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.

Starting up a database Oracle 10g Windows

Did you also get a off-the-shelf installation of Oracle? Did the host crash?

And the Enterprise Manager did not succeed to get up the DB on the feet again? Well...on Windows there are two things that have to be done.

1. Make sure that the User - on the local machine - that are running the processes is defined in the Local Security Settings.
2. Make sure that you learn how to start up the database via DOS window.

Item 1 you can study on some Microsoft Windows page on the 'net.

Item 2, please follow these instructions:

SQLPLUS /NOLOG
SQL> connect username/password as sysdba
SQL> startup

Of course there are parameters, but the default way to start up a database are the steps above.

A walk down the memory lane

Found a T-shirt. The infamous T-shirt that had "Screw LMF" on front.

And the Code in Digital VMS Operating system on the back to do just that.

$COPY SYSLICENSE.EXE SYSLICENESE.EXE_ORIGINAL
$PATCH SYSLICENSE.EXE
PATCH>dep/i address='instruction'

PATCH>update
PATCH>exit

are some lines.

Patching in the Operating System. What a life!

These were the days when licensing policys were introduced in the IT market. Digital Equipment had just implemented this policy. The first License Management Facility had seen the light of the world.

I do not recall the year, it can be somewhere around 1985 or so.

The T-shirt is still one of my keepers. It was handed to me, secretly, folded at a DECUS conference a long long time ago in a galaxy not so far away.

Social media F2F and on-line communities

This is a tryout. Just entering some text and see what happens. Could influence some parts of the DB-industry, or not at all. Anyway. Here it is:

In the on-line communities of today we face some issues not present in every day face-to-face situations. The on-line communities consist of participants that are to be found from a variety of cultures and they are forced to write in another language than their mother-tongue. Various cultural differences influence degree of participation in on-line communities.

Using a language that is not your mother-tongue furthermore in a mainly written environment presents some issues. How will you get your thoughts thru? How do you connect via a language that is not known by heart. You are also forced to write - and not speak – in that foreign language. However, the video and image based communities might present a solution.

This thesis is a practical walk-through of a 27 year long experience in on-line communication, from the stumbling steps in text based communication systems when Internet was just born. It also covers the necessary adaptations and limitations forced upon on-line communication in a multi-cultural non face-to-face world.
One finding made is that it become more easy to get the communication to flow if there are common (multi-cultural, non F2F and non-mother-tongue) jokeable items within the on-line community.

Hadoop - a fast database

I wonder what current database companies answer will be to this:
http://developer.yahoo.net/blogs/hadoop/2009/05/hadoop_sorts_a_petabyte_in_162.html

What to do?

Metalink vs MOS:

Metalink or My Oracle Support?

I am sorry. But nothing I like about My Oracle Support, the new tool to contact Oracle when you have a support issue and wants to send in a TAR, sorry a Service Request. My Oracle Support is a flashy - no pun intended - interface to a very simple task in a company. A task that should be easy for the customers. Not hard.

Support process
A support task is about support. Not tacky, flashy interfaces. Support is about simplicity and choosability how to contact a company, in this case Oracle. You would not consider to let's say "we use only Skype for our Phone Support". Would you?

And, large companies have LCM - Life Cycle Managed - infrastructure regarding PCs. So IF you choose to limit the access to a tool built on some flash or whatever product, you must have a longer time span in order for large customers to test this new choosen tool.

In my humble opinion the text based tools are best for putting in support issues to a company. Or the phone, but that could be a next step in a support issue process item. Or a Oracle Web Conference, but again, that is even a step more further down to support process road.

The method to contact Oracle, or whatever other company, in a support issue should be choosen by the customer. Of course! Who else?

A scenario
If there is a single customer out there, with four DBAs or more, and all of them can not install flash since the PC infrastructure group has not yet qualified Flash Version x.y as a valid and stable tool in Their Unique Environment. If the DBAs are in trouble, Oracle could be in trouble. Why is that so? Well, since these DBAs are the first in line to have 11.1 in the world. And they bought to product, signed sealed an delivered.

