UKOUG London Development and Middleware event - free!

The Oracle development landscape is an extremely broad and complicated one these days. It covers such a wide range of tools, technologies and practices it is hard to keep up.

The UKOUG is presenting a day of sessions which can bring you up to speed. It's a joint initiative between the Development and Middleware SIGs - a composite if you will - at the Oracle City Office on Thursday 6th September. This event is free. If you are a UKOUG member attending it won't count against your allotment of SIG delegates; if you're not a UKOUG member there's no charge so come along and get a taste of what the UKOUG has to offer.

The day covers a broad spectrum. Martin Beeby is a popular speaker; his talk covers how Oracle is embracing new cool technologies such as Blockchain, Docker and chatbots. There are talks from Oracle ACE Director Simon Haslam on mobile applications and Oracle ACE Director Mark Simpson on real-life uses for AI. There are also sessions on API design, building bots and JavaScript frameworks.

Even last year these things might have been considered cutting edge, certainly in the enterprise realm. But most organisations of whatever size are at least thinking about or running Proof of Concept projects in AI or blockchain. Some already have these technologies active in Production. These things will affect everybody working in IT, and probably sooner rather than later. It's always good to know what's coming.

Check out the full agenda here.
Register here.

Oh, and did I mention it's free? Treat yourself to a day out from the present and get a glimpse of the future.

UKOUG Northern Technology Summit 2018

The UKOUG has run something called the Northern Server Day for several years. Northern because they were held in a northern part of England (but south of Scotland) and Server because the focus was the database server. Over the last couple of years the day has had several streams, covering Database, High Availability and Engineered Systems. So primarily a day for DBAs and their ilk.

This year the event has expanded to let in the developers. Yay!

The Northern Technology Summit 2018 is effectively a mini-conference: in total there are five streams - Database, RAC Cloud Infrastructure & Availability, Systems, APEX and Development. But for registration it counts as a SIG. So it's free for UKOUG members to attend. What astonishingly good value!¹ And it doesn't affect your entitlement to attend the annual conference in December.

The Development stream

The Development stream covers a broad range of topics. Application development in 2018 is a tangled hedge with new technologies like Cloud, AI and NoSQL expanding the ecosystem but not displacing the traditional database and practices. The Development stream presents a mix of sessions from the new-fangled and Old Skool ends of the spectrum.

• The New Frontier: Mobile and AI Powered Conversational Apps. Oracle are doing interesting work with AI and Grant Ronald is king of the chatbots. This is an opportunity to find out what modern day apps can do.
• The New Frontier: Mobile and AI Powered Conversational Apps. Oracle are doing interesting work with AI and Grant Ronald is king of the chatbots. This is an opportunity to find out what modern day apps can do.
• Building a Real-Time Streaming Platform with Oracle, Apache Kafka, and KSQL No single technology is a good fit for all enterprise problems. Robin Moffat of Confluent will explain how we can use Apache Kafka to handle event-based data processing.
• Modernising Oracle Forms Applications with Oracle Jet Oracle Forms was< - still is - a highly-productive tool for building OLTP front-ends. There are countless organisations still running Forms applications. But perhaps the UX looks a little jaded in 2018. So here's Mark Waite from Griffiths Waite to show how we can use Oracle's JET JavaScript library to write new UIs without having to re-code the whole Forms application.
• 18(ish) Things Developers Will Love about Oracle Database 18c Oracle's jump to year-based release numbers doesn't make live easier for presenters: ten things about 10c was hard enough. But game for a challenge, Oracle's Chris Saxon attempts to squeeze as many new features as possible into his talk.
• Modernize Your Development Experience With Oracle Cloud Cloud isn't just something for the sysadmins, there's a cloud for developers too. Sai Janakiram Penumuru from DXC Technology will explain how Oracle Developer Cloud might revolutionise your development practices.
• Designing for Deployment As Joel Spolsky says, shipping is a feature. But it's a feature which is hard to retrofit. In this talk I will discuss some design principles which make it easier to build, deploy and ship database applications.

Everything else

So I hope the Development stream offers a day of varied and useful ideas. There are things you might be able to use right now or in the next couple of months, and things which might shape what you'll be doing next year. But it doesn't matter if not everything floats your boat. The cool thing about the day is that delegates can attend any of the streams. ² .

So you can listen to Nigel Bayliss talking about Optimisation in the Database Stream, Vipul Sharma: talking about DevOps in the Availability stream, Anthony talking about Kubernetes in the Systems stream and John Scott talking about using Docker with Oracle in the Apex stream. There are sessions on infrastructure as code, upgrading Oracle 12cR1 to 12cR2, GDPR (the new EU data protection law), the Apex Interactive grid, Apache Impala, and Cloud, lots of Cloud. Oh my!

The full agenda is here (pdf).

Register now

So if you're working with Oracle technology and you want to attend this is what you need to know:

• Date: 16th May 2018
• Location: Park Plaza Hotel, Leeds
• Cost: Free for UKOUG members. There is a fee for non-members but frankly you might as well buy bronze membership package and get a whole year's work of access to UKOUG events (including the annual conference). It's a bargain.

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<sup>1. The exact number of SIG passes depends on the membership package you have↩
2. The registration process requires you to pick a stream but that is just for administrative purposes. It's not a lock-in.↩</sup>

UKOUG Conference 2016 coming up fast

The weather has turned cold, the lights are twinkling in windows and Starbucks is selling pumpkin lattes. Yes, it's starting to look a lot like Christmas. But first there's the wonder-filled advent calendar that is the UKOUG Annual Conference in Birmingham, UK. So many doors to choose from!

The Conference is the premier event for Oracle users in the UK (and beyond). This year has another cracker of an agenda: check it out.

The session I'm anticipating most is Monday's double header with Bryn Llewellyn and Toon Koopelaar's A Real-World Comparison of the NoPLSQL & Thick Database Paradigms. Will they come down on the side of implementing business logic in stored procedures or won't they? It'll be tense :) But it will definitely be insightful and elegantly argued.

Oracle's bailiwick has expanded vastly over the years, and it's become increasingly hard to cover everything. Even so, it's fair to say in recent years older technologies such as Forms have been neglected in favour in favour of shinier baubles. Not this year. There's a good representation of Forms sessions this year, including a talk from Michael Ferrante, the Forms Product Manager. These sessions are all scheduled for the Wednesday, in a day targeted at database developers. If you're an Old Skool developer, especially if you're a Forms developer, and your boss will allow you only one day at the conference, then Wednesday is the day to pick.

Hope to see you there

UKOUG Annual Conference (Tech 2014 Edition)

The conference

This year the UKOUG's tour of Britain's post-industrial heritage brought the conference to Liverpool. The Arena & Convention Centre is based in Liverpool docklands, formerly the source of the city's wealth and now a touristic playground of museums, souvenir shops and bars. Still at least the Pumphouse functions as a decent pub, which is one more decent pub than London Docklands can boast. The weather was not so much cool in the 'Pool as flipping freezing, with the wind coming off the Mersey like a chainsaw that had been kept in a meat locker for a month. Plus rain. And hail. Which is great: nothing we Brits like more than moaning about the weather.

After last year's experiment with discrete conferences, Apps 2014 was co-located with Tech 2014; each was still a separate conference with their own exclusive agendas (and tickets) but with shared interests (Exhibition Hall, social events). Essentially DDD's Bounded Context pattern. I'll be interested to know how many delegates purchased the Rover ticket which allowed them to cross the borders. The conferences were colour-coded, with the Apps team in Blue and the Tech team in Red; I thought this was an, er, interesting decision in a footballing city like Liverpool. Fortunately the enforced separation of each team's supporters kept violent confrontation to a minimum.

The sessions

This is not all of the sessions I attended, just the ones I want to comment on.

