year until I see you all again.

Thank you to all presenters, organisers, volunteers and delegates for making this another enjoyable conference.

Scott
2013 Perth Program Chair

The trick with triggers

Creating triggers, prior to 11g, would default them to an enabled state.

From 11g, we have this in the documentation:

By default, a trigger is created in enabled state. To create a trigger in disabled state, use the DISABLE clause of the CREATE TRIGGER statement.

So when I write my DDL scripts, given this behaviour, I know what I'd prefer:

SQL> create table test_table(a number);
table TEST_TABLE created.
create or replace trigger test_trigger_good before insert on test_table for each row DISABLE
begin
  null -- missing semicolon
end;
/
TRIGGER test_trigger_good compiled
Warning: execution completed with warning

SQL> insert into test_table (a) values (1);

1 rows inserted.

or

SQL> create or replace trigger test_trigger_bad before insert on test_table for each row 
begin
  null -- missing semicolon
end;
/
TRIGGER test_trigger_bad compiled
Warning: execution completed with warning

SQL> insert into test_table (a) values (1);

SQL Error: ORA-04098: trigger 'DEVMGR.TEST_TRIGGER_BAD' is invalid and failed re-validation
04098. 00000 -  "trigger '%s.%s' is invalid and failed re-validation"
*Cause:    A trigger was attempted to be retrieved for execution and was
           found to be invalid.  This also means that compilation/authorization
           failed for the trigger.
*Action:   Options are to resolve the compilation/authorization errors,
           disable the trigger, or drop the trigger.

Only run this when you know things are cool, ie - the triggers does not have compilation errors.

alter trigger test_trigger_good enable;

Otherwise you get the same problem, since you can enable an invalid trigger.

Tip of the hat to Connor McDonald for suggesting this many moons ago.

Post eastern Insync 2013

It's been over a month since my last confession - mainly due to a lot of interstate travel.

The reason for most of the travel was the AUSOUG Insync Conference Series - on the eastern coast anyway. So in the past month I've been to Sydney (and surrounds), Melbourne (twice) & Brisbane (extra 90 mins to fly home).

The conference series was due to begin in Sydney on the 15th, but unfortunately due to a number of factors (which I won't get into here) it had to be cancelled, along with the Canberra and Adelaide legs. Perth preparations are still going strong, and we look forward to bucking the trend.

This turned out expensive for me because I had promised my wife would come over on frequent flyer points and we'd spent time driving through the blue mountains and other touristy type things. And extra two days of that when the company can't sport for accommodation before I head to the Melbourne gig after the weekend - bummer!

I'll just say Sydney was beautiful and treated us to lovely weather - but we had no success whale watching day.

Melbourne was cold, and the conference numbers were lower than previous. Penny (my boss) was still happy with the turnouts to our talks and networking engagement was reasonably successful.

My presentations went well, and for those coming to Perth and want to join any of the half-day workshops (eg: DB 12c, JDeveloper & APEX) I recommend you bring your laptops and become aware of software needs before hand to make the most of the time. See further comments below.

Some presentations I'm keepto keep an eye out for in Perth in November:

1. Penny Cookson - Redesigning core on-line systems in ADF JDeveloper - if you ever want a case study on a ADF migration project - this is the perfect chance
2. Scott Wesley (me) - APEX in your Hands - another case study on an APEX application preparing for deployment on a tablet. We hope to get our client involved with the intro to this in Perth
3. Chris Muir (et al) - The Future of Oracle Forms: Upgrade. Modernize, or Migrate - if you still use Oracle Forms, come even just to keep yourself informed on where things are at and what's truly available.
4. Mark Lancaster - APEX 4.2 Building Responsive application using Twitter Bootstrap - a good overview of a framework worth incoroporating into your applications - it's not hard.
5. Penny Cookson - New Optimizer Features in Oracle 12c - A technical look at tuning features in 12c, with a funny twist. Uber nerd alert.
6. Kylie Payne - ADF for Newbies - I know there are plenty of you out there. Fresh perspective from an Oracle professional.
7. Connor McDonald - CloneDB - a new one from Connor, let's place bets on the slide count.
8. Jeff Kemp - APEX and row level security - presenting the works of an excellent blog post
9. Phil Robinson - Testing the limits of testing - everybody should be incorporating more testing.

We have a few more to be confirmed from Oracle ACEs.