These DBA-guys can sit on information that is unvaluable for Oracle. Oracle has the aggregated knowledge in their database. The DBAs wants to access that knowledg but they can not trigger the Oracle Support process.

The DBAs want to say: "We are having trouble with our SQL statement, it is performing very very bad, and 11.1 was supposed to fix this". The answer could be somewhere along the line "well, you do know that the parameter XYZ has changed in 11.1, default was TRUE is now FALSE, so just change that".
I know this could be found during beta, or even in documentation. But it is an example in a scenario. The issue is of course much more comples, as the computer software is more and more complex.

Ways to contact support
If a customer wants to contact a company for support he or she must be able to choose His or Hers Tool of The day. I am sorry, the tool of the day in the Oracle traditional based market place is text based interface, known as Metalink.

I guess that most revenue comes from database product. If it is not, if revenue is now, these days (and again, only Oracle knows this) come from other areas in Oracle. Well, then I guess Oracle is not a database company anymore, with a key product being The Database that built this company from start.

Albeit, let's go for MOS and interfaces where the business for Oracle is, and Oracle will risk not to get the information they desperately need in order to serve and support other customers (the traditional Oracle DB customers, and OAS and what have you), and in order to update the support and knowledge database.

Knowledge
Knowledge is here to be spread. And in the support process describe above everybody is winning: Supplier, customers and the customers customer. If you can enter a question, if you can find the answer and if you can give an answer. The process stops if customers are not even able to in a simple manner enter questions. The trigger is not there. There is no use case. It will be silent.

If information is hard to find in documentation, please rewrite.

If information is hard to get inside your knowledge based systems, welcome to the club :-). That is why we all share. Information. Especially in the software business.

Vote, debate and participate
Last but not least, make your voice heard.
Leave a comment here. http://blogs.oracle.com/Support/ This is Chris Wartickis blog, or some sort of blog.
OTN has a thread going. - http://forums.oracle.com/forums/thread.jspa?threadID=912647&start=15&tstart=0
Or, just VOTE here. - http://tinyurl.com/metalink-vs-myoraclesupport

Of course I will now try MOS. And see how it works. On my PC I can install Flash.

SOA on ice

There are articles, at least in the swedish IT oriented news papers and magazines, that SOA is declining in focus from the companies.

Maybe the reality got into the SOA think tank. You have to invest in documenting your current processes in order to take advantage of SOA. It is not The Salvation.

We knew that alreday. But some of the IT departments of major companies did not.

SOA and a conductor

I saw a conductor today on the very good and informative channel mezzo. He just showed the orchestra in short moves how to play a very complex piece.

I started to think about a word in the SOA realm. Orchestration.

Orchestration.

The conducter of a choir or an ensemble only shows the path to what there is to come. It relies on the fact that every single intstrumentalist knows what to do. And the pace is the key to success. The SAME PACE. The value in time of the notes have to be coordinated.

The pitch have to be coordinated, and the instrumentalists tune in before the piece starts. They even tend to tune in their instruments during the concert in some intermission or between parts in a mass, or a symphony.

Compare that situation with a software business installment with different web services, different platforms and different hardware. Trying to interact.

I mean, hey! Come on! It puts demands on the internal affairs of a business. The internal processes have to be defined before you can outsource anything, before you can web-servicify any part of any application.

In order to play the symphony every single part, every single trombone player, every single bass player and the little tiny flute has to be in synch. Has to agree on the tempo, on the pitch.

This is the case in software engineering too. You have to decide upon a standard platform, a common way of working and a culture that encourage knowledge exchange.

SOA and the business

There are voices in our IT world saying that we have to go for low cost countries, we will earn money. Well it is not a matter of subtraction, that is for sure.

Cultural differences in the ways of working is making the profit not as profitable as it seems from the start. Note that there seldom - but it could be as well - lack of knowledgeable people in other parts of the world, it is just that the ways of working differ.
That gap has to be acknowledged and adressed.