There's no place like ORACLE_HOME

I started my conference by chairing Niall Litchfield's session on Monday morning. Niall experienced every presenter's nightmare: switch on the laptop, nada, nothing, completely dead. Fortunately it turned out to be the fuse in the charger's plug, and a marvellous tech support chap was able to find a spare kettle cable. Niall coped well with the stress and delivered a wide-ranging and interesting introduction of some of the database features available to developers. It's always nice to here a DBA say difficult is the task of developers these days. I'd like to hear more acknowledge it, and more importantly being helpful rather than becoming part of the developer's burden :)

The least an Oracle DBA needs to know about Linux

Turns out "the least" is still an awful lot. Martin Nash started with installing a distro and creating a file system, and moves on from there. As a developer I find I'm rarely allowed OS access to the database server these days; I suspect many enterprise DBAs also spend most of their time in OEM rather than the a shell prompt. But Linux falls into that category of things which when you need to know them you need to know them in the worst possible way. So Martin has given me a long list of commands with which to familiarize myself.

Why solid SQL still delivers the best performance

Robyn Sands began her session with the shocking statement that the best database performance requires good application design. Hardware improvements won't safe us from the consequences of our shonky code. From her experience in Oracle's Real World Performance team, the top three causes of database slowness are:

• People not using the database the way it was designed to be used
• Sub-optimal architecture or code
• Sub-optimal algorithm (my new favourite synonym for "bug")

The bulk of her session was devoted to some demos, racing different approaches to DML:

• Row-by-row processing
• Array (bulk) processing
• Manual parallelism i.e. concurrency
• Set-based processing i.e. pure SQL

There were a series of races, starting with a simple copying of data from one table to another and culminating in a complex transformation exercise. If you have attended any Oracle performance session in the last twenty years you'll probably know the outcome already but it was interesting to see how much faster pure SQL was compared to the other approaches. in fact the gap between the set-based approach and the row-based approach widened with each increase in complexity of the task. What probably surprised many people (including me) was how badly manual parallelism fared: concurrent threads have a high impact on system resource usage, because of things like index contention.

Enterprise Data Warehouse Architecture for Big Data

Dai Clegg was at Oracle for a long time and has since worked for a couple of startups which used some of the new-fangled Big Data/NoSQL products. This mix of experience has given him a breadth of insight which is not common in the Big Data discussion.

His first message is one of simple economics: these new technologies solve the problem of linear scale-out at a price-point below that of Oracle. Massively parallel programs using cheap or free open source software on commodity hardware. Commodity hardware is more failure prone than enterprise tin (and having lots of the blighters actually reduces the MTTF) but these distributed frameworks are designed to handle node failures; besides, commodity hardware has gotten a lot more reliable over the years. So, it's not that we couldn't implement most Big Data applications using relational databases, it's just cheaper not to.

Dai's other main point addressed the panoply of products in the Big Data ecosystem. Even in just the official Hadoop stack there are lots of products with similar or overlapping capabilities: do we need Kafka or Flume or both? There is no one Big Data technology which is cheaper and better for all use cases. Therefore it is crucial to understand the requirements of the application before starting on the architecture. Different applications will demand different permutations from the available options. Properly defined use cases (which don't to be heavyweight - Dai hymned the praises of the Agile-style "user story") will indicate which kinds of products are required. Organizations are going to have to cope with heterogeneous environments. Let's hope they save enough on the licensing fees to pay for the application wranglers.

How to write better PL/SQL

After last year's fiasco with shonky screen rendering and failed demos I went extremely low tech: I could have my presentation from the PDF on a thumb-drive. Fortunately that wasn't necessary. My session was part of the Beginners' Track: I'm not sure how many people in the audience were actual beginners; I hope the grizzled veterans got something out of it.

One member of the audience turned out to be a university lecturer; he was distressed by my advice to use pure SQL rather than PL/SQL whenever possible. Apparently his students keep doing this and he has to tell them to use PL/SQL features instead. I'm quite heartened to hear that college students are familiar with the importance of set-based programming. I'm even chuffed to have my prejudice confirmed that it is university lecturers who are teach people to write what is bad code in the real world. I bet he tells them to use triggers as well :)

Oracle Database 12c New Indexing Features

I really enjoy Richard Foote's presenting style: it is breezily Aussie in tone, chatty and with the occasional mild cuss word. If anybody can make indexes entertaining it is Richard (and he did).

His key point is that indexes are not going away. Advances in caching and fast storage will not remove the need for indexed reads, and the proof is Oracle's commitment to adding further capabilities. In fact, there are so many new indexing features that Ricahrd's presentation was (for me) largely a list of things I need to go away and read about. Some of these features are quite arcane: an invisible index? on an invisible column? Hmmmm. I'm not sure I understand when I might want to implement partial indexing on a partitioned table. What I'm certain about is that most DBAs these days are responsible for so many databases that they don't have the time to acquire the requisite understanding of individual applications and their data; so it seems to me unlikely that they will be able to decide which partitions need indexing. This is an optimization for the consultants.

Make your data models sing

It was one of the questions in the Q&A section of Susan Duncan's talk which struck me. The questioner talked about their "legacy" data warehouse. How old did that make me feel? I can remember when Data Warehouses were new and shiny and going to solve very enterprises data problems.

The question itself dealt with foreign keys: as is a common practice the data warehouse had no defined foreign keys. Over the years it had sprawled across several hundred tables, without the documentation keeping up. Is it possible, the petitioner asked, to reverse engineer the data model with foreign keys in the database? Of course the short answer is No. While it might be possible to infer relationships from common column names, there isn't any tool we were aware of which could do this. Another reminder that disabled foreign keys are better than no keys at all.

Getting started with JSON in the Database

Marco Gralike has a new title: he is no longer Mr XMLDB he is now Mr Unstructured Data in the DB. Or at least his bailiwick has been extended to cover JSON. JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a lightweight data transfer mechanism: basically it's XML without the tags. All the cool kids like JSON because it's the basis of RESTful web interfaces. Now we can store JSON in the database (which probably means all the cool kids will wander off to find something else now that fusty old Oracle can do it).
The biggest surprise for me is that Oracle haven't introduced a JSON data type (apparently there were so many issues around the XMLType nobody had the appetite for another round). So that means we store JSON in VARCHAR2, CLOB, BLOB or RAW. But like XML there are operators which allow us to include JSON documents in our SQL. The JSON dot notation works pretty much like XPath, and we can use it to build function-based indexes on the stored documents. However, we can't (yet) update just part of a JSON doc: it is wholesale replacement only.

Error handling is cute: by default invalid JSON syntax in a query produces null in result set rather than an exception. Apparently that's how the cool kids like it. For those of us that prefer our exceptions hurled rather than swallowed there is an option to override this behaviour.

SQL is the best development language for Big Data

This was Tom Kyte giving the obverse presentation to Dai Clegg: Oracle can do all this Big Data stuff, and has been doing it for some time. He started with two historical observations:

• XML data stores were going to kill off relational databases. Which didn't happen.
• Before relational databases and SQL there was NoSQL, literally no SQL. Instead there were things like PL/1, which was a key-value data store.

Tom had a list of features in Oracle which support Big Data applications. They were:

• Analytic functions which have enabled ordered array semantics in SQL since the last century.
• SQL Developer's support for Oracle Data Mining.
• The MODEL clause (for those brave enough to use it).
• Advanced pattern matching with the MATCH RECOGNIZE clause in 12c
• External tables with their support for extracting data from flat files, including from HDFS (with the right connectors)
• Support for JSON documents (see above).

He could also have discussed document storage with XMLType and Oracle Text, Enterprise R, In-Memory columnar storage, and so on. We can even do Map/Reduce in PL/SQL if we feel so inclined. All of these are valid assertions; the problem is (pace Dai Clegg) simply one of licensing. Too many of the Big Data features are chargeable extras on top of Enterprise Edition licenses. Big Data technology is suited to a massively parallel world where all processors are multi-core and Oracle's licensing policy isn't.

