Oracle Open World is soon here

I hope to see you there, it was almost a year ago. I do not know about you but I am curious about the focus on Oracle Open World this year.

More curious than before, there are new things in the Oracle realm to think about and relate to.

• Transition to My Oracle Support
• The new appplication server platform - Middleware
• Is SOA really mature as technology. This is CORBA, as we have seen before, but now it can really be efficient.
  
• Is PL/SQL dead and we shall go for coffee, sorry Java...at Starbucks?
• The Cloud - very existing, I really do hope that you all tried Amazon Web Services. Very interesting and it really works. See article by David Peake in Oracle Magazine here.
• Is Oracle DB 11g now stable - I know nothing
• Another aquisition I suppose that we do not yet know about
• Is there a Sun behind the Cloud...?
  

Networking people, communication with peers. That is Oracle Open World at its best.

See you in San Francisco!

Cheers,

Word(s) are not enough...

Sometimes there is no place to say anything. Not at all.

"You say it best, when you say nothing at all".

Nothing Hill. I had a friend that held a speach at a graduation party. He said to the health graduated people that they should listen to what patients said during the anames...do not know that word in english... but also listen to what Not They Say.

I got my Metalnik version 3 account today!

Yes yes.

This is good. It took me a couple of months. The administrator that did let me in was suprised to know that this role was given to her. But it is OK.

So, now I am in.

But calm down you people using an Oracle Database, there is a migration of old metalink, iTAR, SR site or as I say text based entry of support issues.

My view is that if a customer wants to issue the support issue using an SMS, bongo drums or sign language it should be considered as an entry point. For the suppliers support process.

But calm down, migrating from Oracle Application Server 10g to WebLogic platform will be done using the text based entry for support issues. There are plans at Oracle to do the transition - for Oracle this is also a migration to the Siebel stack för support issues - at the end of this year. Let's hope Oracle can row the boat ashore.

Time will tell

SYSDATE is sufficient?
Today almost every date is stored in type DATE. One thought is to keep it simple and stay with that approach. “It works today why think about it”.

This document describes facilities worth taking under consideration. There might be scenarios where the SYSDATE-approach is not enough.

Things could be so that if you set the DB-server in UTC and the database time in init.ora you are OK.

Decide on Date OR time
The first decision is date OR time? Remember

SELECT TRUNC(SYSDATE)FROM DUAL;

gives you the date only. Whilst

SELECT SYSDATE FROM DUAL;

will present you date and time. Essential in comparisons between DATE-variables, when the intention is to perform something a special date.

Datatypes for date and time

There are four data types for date and time available.

Datatype	Description
DATE	Date and time, prior to Oracle 8i the one and only. Reflects DATE and DATETIME in Oracle Forms.
TIMESTAMP	Date and time, no respect to time zone. TIMESTAMP(0) equivalent to DATE. Resolution: billionth of a second. Default resolution: millionth of a second.
TIMESTAMP WITH TIME ZONE	Date and time along with time zone
TIMESTAMP WITH LOCAL TIME ZONE	Date and time (with fractions) along with time zone in DB local time zone.

PL/SQL-variables of this type “local” is regarded as session time zone.
Values transferred between DB-columns and PL/SQL-variables are converted from one time zone to the other.

What’s the date and time?
There are two ways of accessing server date and time.

SYSDATE (datatype DATE) the old fashion way, must be used since there are no other ways if you are using Oracle 8i.

SYSTIMESTAMP (TIMESTAMP) the new way that also gives you time zone.

There are three ways of getting the sessions date and time.

• 1. CURRENT_DATE of type DATE.
  
• 2. CURRENT_TIMESTAMP that is of type TIMESTAMP WITH TIME ZONE
  
• 3. LOCALTIMESTAMP of type TIMESTAMP.