Check comments on the EOUC-meeting in Prague

You can do that using http://www.twitter.com and also by going to visible witter tools and search the tag EOUC.
Or use this link.

På möte med ordföranden i Prag

Om användarföreningar, java och Oracle = sant? Sun + Oracle = Sant?

Intressant, 1/3 av deltagarna är från Java User Group-föreningar. De twittrar om konferensen under tiden den sker, ett wake-up-call for Oracle tror jag. De är rakt fram dessutom och rakt på i deras åsikter.

Oracle är nog lite ovana det tror jag.

English...
At a meeting on Oracle User Groups in Prague, Java + oracle = True? Sun + Oracle = True?

Interesting is that a third of the delegates from the User Communities are from Java User Groups. It is the first time we see them in Europe, and they twitter about their feelings about the conference. And the presentators are...well...nervous about that very fact...

Amazon Cloud and mail

Be sure to check out this blog if testing the Cloud at Amazon. Please see David Peake's excellent article in Oracle Magazine on how to get there. It really works. Some things have changed to the better since the article was written.

Now APEX is pre-installed. And you get going at once. Impressive.

Mail in EC2, careful since there are things with mail, spammers wants to use the gate ways... So consult this article at OracleQuicks.

Send in the Clouds...

Clouds are here to stay, it is spring soon. But IT Clouds are here to stay.

Orcan - the swedish user group has a database going in the Cloud. And an ApEx application. Just for the fun of it.

What it is or becomes, is up to us...

Tom Kyte is on a ferry boat

Just if you like boats, and Oracle. Go on the ride...

Nice ride I think.

Memory lane...minnenas gata...

procedure query_details ( detail varchar2 ) is
begin
go_block(detail);
check_package_failure;
execute_query;
end;

Visst var det längesedan...

Still remembering Carl

I miss him without knowing him, his enthusiasm and knowledgeable but humble way of sharing.
Met him three years ago.
Sweating, in action.

And he seems to love it.

Back again - and up and atom

Have you seen TOR - the nice thing that makes China find places outside their locked in country?

Google on TOR and see what makes China go mad...

In the Oracle scene things are moving. New versions, new merger of companies.

ApEx is on the move in Sweden, there are lots of companies going in that direction. They migrate old legacy systems Access/Excel to new powerful ApEx tools to the user community at their companies.

Also, which is not spoke about imho.
If you got the Architecture in place, the Grid control, the things that you need to really go into dark room computing...then ApEx is an excellent tool for SQL knowledgable user to study the database, the base for the data.

If you set up an organisation that really takes into account cooperation and communication you are on the right track. Openness. But just as much as you like, you have to protect the data, of course. So...ApEx is an excellent read only tool for end user to be on the same platform when it comes to understand the underlying data.

Cow milk and Oracle

This is an interesting article about what sales at Oracle - and other companies - are thinking and doing. Thoughts on sales are always welcome. Since you learn how sales people think and negotiate in various situations.

It is interesting that "Oracle ‘knows’ what its customers are using." is an item explaning how Oracle still is making money. The shift to My Oracle Support comes into a new light. Especially the new feature that we are to send in our configurations to support. That information is very very useful, not only to give us support but to plan Oracle sales department activities.

Read more at http://blogs.zdnet.com/Howlett/?p=1805&tag=nl.e539 and adjust purchase accordingly.

Project, time estimates, lead time and newbies

I had a project today. To put together three BILLY 40cm wide book shelfs.

Interesting, since it was some time I did that. The time to put the first one together was
one hour or so. Why?

Because it was a long time I did it, they changed the mounting method (new kind of screws)
and I was unsure where my tools were.

The two following shelfs did go well. But, as always, when you think that you know something you are starting to make mistakes. Not hard mistakes, but mistakes. In my case one visible, but luckily it will be facing a wall or another BILLY. So, no harm done.

The other mistake was during the mounting of the shelf. Or the integration test you could say :-)

So...the bearing on IT projects is obvious, at least to me. On FACEBOOK a friend of mine who often runs projects wrote after the first one "so, the other two are ready now?". Of course...he is a project manager...what can he write? :-)

Edition-Based Redefinition

Oracle 11g does include an interesting feature, the feature to upgrade your applications in a well ordered and controlled manner. You can test the application before you GoLive with it, and you do not loose any information. The users can do their job in the pre-upgraded version whilst you change the new version, test it and change to it.

Edition-Based Redefinition is, Tom Kyte says, the most important thing that happened since we got PL/SQL in the database. And, Mr Kyte always - in my opinion - knows what he says.

So, go for the manual pages and study EBR. You can have editions on SYNOMYNS, VIEWs and PL/SQL-modules in the database. And there are some rules to consider when you try this out. So carefully study the steps in the manual.

Oracle 11g Reports enhancements

Oracle Reports is here to stay as well, there is lots and lots of money and people time invested in that product. The new release makes it more easy to hide the sequential number in the URL created, now you can say "lets do it random" so it is more hard to guess. In previous releases you could easily see other reports by just decrease the seq nr in the URL by one. If the report was there you could see it.

Also, the JVM is the same JVM as the Forms process, so there is performance gains to do if you are calling Reports from Forms. Most of us still do... And further, there is no need to pass the password anymore to the Reports call. That is taken care of.

Oracle Forms future and Oracle 11g Database

Oracle Forms is here to stay, officials says at Oracle Open World. So, stay calm you Forms Developers out there. The new Oracle Forms 11g has many new features though to make it easy to incorporate new functionality, using web services or Javascript.

Also, Oracle Forms 11g has the capability to react asynchronous to external events, that has not been possible with earlier editions of Forms.

Speaking of editions, upgrading your application in a 24/7 environment is now possible as well. Using the feature in Oracle Database 11g R2 called Edition-Based Redefinition. Simply speaking it works on synonyms, views and PL/SQL-objects. And you have a pre-state and a post-state of the application running in parallell. Looks like a good trick. Lets try this at home! :-)

Oracle Open World has started

This Sunday it all started, the Oracle Develop sessions. Tom Kyte was a blast, as always, talked about developers and what we do wrong.

Also, early this morning there was an excellent presentation on integrating Oracle Forms into Application Express. Worth looking into.

The ApEx platform is a platform to be counted on.

Up where we belong...

The cloud is coming, Oracle has found a way of licensing the Cloud. Sounds good on paper. The trouble is that there is not the same situation if you ask middle-sized customers, not at least if you ask Swedish customers.

There is some fuzz around pricing policies here in Sweden, and Virtual Computing. "OK, you can upgrade to a 64 bit version, but Oracle want you to pay 120 000 USD in license fees".

"Say what?"

"Yes, it says so here in the list of prices".

"OK, let's see, we have to think about that, what about moving to MySQL what price tag is there in doing that?"

Oracle Corp must have an answer, and an answer soon. Or think again, do it again, do it right.

Ah yes...Oracle Support do listen to us, Oracle customer base. We will have an simple HTML-interface to access Oracle Support. Or My Oracle Support. The more flashy guys will have flash...

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.