Five hints for efficient SQL

This was an almost philosophical talk from Jonathan Lewis, in which he explained how he uses certain hints to fix poorly performing queries. The optimizer takes a left-deep approach, which can lead to a bad choice of transformation, bad estimates (but check your stats as well!) and bad join orders. His strategic solution is to shape the query with hints so that Oracle's execution plan meets our understanding of the data. <

So his top five hints are:

(NO_)MERGE
(NO_)PUSH_PRED
(NO_)UNNEST
(NO_)PUSH_SUBQ
DRIVING_SITE

Jonathan calls these strategic hints, because advise the optimizer how to join tables or how to transform a sub-query. They don't hard-code paths in the way that say the INDEX hint does.

Halfway through the presentation Jonathan's laptop slid off the lectern and slammed onto the stage floor. End of presentation? Luckily not. Apparently his laptop is made of the same stuff they use for black box flight recorders, because after a few anxious minutes it rebooted successfully and he was able to continue with his talk. I was struck by how unflustered he was by the situation (even though he didn't have a backup due to last minute tweaking of the slides). A lovely demonstration of grace under pressure.

UKOUG Analytics Event: a semi-structured analysis

Yesterday's UKOUG Analytics event was a mixture of presentations about OBIEE with sessions on the frontiers of data analysis. I'm not going to cover everything, just dipping into a few things which struck me during the day

During the day somebody described dashboards as "Fisher Price activity centres for managers". Well, Neil Sellers showed a mobile BI app called RoamBI which is exactly that. Swipe that table, pinch that graph, twirl that pie chart! (No really, how have we survived so long with pie charts which can't be rotated?) The thing is so slick, it'll keep the boss amused for hours. Neil's theme on the importance of data visualization to convey a message or tell a story was picked up by Claudio Bastia and Nicola Sandol.   Their presentation included a demo of IConsulting's Location Intelligence extension for OBIEE. The tool not only does impressive things with the display of geographic data, it also allows users to interact with the maps to refine queries and drill down into the data. This is visualization which definitely goes beyond the gimmick: it's an extremely powerful way of communicating complex data sets.

A couple of presentations quoted the statistic that 90% of our data was created in the last two years. This is a figure which has been bandied about but I've never seen a citation which explains who calculated it and what method they used (although it's supposed to have originated at IBM). It probably comes from the same place as most other statistics (and project estimates). What is the "data" the figure measures? I'm sure in some areas of human endeavour (bioinformatics, say, or CERN) the amount of data they produce has gone metastatic. And obviously digital cameras, especially on phones, are now ubiquitous, so video and photographs account for a lot of the data growth. But are selfies, instagrammed burgers and cute kittens really data? Same with other content: how much of this data explosion is mirroring, retweets, quoting, spam and AdSense farms? Not to mention the smut. Anyway, that 90% was first cited in 2012; it's now 2013 and somebody needs to invent derive a new figure.

The day rounded off with a panel and a user presentation. Toby Price opened the Q&A by asking Oracle's Nick Whitehead, how does Hadoop fit into an Oracle estate? It's a good question. After all, Oracle has been able to handle unstructured data, i.e. text, since the introduction of ConText in 8.0 (albeit as a chargeable extra in those days). And there's nothing special about MapReduce: PL/SQL can do that. So what's the deal with Hadoop? Here's the impertinent answer to this pertinent question: Hadoop allows us to run massively parallel jobs without paying Oracle's per processor licenses. Let's face it, not even Tony Stark could afford to run a one-thousand core database.

The closing session was a presentation from James Wyper & Dirk Shelley about upgrading the BI architecture at John Lewis Partnership. They described it as a war story, but actually it was a report from the front lines, because the implementation is not yet finished. James and Dirk covered the products - which ones worked as advertised, which ones gave them grief (integration was a particular source of grief). They also discussed their approach to the project, relating what they did well and what they would do differently with the advantage of hindsight. This sort of session is the best part of any user group: real users sharing their experiences with the community. We need more of them.

Application integration: reorganise, recycle, repurpose

The last UKOUG Development SIG focused on Forms. Its theme was Forms in the 21st Century: modernise, integrate, migrate? I think we covered modernisation and migration very well. But even in a packed day we couldn't cover everything, and I fear integration was not done full justice.

It wasn't planned this way, but it so happens the upcoming UKOUG Development SIG is all about Application Integraton and SOA. Integration is a topic which is in everybody's baliwick. The business people want to get the best value from their existing IT investments. The architects need to understand the interfaces bewteen the silos and across the layers. The developers have to implement it.

Every stakeholder has to appreciate the others' concerns. SOA isn't any different from other IT endeavours in this respect, but it is still relatively unfamiliar. So the SIG's agenda covers integration from both technical and business perspectives. Check it out.

And, of course, please register for the day. The date is Thursday 14-JUN-2012, and it will happen at the Oracle City Office in London. Sign up here.

UKOUG2008 - Thursday

People kept telling me Being Steven Feuerstein was a striking presentation title. Although, as Niall Litchfield observed, James Morle's Driveheads revisited was pretty cool too. The thing about snappy titles is that they need to convey something about the subject matter as well as being funny, so I think James just edges it on the informative side.

The presentation had proved to be one of the hardest I have given, both in shaping the material and then in getting it down to 45 minutes. I went through it seven or eight times and it always took an hour. It was like a cartoon parcel: every time I pressed down on one bit another bit ballooned out. In the end I found myself in the hall just dropping whole chunks and hoping. I got to the wire with two minutes spare for questions (better than some other speakers I've seen this year).

My key insight into coding standards is that they don't make us better programmers. A program can be the acme of applied coding standards and still be functionally incorrect and bug ridden (although unit testing and code reviews should make that unlikely). More obviously a program can correctly implement the requirements and be bug-free yet fail to meet any set of coding standards whatsoever. No, the point of coding standards is to make us better team players, so that our programs play nice with programs written by other people. It's all about maintainability.

There was no time to relax after I finished because I had another session almost immediately. This session was difficult for another reason. I'd proposed the title Designing PL/SQL with a view to doing something different, something interactive, a sort of workshop. I'd prepared some design exercises with a view to stimulating some thinking. In hindsight I hadn't given enough thought to how I was actually going to run the session. In particular I hadn't got an ending, so it just fizzled out. It would have been a lot easier to give the session a shape if I could have topped and tailed it with some slides. But I chose to use the round table area so that people could talk and work together but it has no AV facility. So no Powerpoint. Also the exercises were too hard for people who had no experience in the sort of design decisions I wanted to explore, which seemed to be almost the whole audience.

So I await the feedback with interest. I don't know whether anybody else learned anything. But I certainly got some lessons in running interactive sessions. They are much harder than they look, because you need to put in just as much thought and preparation as a regular guy-plus-slides session, but rehearsing them is a trickier proposition (it's not really the sort of think you can do in a hotel room on your own). Still, the people in the UKOUG back office were supportive of the experiment, so I think I might have a second attempt at something like this next year. In the meantime, there are no slides to download for this session (obviously) but I will try to blog the exercises later.

After that session a couple of people asked me about automated unit testing, so I spent some time discussing testing in general and utplslql in particular. It made a change from evangelising to the uninterested, which is the more usual case. So I missed the start of Robyn Sands's talk on Root Cause Analysis in the service of reducing a support DBA's workload. She discussed the Five Whys as a technique for discovering what problem underlies an error message, the Ishikawa diagram for analysing all the possible sources of error and Pareto charts for seeing where most of the pain is. I particularly liked the way she redrew the Ishikawa fish to reflect a database scenario rather than its manufacturing origins.

The object is to fix the issues which will reduce the greatest number of calls, rather than reacting to the immediate symptoms. We all know thinking is good, but it can be hard to resist the pressure to resolve the surface issue and move on to the next ticket. Robyn was discussing a project she worked on which was dedicated to just eradicating persistent deep sources of bugs. The fact that this was a special project shows how hard it can be to resolve things properly in the real world.

My final task of the conference was chairing my colleague Roel Hartman's presentation on ApEx. This discussed a project to convert an archaic existing application (written in an obscure metadata-driven tool) into ApEx. The converted application had some neat features, including a good-looking planning tool with drag'n'drop. My concern is that Roel's presentation featured lots of JavaScript. How long can ApEx maintain a reputation for productivity when we still have to resort to bespoke coding for features as mundane as user-friendly calendar widgets and multi-column LOVs?

