OOW2K6: Sleepy Sunday

The first presentation of Open World for me was Tim Gorman's talk on Scaling to Infinity. Obviously I didn't read the abstract properly because this took me by surprise. Instead of being a way to gently ease myself into the spectacle Tim's talk gave me some very useful insights that are immediately relevant to my current project. "All databases are victims of their own success" was especially resonant. Tim's key point was that we can only scale VLDWs if we design them properly from the startpoint. In particular we need to avoid any heavyweight DML (i.e. UPDATE and DELETE) and use partioning smartly. One of my pending tasks is to improve the elasped times of queries in the searching datamart. I think in the light of Tim's talk I am going to have to revisit my implementation (which uses bitmap indexes and partioning) as I'm not sure it's going to scale to infinity.

After that it was up to the icy wastes of the Hilton's sixth floor to watch "Tiger" Mark Rittman dicing with death. Or at least exploring the slapstick possibilities offered by the trailing radio mike's cables. Beforehand Mark had expressed a concern that he wouldn't be able to fill the ninety minute slot on the new BI Suite EE. But in the end he ran out of time, with material still to do. Who would have thought Mark could be so talkative? I had better quickly say that Mark's presentation was coherent and informative and didn't feel incomplete. And he coped gracefully with the inevitable failure of one of his demos.

In the evening the ACEs dinner was nice, although I drank too much wine and didn't eat enough food. I almost got stuck with the bill after the manager mistook me for Andrew Carr. Well, I thought she said "Are you Andrew Clarke?". It doesn't help that we are both balding, bearded and British. Fortunately I eventually managed to introduce her to the right Brit, otherwise I'd be there still, washing dishes. I ended up seated next to Steven Feuerstein who wanted to know whether my presentation was going to focus on utPlsql (which it does). He thinks Code Tester (formerly QUTE) is a much better tool and he's certainly convinced me to take a second look.

I was awake again at 02.00am so I went through my presentation once more. Just as well: I ran my scripts and the first test failed with ORA-01438: Value larger than specified precision allows for this column.  I know I've joked about breaking my demo but this wasn't funny. Eventually I figured it out. The EMP.EMPNO column is NUMBER(4,0) and I had simply run the code so often that my EMPNO_SEQ had clocked 10000. After I dropped and recreated the sequence the scripts ran fine.

OOW2K6: Weather update

The Oracle slogan for this year is Better Information, Better Innovation. Here is an instance of innovation. The conference bags contain a Fujitsu-Siemens branded umbrella, which makes a change from the usual mouse mats and stress balls. Unfortunately the current weather situation demands sunscreen instead. Did I just say "unfortunately"? Tee hee!

I'm writing this after the speakers' meeting, which included some facts about the conference. Apparently there are over forty thousand registered attendees but on the peak night there will be delegates staying in just fourteen thousand hotel rooms. So either Kent Graziano isn't the only person looking to crash on somebody's floor or else the conference is going to be livelier than we might have imagined.

OOW2K6: ACEs high

Well here we are again. I've already guided one lost resident of Phoenix to the Moscone Centre (or Center, I suppose). She asked me if I was from round these parts. I guess SF is so unlike the rest of the US they just expect its residents to speak with English accents.

Anyway, I met up with Mark Rittman and Tim Hall in the King George yesterday. All of us had been on the go since the crack of dawn BST but we agreed the best thing would be to stay awake until bedtime PST. So we did a mini-pub crawl: an "Irish" pub round the corner from the hotel and then down to scope out the Thirsty Bear. Mark was happy with it as the location for the Bloggers' lashmeet-up on Tuesday. This was the first time I had met Tim in the flesh. I think it went okay although at one point I found myself ranting on and on about Warrior. Why? I haven't read a graphic novel in twenty years! I think I got away with it.

We managed to still awake until 10.00pm PST. The beer undoubtedly helped. Unfortunately I still woke up at 2.00 in the morning (the beer again). So I ended up running through my presentation and polishing the demo. I hope I didn't break any of my code. That would be so ironic.

OOW2K6 Keynotes

Oracle has published the schedule of keynote speakers for Open World.  To be frank for me  keynotes are usually the least appealing component of most conferences.  Keynote speakers tend not to to leaven their marketing spiels with humour or insight.  Which is fair enough, they're executives not court jesters, but it can make for some turgid speeches. 

Still, one of  the advantages of attending Open World is the opportunity to see most of the big beasts of the IT savanna.  With the (understandable) exception of Microsoft and IBM the main players in chips, boxes and wires are all present. This means that the speeches are more interesting because there's more needle. Obviously everybody bashes Microsoft and IBM.