Workshop tips

1. DB 12c - Martin Power - bring a 64 bit laptop with plenty of gigs free. Download his recommended files first and do your best to get VirtualBox booting beforehand. He brings a thumbdrive with a pre-built image, but it will take a while to copy, initiate, boot.
2. Forms -> ADF - Penny Cookson - Read her setup instructions and try your best to come prepared
3. APEX Plugins - Scott Wesley - the easiest to prepare for - just bring a laptop! You can also do it easily in your own 4.2 environment, just grab a few files beforehand so you can play along.

For those in the east - also good was

1. Guy Harrison - Avoiding death by Big Data - a lighthearted but effective 1000 ft view of how big data is shaping our world. I enjoy his talks, and try to incorporate some of his style in mine. Imitation is the sincerest form flattery, they say...
2. Tim Daniell - Being Productive in IT - a different, thought provoking comparison of the human brain and an Oracle database.
3. Connor McDonald - SQL Tuning 101 - if you missed it last year, too bad - a fast paced, humorous look at SQL basics that everyone will learn from.

SAGE will be exhibiting in Perth and will continue our fine form of booth design, thanks to Branka.

Scott

ps - to all Australian readers - happy footy finals month.

9 things about AUSOUG WA in 2013

The Western Australian AUSOUG page has recently been updated to detail some activities for 2013.

Some points I'd like to mention specifically:

1. February 28th - Kick off the user group year with Connor McDonald for a Thursday morning breakfast at Oracle's Kings Park office.
   As you can see, we've already scheduled a number of events - more to be announced!
   
2. Website - a long awaited upgrade to the national website is due this year. This will help us provide further services for members in a modern format using APEX. It will facilitate easier site maintenance for the  committee so we can concentrate efforts on, say, a more complete & polished mobile application for the conference.
   
3. Twitter - @AUSOUG_WA is where you'll find announcements, updates, and other things worth having on your Oracle twitter list.
   
4. Presentation skills - and more. SAGE will assist those interested again this year, contact us for more info.
   
5. Student memberships - We are targeting student groups this year to assist them with their future in IT. Ursula is your first point of call. Let us know if you have ideas for outreach.
   
6. Conference - finalising venue/dates now - send through any ideas you may have to make it the best one yet. We're looking to change things up a little this year.
   
7. Branch meetings - every month we hold an event with food & a speaker. These are great ways to meet & network with other in your community.
   
8. Membership - If you're not sure if you a member, ask us. Many Perth companies hold corporate membership so you may already be covered. If not, an affordable tax-deductible annual membership may be worth your while.
9. Have fun - I feel I'm lucky enough to enjoy what I do for a living. However you approach this year, be sure to have fun doing so.

writing.galaxyzoo.org/6uu2i2/

I look forward to an active and progressive 2013 for the WA user group. I encourage all readers to also take part and be pro-active within your Oracle community - wherever you live.

Scott Wesley
WA AUSOUG Committee Web Master & Conference Program Chair

2012 Perth Conference Abstracts

Just a quick note - abstract submissions for the 2012 AUSOUG Perth Conference have been extended to the 27th August... just say'n.

Head here for more info
http://www.ausoug.org.au/2020/

---

In other news, Penny & I will be at the Insync conference next week. I'm on Wednesday afternoon - but I think my different presentation technique should keep you sustained after the lunchtime feast. Not sure when Penny is, but be sure to seek us out and say hello. We look forward to seeing friends and meeting new ones.

If you're on twitter, I'll leave the green pigs up so keen an eye out for them @swesley_perth
And I'm sure @InSyncEvent will liven up shortly.
I might have some pigs with me, but they'll certainly be at the booth in Perth.

Also check out for the Western Australian Oracle User Group twitter feed - be gentle, it's still learning

Anyone considering attending, consider this - 2 day 5 stream Oracle conference, third day Real World Performance with Tom Kyte, Andrew Holdsworth and Graham Wood. Speakers at the conference will include local regulars Penny Cookson, Connor McDonald, Chris Muir (& myself), plus some of those not native to the Australian continent. We will announce those as we confirm them.

Plenty going on with the user group over next next few months. Wednesday's breakfast double header was a success - well done Anita, Kevin & Andi.
Another interesting topic next month by Jeff Kemp, plus I saw a few e-mails announcing other events. Get involved!

Scott

Why you should get involved with your local Oracle User Group

Thanks to our Sydney Pythian friend Yury, we have a video from last year's Oracle AUSOUG Conference available for viewing.

This was a panel discussion on why you should submit an abstract to an Oracle user group event.

It features Oracle ACE card carriers Debra Lilley, Chris Muir, Connor McDonald, Penny Cookson, Tim Hall

You can watch it via this link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TeXvxmrywDs or using the embedded video below.