The contrast with Duncan Mills's session on the Fusion development platform earlier in the week is instructive. Duncan was discussing how the Fusion Apps developers are using JDeveloper. They operate under two rules:

1. Write no SQL
2. Write no JavaScript

The new generation of Oracle Applications are being assembled out of pre-built components and metadata driven frameworks. The range of JDeveloper widgets is comprehensive to the point of confusion (if you want to build your only implementation of MS Project JDev offers you a menu of Gantt chart components) but the results can be astounding: check out the Cuyahoga County GIS application.

UKOUG2008 - Wednesday

The big topic of conversation has been the credit crunch, and what impact it has had on the conference. Certainly there seem to have been more cancelled sessions than in previous years. And the exhibition hall seems emptier. The striking feature is the absence of many stalwarts of previous years: no Microsoft, no Dell, no Quest, no Sun. Another feature is the complete absence from the stands of - and there is no PC way of putting this - dolly birds. It's all techies in polo shirts and marketeers in smart suits.

At least IBM still showed up. Their barista provides the only decent coffee on the site.

Actually, there is a presence from Sun: they have a stand for MySQL. I complimented the guy on his bravery. He said that 75% of Oracle users are also MySQL users, which is an interesting statistic and may even be one that he hasn't made up. He gave me a MySQL keyring, so I'll give him the benefit of the doubt.

I went to see Mogens Norgaard do one of his idiosyncratic turns. He was as deceptively rambling and unfocused as ever, leavening his talk on goats and beer with many perceptive insights into our industry today. Mogens gives presentations like Les Dawson played piano: with consummate skill and exquisite timing. "We are all legacy now.... Look around you". Supporting his assertion that "Databases are legacy" he quoted an Oracle product manager at the ACE Directors' briefing from this year's Open World who claimed Coherence offered "zero latency" and "infinite scalability". Why are these people building middleware when clearly they should be building the spaceships that will take humanity to the stars?

I chaired Sue Harper's presentation on Visual Data Modelling using the SQL Developer Data Modeler tool. One of the doubts I had when Oracle purchased the CDW4ALL tool was regarding the business sense in buying a product only to give it away for free. Sue answered that question today: Oracle are not going to give it away. Although it's part of the SQL Developer brand it will be a licenced standalone product. Although there will be a free extension to the SQL Developer IDE which will allow developers to read OSDM models. Sue was demonstrating the EA2 release, which looks to have fixed a number of issues from the first release. In fact the whole tool looks very nice. In some ways it is a distinct improvement on Designer. The date of the production release is dependent on building a repository for the tool (currently everything is file-based). This shows that the team really is showing the same responsiveness to the product's users as they have shown with the SQL Developer IDE itself.

Words of wisdom from the bottle of Rittman-Mead beer I'm drinking as I write this: "A consultant is a man sent in after the battle to bayonet the wounded." Almost as true as this.

UKOUG2008 - Tuesday

The water tastes funny. This is not just a Londoner whinging about leaving his comfort zone, other people have commented on it too. And it's not just the water in the ICC it's the water in the hotel too. Perhaps it's time to resort to the medieval practice of drinking beer all the time.

Or then again perhaps not. People stopping by the Rittman-Mead Consulting booth can sample their branded beer (lager). Indeed beer will be pressed upon them. It's not bad but I totally blame Mark's beer for what happened next. I was chairing Steven Feuerstein's session on Weird PL/SQL. We were chattting about this and that when I glanced at my watch and noticed that the session should have started three minutes earlier. Tut tut. Steven's session was further interrupted by a screen blackout but he's a trouper and coped admirably. His presentation focused on some the quirks in PL/SQL. For instance are exceptions negative or positive? The answer is, it depends. Most are negative, execpt USER_DEFINED_ERROR and NO_DATA_FOUND. And then some of the built-in PL/SQL utilities store them as positive numbers. He also showed us some features in PL/SQL which had been implemented but not quite finished.

More fun was poked into Oracle in the next session I attended, a double bill from Hugh Darwen and Toon Koppelaars on DB Constraints, A Woeful State Of Affairs. Hugh led the attack. He had set his undergraduate students an exercise in modelling a simple banking application in two different ways. The first approach was to use Tutorial D implemented in Rel, which is a fully compliant relational language, and the second approach was to use Oracle SQL 10g, which is not. There were three things which Oracle could not implement. The first was enforcing the rule that a Customer must have an Account. The second to ensure that a Customer could have several different phone numbers but only one of a given type (Home, Work, Mobile). I'm not sure about this one, as I think it could have been modelled differently and in a way which Oracle could support, but I'm not going to cross swords with a modeller of Hugh's experience. The third hitch concerned outgoing transactions: payments with a cheque or credit card use the account number but paymenst with a debit card use the card number instead. The first two problems were due to DBMS vendors not implementing features in the SQL standard (such as CREATE ASSERTION) but this third was due to a peculiarity in Oracle's implentation, which don't allow compound unique indexes to have multiple null values in one of the columns.

Toon was responsible for defending the position of the vendors with regards to assertions. He did this by walking us through the complexities involved in enforcing the rule "If a Dept employs a Mgr or a President it must also employ an Admin". The basic principles are quite straightforward, the difficulty lies in tuning the rule so that it doesn't completely kill your application. For instance, you don't need to run the rule if you're inserting an employee who's not a manager or if you're deleting an employee who's not an administrator. I guess the place where Toon was heading is the difficulty of enforcing such rules in a multi-user environment. Unfortunately, the session overran with the start of the focus pubs, which as a SIG chair I had to attend. So I'll have to wait until I download his presentations to discover the denouement.

The stated aim of the focus pubs is networking: to allow delegates to meet the people people who run the SIGs and for us to badger them into doing presentations. Unfortunately the ambience is more like a nightclub than a pub: dim lighting so you can't see anybody, loud music so you can't hear anybody. Thus you end up mainly talking to people you already know. But that's good too.

At last, the UKOUG show

I have been very busy recently, too busy to blog. Although I do have a stack of half-finished articles which I will finish off in the coming months. Mainly it's been work pressures: I'm coming to the end of my stint on my current project so there's been lots of tidying up and handing over to complete.

But also I've been working on two presentations for the UKOUG. One is stressful enough. The presentations are back to back on Thursday. The first is a regular presentation, called Being Steven Feuerstein, and it's a meditation on PL/SQL coding standards. I don't think Steven himself will be attending, which is a relief but also a disappointment as I was hoping to stage a PL/SQL version of the "I'm Spartacus!" scene. The other presentation is a more experimental session called Designing PL/SQL. It is in the round table area but it's not a round table. It's more of a Workshop.

Birmingham is its usual Christmas-y self, complete with street decorations in the achingly fashionable blue and white colour scheme. In fact it's been snowing, which I think is taking Christmasiness too far. I don't fancy negotiating the canal-side walkways once the slush has frozen over, particularly tonight, what with the ACE dinner following on from the focus pubs. I think I might skip into town to replace my work shoes with something more in the Timberland line.

UKOUG DE SIG 10-JUL-2008: the Agenda agenda

A while back I was discussing the difficulty of assembling a SIG agenda with a fellow chair. He had recently taken over his SIG and had been expecting to find a long list of volunteer speakers. He was disappointed by the reality, which is - alas - scraping around to get presenters. I was relieved it's not just the Development SIG with this problem. There's just over four weeks to go before the next SIG and I still have only three confirmed speakers, although I am confident of getting at least one more.

There are a number of different sources for speakers. The obvious one is Oracle itself. Every SIG has an Oracle buddy (strictly speaking they're called Ambassadors but the "buddy" tag stuck). Our buddy is the redoubtable Grant Ronald, who is a Group Product Manager in Oracle's Tools Division, which makes him the go-to man for Forms and JDeveloper. For the upcoming SIG Grant will be presenting on Oracle ADF 11g: New Declarative Development Features for Fusion . This will be an opportunity to see whether JDeveloper is yet approaching the productivity which Forms has offered us for more than fifteen years. Grant will also be giving us a brief overview of the new features in Forms 11g.