If you have a business where you want to outsource some part of your internal business. That decision will put several requirements upon your inner process structure and documentation. It essentially say "you have to define them". That is the first obstacle. Are there heroes out there making the business run and you do not know it? Yes, probably. There is always a "phone Mr FixIt and he will take care of you" or "send a fax to Mrs IgoFigure and the order will be in place when you want it".

So you go document.

Then you go standardise the inner it landscape. That is the next step, of course every single person has to agree upon the technical road taken. Actually, we all sort of just accept the fact that we shall use Word as a word processing tool. Thou shalt use Word. OK, we say, we do not go in our chamber and make up a new word proceessing software. Do we? No, if we do anything we look for open source alternatives. That is a good thing. Or we look for software on the shelf solutions.

A SOA concept for your company could be the soulution and lift everyone. But it is a cumbersome task to achieve tru outsourcing capability. And it starts with Your company, not the outsourcing company.

SOA, absolut and the world.

So they say. SOA is The New Thing. It is just a new packaging.
I am not saying it is a bad thing, just that it is not new.

I am reading in Financial Times about lifestreaming, very interesting stuff to read in there. That is for sure, they state that the battle of the web (should be read the battle of the money that can be made on the 'net) is here. Google is not making it fully, they say, they have not found more ways of doing money on hits than adverts. Myspace got bad credit some months ago locking in their users and not allowing Google's Friend Connect.

A former employee of Google left Google and started Friendfeed, as in feed your friends with what is going on in your life. Well, OK, so, and what about texting. Friendfeed is The Application to set off the 'net (once again, heared that before too, but then again Skype did make a lot of money in the end). Well could be interesting but it did not make my day, at least not this very day.

People buy stuff or services. Machines seldom do, and when they do their algoritms was the same to parts of the fact that machines buy stocks made the October crash in the stock market in 1997. They had the same parameters and sold and sold, and then another program noticed that "everybody" did sell. Machines did sell. The crasch was a fact, my own theory but I have seen it elsewhere. The algoritms of today is, of course, better. Or are they?

Internet ads is just an electronic part of (almost) every people in the western world. To lifestream the mailestones (and that milestone can be "look at me at this bar in Thailand") of our social life is another electronic footprint of our selves. I am not sure where this will lead, and I share that uncertainity (even an english word?) with the Financial Times.

The good thing about the article is that it seems to me that commercial forces are now seeing that social networking really really is happening. Also, that social networking (virtual social networking) is here to Stay. I am not surprised, we people tend to like to chat, to just hang out, to just be amongst other human beings.

A swedish company called twingly is doing something completely different. They are weaving another web. Tangling other twisty little passages with their software. Twingly are building their business cases on mutual benefit. What they do? Well...if I scratch your back then you scratch mine. That is the essence of the business idea.

In Sweden the blogosphere is a internet based (of course) business area, a virtual business area with a virtual customer segmentation. Some of the swedish bloggers are important influencial bloggers, but twingly does not make any difference. If you put a link on your own blog to a news papers article and then ping the twingly server they will connect your blog to that news papers article.

Thus...a boost on your blog and a boost on the article in the news paper. Voilà!

Well, Twingly has taken this a bit further, they now started to make up contracts with companies to do the same thing. The first one is Lindex, a clothing company in Sweden.
This is risky but the companies are embracing the web as a virtual space for business. So, adopt to the rules. One of the new one's being:

If some blogger writes something bad about your product then so be it. The key to success here is to react and to react very very fast, at blogspeed. One example of when that did NOT happen is the Absolut commercial run in the Mexican "part" of the world. There are no borders on the web... And the americans, or at least not all of them, realized that this was an old map. So the "joke" did not make it. The absolut company had to stop the campaign. The US blogosphere spread the word around very very fast.

And do notice that even if the map was a replica of an old ancient map most people did not care. Created a lot of bad will for Absolut. Every excuse the responsible marketing person made was beaten up into internet bits and pieces by the raging blogosphere.