It is conference length, and viewing via video certainly does the discussion no justice - but I hope if you are even considering / contemplating / had passing thoughts about presenting at either a conference or a monthly meetup, you might be enthused to take it a few steps further. We can certainly help you along with this, in fact on the 15th August we have 3 presenters making their debut in a Perth branch meeting with thanks to Penny's guidance.

Abstract submissions for this year's Perth conference is closing soon.

Deadline for submissions has been extended until just after the Insync Conference - get in soon!

I look forward to seeing your submission - and if you don't have time this year to prepare one, I'll be more than happy to talk with you at the conference about what your options are for getting more involved in your local user group - it will be very beneficial to your career!

Scott

AUSOUG event - See Connor bend time

Attention AUSOUG members - come by for a nice breakfast and listen to one of Perth's slickest presenters, Ace Director Connor McDonald!

If you're on our mailing list, you check your e-mail - if not, please contact us about joining, particularly if you think your corporation has group membership.

Where: Oracle Australia: Level 2, 66 Kings Park Road, West Perth

When: Wednesday, February 29, 2012. Breakfast starts 7:30am. Connor will speak from 8-9am, question time afterwards for those who can stick around.

RSVP: By RSVP Sunday 26th February 5pm by emailing vicepresident.wa@ausoug.org.au

Cost: Free to all AUSOUG members. Ticket parking on Walker St, just off Kings Park Road, or catch the Red CAT, with a short walk from corner of Outram/Ord.

Abstract - Flashback:
We have all heard the term "adrenalin rush".  It comes about 3 seconds after you press the Commit button and you realise that you probably needed to have a WHERE clause on that "delete all rows from the SALES table" SQL statement.  Or it might come just after you run "drop table" on the Production database, when you were just so sure that you were logged onto the Test system.  This session will discuss how you can use the FLASHBACK features in 10g and 11g to overcome this uniquely human condition

Connor's Bio:
Connor has been working with Oracle software for 17 years for clients in Australia and the UK. He is a member of the OakTable, is an Oracle Ace Director, and has co-authored three Oracle books. He has been a popular speaker at Oracle conferences around the world for the decade, specialising in topics regarding the database engine and PL/SQL.

Find his blog connormcdonald.wordpress.com/

I hope to see you there,

Scott

ps- Another Oracle Ace & fellow blogger, Yury Velikanov, will be visiting sometime in March - details to come.

And don't forget next Wednesday!

First events of 2012

Today is the true new year for many, and Sage Computing Services would like to announce it's first training event for the year open for enrolment.

JDeveloper Workshop
27th February to 2nd March
Perth CBD
Taught by Oracle Ace & Educator of the year - Penny Cookson
Workshop details

If you can't make that, keep the morning of the 29th Feb free. If things haven't changed on me over the new year, AUSOUG will be sending out details of a breakfast at the West Perth Oracle building by one of our favourites - Connor McDonald.

If you're interested in any of our courses, feel free to drop us a line and we can schedule a time frame that suits you.

Scott

Sage Hat Trick!

Well done to the Sage team!

With the help of our wonderful support crew, the Sage team won the three best paper awards

1. Best Ace - Penny Cookson - I missed her talk this year, but I'm sure it was full of rude jokes
2. Best from OTN Tour - Chris Muir - finally not foiled by just as superb Connor McDonald.
3. Best Paper - Scott Wesley - me! I'm so happy, particularly since I overslept and made it with only 10 minutes to spare!

I'll blog about my experience with the Prezi tool soon, I've had a few people asking questions.

Now it's bed time.

Cheers,

Scott

APEX performance presentation

At the Insync conference in Sydney I experimented with a different presentation technique.

I've forgotten already where I stumbled across it - might have even been somewhere on twitter - but it's called Prezi. I did have a fear that I would instill motion sickness onto my audience, but after some initial feedback with a prototype I decided to go for it.

My topic was Oracle APEX Performance, and I originally presented it as a powerpoint slide deck at last year's AUSOUG conference in Perth (Nov 3-4 2011, btw).

So I updated and converted it to the Prezi format, which can be found here:
http://prezi.com/gfmw8q_gstcl/n-methods-to-improve-apex-performance/

A link to the PDF version of my powerpoint display can be found here. Yes, in writing that it does seem a little strange, I'm not sure why I didn't publish the PPTx version - not that there would be much difference.

I certainly learned a few things from the experience - things that worked and things that didn't. I have plenty of visual ideas for the topic I'm doing in November, to try and further embrace the prezi style instead of thinking "slides".