Oracle Consulting also provide us with speakers. It's a good place to get information on the newer Oracle products and technology. I'm still waiting for David Richards, the SIG's Consulting contact, to get back to me, but he usually comes up with the goods.

We do get offered sessions from vendors. I think it is an important function of the SIG to bring relevant products to the notice of our audience. But we have had feedback that people don't like sales-oriented presentations, particularly at SIGs because the single stream means there's no choice. This is why I am especially grateful to Peter Sechser from PITSS for offering a wholly technical presentation on turning an older Forms application into a SOA application which isn't a sales pitch for their PITSS.CON product.

Another, largely theoretical, source is people - actual users - who have volunteered to present. Unfortunately we get almost no such offers. I'm not quite sure why this is, but I suspect it is related to the reason why we get lower attendance compared to the DBA SIGs. Apart from anything else, the smaller audience represents a smaller pool of potential speakers. Then again, perhaps developers are just shyer than DBAs.

My final option is to phone a friend - or at least e-mail people whose blogs I like. In previous years I have buttonholed Rob Baillie and Tim Hall. This year's victim is Adrian Billington, who will be presenting on pipelined functions in PL/SQL. Adrian is a knowledgeable practitioner of PL/SQL so I'm hoping to learn lots from this one. I also approached another Oracle ACE for a presentation: I've still got my fingers crossed but I fear this one's going to fall through.

Putting the agenda together is a tough task, I try to balance the topics between the firm favourites (i.e. Forms) and the new (Java, ApEx). I like to include at least one unfamiliar topic in the mix (PHP, .Net, Rules Engines). But most of all I think it is my duty to ensure that we have presentations from different sources: I could easily have five sessions from Oracle employees but it is meant to be a User Group, not a branch of Oracle marketing.

So, if you're an Oracle developer based in the UK please come to the SIG. It's in Blythe Valley Park (near Solihull) on July 10th 2008. It's open to all comers (it's just more expensive to get in if your organisation doesn't have a UKOUG membership). But also, please consider presenting at the SIG. I admit it's not as glamorous as the annual conference but it is still a worthwhile and rewarding experience. If you are interested please contact Julius Kisielius at the UKOUG office.

OOW2K7 vs UKOUG2007

Having attended the two conferences so close together makes it easy for me to compare them. There are obvious differences. San Francisco in November is warmer, sunnier and all together more attractive than Birmingham in December. Open World is much much larger. But the UKOUG felt more tiring, at least to me. This is because the UKOUG packs a lot more into each day.

Open World is distributed across several sites. In order to give delegates sufficinet time to get from a session in the Westin St Francis to Moscone South there is a half hour gap between sessions. There are no sessions whilst the key notes are on. There are no sessions during lunch hour. The UKOUG schedules sessions with only ten minutes between them. The streams are staggered, so that there were always sessions during lunch. This obviously provides value for the delegates by offering a vast number of sessions to attend. But it also makes us feel guilty about skipping a session in order to go round the exhibition hall.

Another difference is the networking opportunities. Oracle have started putting a lot more effort into providing portals for delegates to get in contact with each other and places where people can meet and converse. This is easier because Moscone Center has some big spaces which can be used for such purposes.

Both conferences are valuable. I learned a lot from attending both. But Open World was much more relaxed. I think the fact that I have just blogged about UKOUG Wednesday more than two weeks after the end of the conferences says it all.

UKOUG 2007: Wednesday Morning, 3 AM

Well not quite, but I was awake at 4:30am. So I ran through my presentation a couple of times and made some final tweaks to the slides. I didn't have any code demos this year, so there was no chance of me breaking anything.

Every performance problem is one of two things

I almost skipped James Morle's presentation, because I thought it would cover the same ground as Jonathan Lewis's talk on Statspack. I'm glad I didn't though, because it was completely different. But I'm even more frustrated that this talk was scheduled at the same time as Daniel Fink's talk on Why tune SQL?.

James's talk was a reassessment of the YAPP tuning method:

R = S + W

That is, response time equals service time plus wait time. Most tuning methods focus on the waits. This talk's assertion was that most fixes actually deal with skew or latency, that is, the service time. In a nutshell, Morle's Grand Unified Theory of Performance Tuning is: All problems are caused by skew, latency or both.

Bandwidth is not the same as latency: bandwidth is how much transport you have, latency is the wasted time associated with each operation. James demonstrated the difference between latency and bandwidth with some live action in which two volunteers transported bottles of beer across the auditorium, in a suitcase or by hand. The impact of Connor McDonald's infamous "squirrel sketch" is still rippling across the presentation pond. However, this example is easier to blog. Given two networks:

LAN	100MB/s	ping = 3ms
WAN	250KB/s	ping = 2ms

which one can transmit the most data? The answer is the WAN; the LAN's enormous bandwidth is wasted because of the additional latency in its ping speeds. Of course, the WAN is operating more-or-less at capacity and the LAN isn't.

Problems with bandwidth are easy to fix - they just require money and bandwidth is getting cheaper all the time. They are also easy to spot. Latency on the other hand is bounded by the laws of physics, which means it is not necessarily fixable to chucking money at it. Also, it can be hard to spot. Latency multiplication is a very common source of problems - 1ms per operation is a very short time until you do that operation a thousand times.

Common sources of latency:

• nested loop joins
• SQL*Net message to/from client
• too many commits
• "slow" I/O

Skew is also hard to spot because humans (and computers) tend to think linearly, and unconsciously split things into evenly-sized chunks.

Common sources of skew.:

• distribution of column values
• high demand for small set of resources (contention)
• response times for component SQL statements in a transaction

.
So the revised version of the YAPP formula is

R = S + W

where S = (skew * service time) and W = (skew * latency + passive wait time).

Modelling on the cheap

This presentation originally started out as some jokey test data, when the UKOUG asked some of us SIG chairs to test the conference site. But the title was sufficiently compelling for me to submit it as a real paper and, more surprisingly, for it to be accepted. I think many people found the title compelling because it focuses on a real problem: how to undertake database and application modelling when the boss won't spring for an expensive CASE tool. I work for a consultancy; consultancies tend to put software licences in one of two categories - those for which the client pays and overhead. So I have an interest in tools and techniques which don't require me to get a business case approved.

I talked about low tech solutions (whiteboards, Post-It notes and index cards), desktop tools (PowerPoint and Visio) and then free modelling tools (basically Schemester). There is JDeveloper but I don't think that is really suitable for people who are developing database applications. However the rumours suggest that JDev 11g will have much more to offer on that side of things, and that means that we can hope those features will eventually be ported to SQL Developer. I feel the session went well but I shall have to wait until UKOUG publishes the evaluations.

Afterwards, somebody who introduced themselves as one of the JDev development team who worked on the original Use Case modeller said they started out modelling that tool with index cards and Post-Its. And Duncan Mills said that he didn't think the JDev features set was any worse that Schemester. It's a fair point: Schemester's big advantage is that it is a mere 295KB zip to download and has a memory footprint of ~12MB of RAM. So, unlike JDev, we can run Schemester without nadgering our desktop.

UKOUG 2007: Ruby Tuesday

Tuesday was a long day for me. I was awake at 5:00am. On Monday I was awake at 5:30am. If it wasn't for the fact that I'm still in the same timezone I would swear I was jet-lagged. It isn't "jet-lag" either - I mainly drank water at the bloggers' meet-up last night. Anyway, it gave me the chance to run through my presentation before breakfast.

The first session of Tuesday was Sue Harper's overview of SQL Developer's new features. These transpired to be the new features in the coming 1.5 release rather than the latest production release. The upcoming release is special because its features are ones suggested and voted on by SQL Developer users on the SQL Developer Exchange site. The team deferred the planned 2.0 release because its manifest contained no features which users were clamouring for, at least not according to the SQL Dev Exchange rankings. So if there's some functionality you want to see added to the product, suggest it. If enough other users agree with you there is probably a reasonable chance you might get it. Power to the people!

Most of these new features are enhancements to existing functionality - a new SQL formatter, better code insight. This is because the SQL Dev team is quite small and has only one real developer. The team piggy-backs on the work of the JDeveloper team, so to a large extent the feature-set in SQL Dev depends on what is in the other tool. That is why the next release will feature the ability to see queue tables but not to create or alter them. In the long run we can hope that the JDev modelling features will be included in SQL Dev.

Database vs middle tier

My chairing of Toon Koppelaar's session got off on the wrong foot. Of course I should have checked how to pronounce his name before I introduced him - Dutch names tend to sound like a cough - but as it turned out it was the name I thought I knew which I had in fact got wrong. Toon (pronounced tone) was generous. Apparaently he gets call "Tune" quite a lot.

Toon's talk was another waltz around the question of where business logic properly belongs. Toon distinguishes three times of logic:

• data logic - directly manipulating the data;
• UI logic - directly affecting the user's interaction with the system;
• business logic - everything else.

Toon rehearsed the familiar arguments. We have moved almost full-circle from text-based stateless apps in the seventies and early eighties through client server apps to the current fad for graphical stateless apps. The main difference between the green screen dumb terminals of yore and today's browser-based apps is responsiveness: the new apps do try to respond to the user in the client layer. This comes at a price: the presentation layers have a large number of moving parts, drawn from an exploding range of widget toolkits and frameworks. Keeping up with all these different bits requires a significant knowledge investment, which in turn leads to teams of specialists overseen by architects (you have to hear Toon say "architect" to realise that he means it as an insult).

But the real problems arise when the business logic is written in Java or .Net or one of these other fancy-dan languages. These applications tend to be very chatty - Toon quoted an example where a single search spawned 7000 separate calls. They also tend to date very quickly, which makes them hard to maintain and hard to migrate. Most applications are "Window on Data" - the user retrieves data and updates data. This is precisely what databases are meant to do. Consequently the underlying database design is paramount. The DBMS and PL/SQL have been the single stable constant in system architectures for more than fifteen years now. So put your business logic in the database (PL/SQL and views) and just change the front-end layer to keep up with the Next Big Thing.

The interesting thing is that these talks - due to the nature of the conference - are usually singing to the converted. However, I noticed an ex-colleague, who is a Java head, in the audience. I chatted to him afterwards. He was spitting feathers. Strawman arguments... business logic is object-oriented....PL/SQL is too hard to maintain. In the end I had to calm him down by proposing that he present his opinions at a SIG. He said he'd think about it. I have heard this a number of times now. Both sides try to bludgeon the other side into admitting defeat. The trouble is finding people who are equally experienced in both database and middle-tier architectures. Almost everybody is a specialist on one side of the fence or the other. There are good reasons why this tends to be the case but it does make it difficult to hold a discussion in which everybody understands the issues involved.

So I think it comes down to numbers. Front-end developers generally outnumber database engineers in any organisation, so most of the application will be written in the programming paradigm which suits them. This will lead to the business logic in the middle tier, because that's what they understand. Whether this is the correct solution is a different matter.

11g for developers

Well at least I managed to pronounce Tom Kyte's name correctly. In this session Tom covered the key new features for developers. As with the other session, I'll list the features he mentioned, and just expand on a couple of points which were news to me:

• Client result cache
• server result cache
• PL/SQL result cache
• virtual columns
• the long awaited PIVOT clause
• finer grained dependency analysis
• Advanced compression
• PL/Scope
• Method 4 dynamic SQL
• compound triggers
• change to WHEN OTHERS exceptions (see below).

The more I hear about the result caching features the more I think my project ought to move to 11g. Currently we are on 9i with only the vaguest plans to migrate to 10g. For the last few months I have been, in effect, implementing something like result caching, only not as efficient. A crusade for the new year. Something I had not picked up on before is that the PL/SQL result cache only applies to functions, not procedures, and also doesn't work with functions which have OUT or IN OUT parameters.

Bryn Llewellyn, the PL/SQL product manager, offered Tom the choice of three new features. Tom asked to have the WHEN OTHERS exception banned; regular readers of AskTom will know that the use of this exception without an accompanying RAISE or RAISE_APPLICATION_ERROR is one of his bugbears. In the end they compromised: WHEN OTHERS without a RAISE or RAISE_APPLICATION_ERROR will throw a compilation warning. But only if the compilation is set to the correct level. I rather suspect the sort of developers who code such silent bugs in their exception handlers probably don't use the compiler flags.

The duplicity of duplicate rows

Hugh Darwen started the third talk in his series of SQL's biggest mistakes with a discussion of the Bellman's line from the Hunting of the Snark, "What I tell you three times is true." He followed this up with Ted Codd's observtion that "If something is true saying it twice doesn't make it any more true."

Duplicate rows in a resultset are duplicitous because they can represent two different problems. One is that the table contains duplicated data. The other is that the SQL has generated duplicate rows, for instance through an imperfect join. Either way it is an offense against relational theory, which requires that a relation consist of unique records. The possibility of valid SQL generating duplicate rows is a fundamental flaw in relational theory, which wasn't anticipated by Ted Codd. There are workarounds. We can introduce artificial uniqueness through sequences or or on the fly row number generation. We can suppress duplication through the use of DISTINCT or UNION, or we can ensure we include all the key columns in our select statements and include differentiating tags in UNION ALL statements.

No solution is entirely satisfactory. Synthetic keys do not address the underlying problem of duplicate data in the table. That really needs to be tackled by a decently normalised data model and building unique constraints on the natural keys. Removing duplication from the resultset has performance implications. We wouldn't want to pay the overhead for applying DISTINCT to every query but how else can we guarantee uniqueness in the resultset. Hugh suggested this problem was down to the database vendors but I think that is a bit cheeky. DISTINCT inevitably requires additional work on the part of the database and that has to cost something. It can be optimized (with the kind of hashing algorithm Oracle introduced for GROUP BY in 10gR2) but as Scotty was wont to observe, "Ye cannae break the law of physics".

Incidentally, Hugh owned up to introducing the NATURAL JOIN syntax into the ANSI standard. He acknowledged that it was a controversial addition. Indeed. Some people I know regard it as a mistake; perhaps not on a par with NULLs but a mistake none the less. Personally I think it's a heffalump trap. It may be a boon for the experienced SQL practitioner but it's just a bug waiting to happen for the unwary. And if my experience on the OTN forum is at all representative the clueless outnumber the clueful, and they appear to breed faster. It's not the way we'd like it to be but it's the way it is. Of course this is just the sort of pragmatic approach which often enrages the theoreticians (or at least Fabian Pascal).

Hugh rounded off his presentation with the observation that fundamental mistakes are often irrevocable. Furthermore they don't often reveal themselves until it's too late. So maybe it's time for a Truly Relational Database. This call for for arms was delivered with a knowing smile - most of us in the audience are Oracle wranglers first and foremost. So he asked the question of himself, why does he keep doing this? Because somebody has to, otherwise the importance of theory will disappear off the practitioners' radar altogether.

Understanding statspack

Jonathan Lewis also started his presentation with a quote:

"------ is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it wrongly and applying unsuitable remedies."

This turns out to be Sir Ernest Benn on politics, but as Jonathan rightly says it acts as a neat summation of the state of Oracle tuning.

All database performance problems mean one of two things:

• the database is working too hard; or
• it is waiting for someting.

Waits are due either to the inherent slowness of a particular step or because there is a queue for a particular resource. There are only issues:

1. disk I/O;
2. CPU consumption;
3. network delays;
4. application contention (locks);
5. internal contention (latches)

It's almost always the SQL at fault:

SQL ordered by gets		CPU
SQL ordered by reads		Disk (CPU)
SQL ordered by executions		CPU (network)
SQL ordered by parse calls		CPU (internal contention)
SQL ordered by version counts		CPU, internal contention
SQL ordered by CPU time		CPU
SQL ordered by elapsed time		application contention

The problem with Statspack is that it just gives us a list of symptoms. It can be hard to distinguish the flow of the events which underlie the bald statistics and even harder to determine possible causes. What sort of database activity might generate lots of logfile sync waits? So Jonathan advises us to play with Statspack. Run a query many times; check the Statspack output. Change the statement and repeat the operation. Stress Oracle and see what happens.