I don't think the technique will work for everyone. Connor certainly has a unique style, similar to Larry Lessig and further pioneered in IT by Dick Hardt. A great write up can be found here. If you've never seen Connor present, you must make it happen. He makes powerpoint his own and will rip through a zillion slides in less than one hour - and you'll come out very much entertained!

I don't think Connor could adapt his slick style to the prezi format, and I think many technical presentations would be difficult to translate. I found when converting my original presentation I had trouble "forgetting" the powerpoint way of thinking. I think when I do my next one, since it will be fresh I'll be able to plan the layout a little better and provide something more fresh & creative. I found myself jotting ideas down as I listened to people speak at Insync. It will be on APEX 4.1 security.

If you come along to our Perth conference you can experience it first hand! ;-)

Now, to start writing it...

Scott

Insync 2011 Day 2

My tip for surviving an interstate conference - sleep in the second day until as late as possible.

I walked in with time to grab a cup of tea and walk up to the first session. I chose Alex Peattie talking about an introduction to SOA for application integration to see where Oracle are pitching these days for their grand world of SOA. It was fairly entry level, but a thorough overview - a nice way to warm up.

It certainly would have been tough to warm up with Shan Nawaz talking about the top ten 11g features that aren't your usual top ten. It was a good idea for a presentation as one does get bored with hearing about the same glossy features all the time. For those curious, here are my interpretations of my quick scratches on the day

1. DBMS_PARALLEL_EXECUTE
2. DBMS_COMPARISON
3. Reproduce SQL test case (DBMS_SQL_DIAG)
4. Advanced compression (costed option)
5. Diagnose/Resolve failure with DRA
6. Multi-section backups
7. Database resident connection pool
8. Server consolidation
9. SQL*Plus error logging (sperrorlog)
10. Preprocessor

And yes, some of those are very cool.

The post-morning tea slot saw me torn again between Francisco Munoz on Oracle security tips and Marcelle Kratochvil convincing us to store unstructured data in the database. I ended up in Marcelle's, and while I can't compare to Francisco's session (Barbara thought it was excellent), I think Marcelle's was up there for the most engaging and thought provoking of the conference. It reminded me of Guy Harrison in Perth last year - his was less Oracle and more commentary on the direction of the computing world, but Marcelle really hit the nail on the head for the issues of tomorrow. Our technology isn't there yet for searching videos/images, protecting copyright etc, but Marcelle certainly convinced me by not putting this information into our database, we aren't exactly heading in the right direction! 

Before lunch, again two slots I wanted to see. I ended up with Connor McDonald talking statistics, which I will say is my favourite from his catalogue. I saw it previously in Perth, but was more than happy to be entertained once again. If you've never seen one of his presentations - it doesn't matter what the topic - you must see him at least once.

After lunch, torn again - sense a trend? I almost went to see an Australia Post case study on SOA, which apparently was packed - but I thought I'd learn a thing or two about Exadata from Tony Jambu, and get myself a mintie. Tony assessed the facts and myths to see if Oracle was pulling the wool over our eyes or if they really have the beez neez of hardware/software integration - turns out Oracle really does have the right stuff.

And we all saw some magic that involved Guy Harrison wondering if he was going to walk out of that session with a cup of water drained over his head. Great work, Tony.

After three sessions of indecision, I found myself struggling to pick something in the penultimate session. I ended up seeing Clancy Bufton introduce flashback queries and total recall. Not a new topic, but one I'm not completely familiar with. 

Now for the biggest scheduling issue of the conference - we had Mark Lancaster talking advanced Apex 4 UI; Tim Hall on edition-based redefiition; and Tom Kyte on SQL techniques.

I went the big name, which is a shame because it turns out I had seen this one before, and was very happy with my use of his suggested better practice. I was however glad to see and hear the younger generation (did I really say that?) talk about some of his suggestions and seek clarification with Tom afterwards. To me that indicates some success and progress within a conference. 

Tom certainly drew the crowd as Marc and Tim suggested afterwards some smaller than expected numbers. But that's ok, those who were there got an up close & personal, interactive discussion with them both.

So that concluded the conference proper - however I still had the evening and an extra day to survive. The evening made it easy. After a quick revival back at my room, 14 of us headed out for dinner. We tried once place only to find we wouldn't fit, but plan B was superb. We headed to South Styne - a floating restaurant in Darling Harbour. I enjoyed perfectly cooked kangaroo fillet with lovely spices and mash, chased down with a few king browns and good company. Thanks people, and I remember someone taking a group photo so no doubt I'll stumble across that in the near future - hopefully I can post it up.

Stay tuned, I have some more thoughts on this week to come.