The other important thing is to keep an archive of Statspack results. Quite often performance problems arise because something has changed. The current output may flag up a problem but it might not be enough to diagnose it. Having a history of Statspack output will allow us to spot trends, repeating patterns or sudden changes in behaviour.

.	.	occurrence
.	.	rare	frequent
impact	huge	easy to see	easy to see
.	tiny	irrelevant	statistically visible

This tied in nicely with Robyn Sands's observation that performance tuning is about reducing variability.

Tuesday evening

In the evening we had the SIG Focus Pubs. This is supposed to be an opportunity for delegates to meet others with similar interests. I'm afraid I took it as an opportunity to find presenters for my next SIG (27th February 2008 - save the date!) I did chat with somebody who is still happily using client/server Forms 6i. Well, it's table, quite richly featured, highly productive and it works - at least for the time being. This person expressed the hope that Forms 6i would run on Vista. Somehow I doubt it (and so did a former Forms guru of my acquaintance). Apart from anything else, archaic software like Forms is exactly the sort of thing which will display very slowly on Vista's new rendering architecture.

Afterwards a few of us went for a mealy at a rather upmarket curry house called Lazeez (hence "ruby Tuesday"). The food was very nice but there were no side dishes. An innovation too far. Anyway, my thanks to Joraph, who picked up the tab.

UKOUG 2007: Presentations available.

I haven't finished writing up the conference and already the presentations are downloadable from the conference agenda page. Sigh.

The password is the usual one. If you don't know it, your membership's regular contact should be able to tell you. Otherwise e-mail the UKOUG office, which is quicker than attempting to crack it yourself (although as it's a regular dictionary word with no baroque capitalisation or numbers your rainbow tables won't break a sweat).

Not all the presentations are available. As speakers we had until Friday 7th December to upload the really final version of the slides so perhaps some people didn't make that deadline. Also, putting our slides online was not compulsory. It's a shame, because there are a couple of talks which I missed which are not there yet.

UKOUG2007: Make It Great

Most great cities have a quarter. Paris has its Latin quarter. Prague has the Jewish Quarter. Lankhmar has a Thieves Quarter. Birmingham has two quarters, the sparkling Jewellery Quarter and the slightly less sparkling Conference Quarter. No, really. It's a area dedicated to conferences, which means it has lots of hotel and lots of bars. No I don't know what bars have to do with conferences either ;)

Outside of the Conference Quarter Birmingham is gearing up for Christmas in a big way. The German market is doing a thriving trade in Gluhwein and Stollen. The central shopping area is thronged with people. Every structure is festooneed with lights and tinsel. And the weather is sufficiently chilly to make mulled wine and hot mince-pies seem like very good ideas.

Last night we had the UKOUG volunteers' meeting. Apparently this year is the biggest UKOUG conference yet: 2900 delegates registered, 600 speakers and 450 presentations (up from 350 last year). The conference is scaling out from the ICC and running some sessions in the Birmingham Rep theatre next door. But it's still relatively compact compared to OOW2K7 - I have already met several colleagues and ex-colleagues without trying, because there are fewer people - and obviously there is a greater preponderance of people from the UK than there was in San Francisco.

I have already attended the keynotes from Ian Smith and Tom Kyte. Ian was keen to stress the point that Oracle UK are responding to customer feedback, and in particular the responses to the UKOUG customer survey. He cited as evidence their initiatives for the JD Edwards and PeopleSoft communities, who felt bewildered by the sheer size of the Oracle range. Oracle is now "the world's leading enterprise software vendor", with the database just being one of its offerings (although it has 47% of the database market, more that #2 and #3 combined). Tom made a similar point. He skated through a list of twenty new or enhanced features out of the 400 in the 11g database release in thirty minutes. He said that when he joined Oracle in 1992 he could have covered the features of their entire product range in the same time. That's the scale of innovation in Oracle.

So the UKOUG conference is going to have to keep growing just to be able to keep up.

UKOUG 2007: My schedule

Although it's nice to go to both OpenWorld and the UKOUG conference it is difficult when they're both so close together. I haven't finished digesting the stuff from OOW2K7 yet. Also being part of the UKOUG committee means I have a few light pre-conference chores. Furthermore, I'm presenting, so there's all that to prepare. Plus the small matter of the day job, which doesn't really respond well to two separate absences so close together; that's why I'm not doing the full UKOUG this year (again). Anyway, enough whinging.

My standard take on the two conferences is that OpenWorld is more fun but you learn more at the UKOUG. This is because OpenWorld is usually dominated by Oracle's marketing and placed presentations (there is no open Call For Papers). The UKOUG is independent of Oracle and casts its net wider. Consequently you generally get a better range of speakers and topics, and a more honest appraisal of Oracle's products. However, OpenWorld07 was a valuable learning experience for me and - compared to previous years - quite low key in the hype department. So the UKOUG Conference has a tougher challenge this year.

One thing I do know is Birmingham in December will not be T-Shirt weather.

---

For those of us on the committee the conference starts at 16:15 on Sunday with the Volunteers' meeting. Followed by a few sherbets at a local watering-hole.

Monday, 3rd December 2007

12:10-13:10 - "Avoiding Avoidable Disasters and Surviving Survivable Ones" : Hall Exec 8

I felt like easing myself into the conference, so I chose my first session for its potential entertainment value (which isn't to say it won't be useful too). The speaker is the Martin Widlake and it's got another one of his arresting titles. I'm chairing this one.

13:30-14:15 - "TimesTen: Anatomy of an In-Memory Database" : Hall 11a

Having attended Susan Cheung's session at OOW2K7 I now know something about TimesTen, and its capabilities. So I know right now it's not appropriate for my current project, but I want to find out more because I think it has some interesting potential for future projects.

14:10-15:10 - "Oracle right to reply on Oracle Licensing" : Hall 1

This is a roundtable facilitated by Mr UKOUG himself, Ronan Miles. I have only just noticed that this is Oracle's response, I guess to the earlier session by from Rocela. I thought it was going to be a chance for us, the customers, to have a therapeutic bitch about Oracle's licensing policies. Apparently not. Given that it is a round table the agenda can be seized by the attendees, so ....

15:20-16:05 - "An Industrial Engineer's Approach to Oracle Management and Performance" : Hall 11b

Like most conferences these days the UKOUG is dominated by features and functionality rather than process. This session from Cisco's Robyn Sands is one of the exceptions. I'm chairing this one.


17:35-18:35 - "11g new features for DBAs" : Hall 1

I didn't get to see Tom Kyte strutting his technical stuff at OOW2K7, because I knew I was going to catch him here.

Monday rounds off with the Bloggers' drinks. Once again the redoubtable Mark Rittman has organised this and arranged for a cash injection from the UKOUG team. Nice one, Mark.

Tuesday, 4th December 2007

09:00-10:00 - "Oracle SQL Developer Latest Features" : Hall 5

I've downloaded the recent SQL Developer patch but haven't really used it much. Sue Harper should provide some inspiration. I'm chairing this one.

10:20-11:05 - "Harvesting the Advantages of a Database Centric Development Approach" : Hall 8a

I haven't heard Toon Koppelaars talk before but I have heard of him. The topic is a key area for me. I'm chairing this one.

11:15-12:15 - "11g new features for DevelopersSs" : Hall 1

A mad dash over to the main hall to see Tom Kyte give expression to the other side of his personality. I'm chairing this one.

13:30-14:15 - "The Duplicity of Duplicate Rows" : Hall 9

For the third year running Dr Hugh Darwen will be giving us a bracing dose of database theory. I'm chairing this one (which is the end of my chairing duties).

14:25-15:25 - "Understanding Statspack" : Hall 1

It's always good to hear Jonathan Lewis talk about anything.

17:30 - 20:00 - "COMMUNITY FOCUS PUBS"

I'll be reprazentin' the Development Engineering SIG at wherever we get allocated. Probably lumped in with the MAD and App Server SIGs. These are birds-of-a-feather things where you can meet people who have the same Oracle interests as you, so do come along.

Wednesday, 5th December 2007

10:40-11:25 - "Every Performance Problem Is One Of Two Things" : Hall 5


James Morle with a promising title. If it was followed by "Discuss" it could fit nicely into a Philosophy exam paper.

12:30-13:15 - "Modelling on the cheap" :

As Mike Yarwood used to, "And this is me." At the time of writing I am still working on the words but I have met all the other deadlines (just!) so I should be alright. However I am open to taking this one off-piste, so if you have some opinions or suggestions about alternatives to expensive CASE tools please bring them along.

---

I am leaving UKOUG on the Wednesday afternoon. I might attend another session or so, it depends how I feel.

UKOUG 2007: Chair registration - for real

The UKOUG conference website is now open for any delegate to volunteer as a session chair. Yes I know I said this once before but this time it's the truth. I have had the green light from Lauren so it must be okay !

Chairing sessions is not too onerous. We have to remind delegates to switch off mobile phones and fill in the critique forms. We also have to introduce the speakers. However most of them already have prepared their own introductions, so "without further ado" is a handy phrase. The key thing is to ensure the session finishes on time; this means giving the presenter discreet time signals, although most of them should be able to keep their sessions on track without prompting.

The value of volunteering is that you get a free pass to the conference when you chair six or more sessions. I know it is only a few days away, but if your boss is wavering this might just be the extra leverage you need. Sign up now!

Update

At the time of posting the Conference site still displays a message saying you cannot register to chair sessions if you haven't had an invite from Lauren Edwards. Just ignore this and go ahead. I have e-mailed the UKOUG office and I hope the site will be amended soon.

Update again

The website has now be amended.

Report on UKOUG DE SIG 11-OCT-2007

The Oracle City office played host to the last Development Engineering SIG of the year. This meeting focused largely on the Tools aspect of the SIG's remit. I would like to thank all of the presenters for contributing to what I found an interesting and useful day.

Jeremy Duggan of Joraph started the day with an overview of Application Express. This was his first gig as a speaker, although he has been running (or co-running) the Designer SIG for a number of years(1). For a first attempt it was very good. Jeremy has a nice conversational style and a good command of his brief. He also had the right amount of content to fill the time slot without rushing the end. I liked the way Jeremy put Application Express into the context of his own IT career: that helped us to understand why he appreciated the tool. Personally I wanted to hear more about the case studies, but these things are not always easy, especially if the client has made you sign an NDA. Jeremy got confused about his role only once, when at the end of his talked he almost led off his own round of applause.

Simon Day from Borland had the next slot. Simon is another old hand from the Designer SIG. He has a great presenting style. His talk was billed as Requirements Driven Approach to Testing Oracle J2EE applications. The JDev element turned out to be in the demo, which didn't work. This gave me an opportunity for a cheap shot about not testing the demo, which I duly took. Sorry, Simon. He presented a summary of findings from the usual business analysts (Butler, Gartner et alia), which show that the top three reasons for IT projects failing are:

1. Inaccurate requirements;
   
2. Incomplete requirements;
   
3. Changing requirements.

Well, durrr. We all know that. We just pretend these things aren't going to happen this time. It is this apparent inability to properly deal with the errant requirements which causes the problems: forty percent of all project work is re-work. Fortunately there is an answer and it is ... a suite of software produced by Borland. I bet you didn't see that coming. To be fair, managing requirements and the code which satisfies them and the automated tests to validate that code is a complex task, one which obviously demands a tool. I was just hoping for a solution which didn't necessitate a procurement process. I sure elongated and overly-complicated procurement processes is number four on that list.

Next up was Tim Hall, reprazentin' Oracle-Base, talking about Oracle and PHP. Previously I had tried to get a presentation on this topic from two different sources. Both had mucked me about. Then I noticed that Tim's web site was written in PHP, so I asked him if he would do a talk about it. He was reluctant at first, because he doesn't consider himself a PHP expert. But the whole point about PHP is that it allows numpties to build web sites. Er, not that I'm saying Tim is a numpty. So he took the bait. His presentational style is like that of the Cillit Bang adverts: here is a sample of code, this is what it does. Clear, concise and focused. It was just a shame that Tim's demo didn't work either. Still, at least Tim had the consolation of Nietzsche to fall back on.

After lunch we had a second presentation on Application Express. Oracle Consulting's Gus Charnell talked us through some of the New Features in ApEx3.0. This was a marvelous complement to Jeremy's talk, because we could see just how easy it can be to build and change pages with the tool. One of the questions which came up at Mike Hichwa's sessions at the UKOUG conference last year was with regard to ApEx reporting. ApEx is free but Oracle were proposing to implement reporting use the decidedly not-free XML Publisher: how did Oracle propose to resolve this licensing conundrum. Gus's talk gave us the answer. ApEx can produce simple (i.e. single query) reports using Apache FOP style sheets, but if we want anything complicated we'll have to spring for BI Publisher licences. Still, with the increasing functionality of SQL we can pack a lot of sophistication into a single query. Gus finally broke the hex on failing demos. However, it did take a bit of voodoo (changing a variable value, committing and then changing it back) to generate the PDF.

The final presentation of the day was Harvey Raja, also of Oracle Consulting. Harvey attempted to compress about a day's worth of content on JDeveloper 11g into forty-five minutes. He made a good stab at it. Java these days is a bewildering torrent of TLAs, standards and bizarrely named libraries (ICE Faces, JGoodies). On the other hand, the applications we can build are slick and flexible almost beyond belief. The cynic in me wanted to know the spec of Harvey's machine: JDeveloper never runs that fast on my PC and I don't even have the ADF version installed.

I must start thinking about the next SIG soon. It's earlier in the year than usual (last week of February) so I really need to get most of the sessions confirmed before Christmas. If anybody would like to present please contact me or Julius. We promise not to kill you, so it can only make you stronger.

At last, the Oct-2007 DE SIG!

Next week the third UKOUG Development Engineering SIG of the year happens at the Oracle London office. I should have blogged about it sooner but we experienced a slight agenda malfunction hem hem. Fortunately our friends in Oracle Consulting have come through to plug the gaps and spare my blushes. It's ended up being themed around some of the newer tools in the Oracle development space. We have two presentations on Application Express, two on JDeveloper and one on PHP.

I have been trying for ages to get somebody to talk about PHP and Oracle without success. So I am grateful to Tim Hall for accepting the challenge. I'm hoping that he'll turn up in his full ACE Director fig: tiara, ermine robe and chain of office. Also speaking is Jeremy Duggan, better known as the Chair of the Modelling & Design SIG. I think this is Jeremy's first time on the other side of the fence , so I'll keep my fingers crossed for him during his presentation. The session which most intrigues me is Simon Day, talking about requirements and testing with JDeveloper. Mapping user requirements to delivered code is one of IT's black holes, so I am keen to known what JDev offers us in this regard.

One of the talks I tried to get but which didn't materialise was an introduction to the Microsoft development environment. It occurred to me whilst listening to Xen Lategan's presentation at BVP in June that I knew very little about the Microsoft architecture. I could guess the function most of the boxes in the architectural diagram because the Oracle/J2EE stacks have similarly-shaped boxes in similar places. As the October agenda seemed to be moving towards a tools theme I thought it would be an ideal opportunity for Microsoft to evangelise their toolset to a fresh audience.

Unfortunately the only presentation they could offer me was a talk on Visual Studio 2008 New Features, which apparently would enthuse the audience to upgrade immediately from VS2005. As I doubt that any of the expected audience uses VS of any flavour I had to regretfully turn this down. Still it is good news for those people who regard Microsoft as an all-devouring beast. The Borg has assimilated all the customers it wants right now, at least on the development tools front. Presumably the unassimilated remnants are too hardcore (or too few!) to be worthwhile. So we're safe ... for the time being.