The ones that look the most interesting are:>

Tuesday, October 24 8:30 a.m.-9:15 a.m. PT

Mark Hurd, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, HP is talking a little early in the morning after OTN Night.  But it will be worthwhile turning up for just the last ten minutes to see whether he takes questions on employee surveillence.

Wednesday, October 25 10:00 a.m.-10:45 a.m. PT

Jonathan Schwartz, Chief Executive Officer and President, Sun Microsystems, Inc.  has the hardest task of the week.  Scott McNealy was easily the most entertaining keynote speaker I saw at previous Open Worlds.  Is Schwartz going to try to match his predecessor's charm or will he play Iron Chancellor Brown to McNealy's Blair?

Wednesday, October 25 1:00 p.m.-2:00 p.m. PT

Larry Ellison, Oracle Chief Executive Officer will almost certainly be impossible to see live.  If you don't know somebody with influence who can reserve you a seat and you don't want to blow a roadie to get a backstage pass your only option is to start queueing before lunchtime.  Probably best to watch it on TV from the comfort of a bean bag somewhere in the Moscone Centre. 

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OOW2K6: The buzzstorm gathers

So less than a fortnight to go until Open World and as Eddie Awad has pointed out, the Oracle blogosphere is picking up on it.  OOW2K5 was the time when I really got into blogging.  One of the things Oracle get right is providing large villages of PCs, locked down to do nothing more than run a browser.  (what a keen idea! maybe Oracle should market this concept.  They could call it, I don't know, a network computer...).  So it's easy to get access to the internet at points around Moscone centre without lugging a laptop around.

Connecting with your peers

Oracle have introduced an interesting innovation this year: Connect.  This is just a gussied up forum site but with a social spin.  The point is to find other OOW attendees with similar interests.  So there are forums with threads and posts, as you would expect, but there are also channels for communicating privately with other attendees and arranging meetings.   There's a function to "Request Introduction" - which seems  like Jane Austen gone high tech - and another one to "Request Meeting", which is obviously a bit forward if you haven't been introduced.  The obvious intention is to arrange business networking opportunities, power breakfasts and other high concept stuff.  In practice I think it will mainly just groups of developers and DBAs arranging to discuss IDEs and ASSM over beers.  

The forums are groups set up by individuals.  Most of the current ones represent some aspect of the Oracle community.  There are ones for various user groups and Laurent Schneider has set up a couple that intersect with my interests: Oracle bloggers and OTN Forums regulars.  I have set up one myself, the Jetlagged Junta, although to be honest I've really not got any idea what I'm going to do with it.  At the moment the only group that is seeing much action is the OOW Newbies group, which is helping neophytes plan their conference.  Once Open World starts I think Connect could be a useful way for us to hook up with people who we only know by email address or forum handle.  And with forty-one thousand attendees we are going to need all the aids we can get.  

So I urge attendees to sign up for a Connect group.  If there isn't one to suit your interests create one.  Note that you have to tick a box on the registration form to enable your access.  If you didn't do this when you registered you will need to re-click through your registration form (I think the relevant checkbox is at the bottom of the third page). 

Airport security

I have almost finished my paper on PL/SQL and automated unit testing.  But I am finding it quite hard to get it all down in a way that is going to make sense to anybody.  I keep switching between explaining the philosophy of automated unit testing and explaining utplsql.  Still I'll get it done somehow.  At least I have the actual presentation under control: that has the potential to be far more embarrassing because it's so much more public and I'm doing a demo this time.  I was toying with trying to use VMWare
for that but having seen a VMWare demo go ka-blooie at the recent DE SIG I think I'll stick with an actual environment.  At least I know what I already have works and there's enough on my plate with the day job. 

What this does mean is that I have to sort out my carry-on luggage.  As I'm doing a demo as part of my presentation I will be bringing my laptop to the US.  In previous years I haven't bothered.  I hope I can take my laptop on board with me instead of having to check it in to the tender mercies of the baggage handlers.  Are we allowed liquids yet?  

I notice that the agreement between Europe and US Homeland Security about the sort of information that it will divulge about airline passengers has run out.  Apparently they didn't tell the US about passengers who have ordered kosher or halal meals, because that reveals their religion and so infringes their privacy.  But they did pass over the names of people who have ordered vegetarian meals.  Ignoring the fact that many people will order the veggie option because of their religion (Brahmins, Jains, Buddhists) just what did the US authorities do with this information?  Were they concerned that a cadre of militant vegetarians might stuff themselves with bean burgers over the Atlantic with a view to launching a poisonous gas attack in a confined area?  Or is it simply that anybody who doesn't eat beefburgers and fried chicken is inherently unAmerican and therefore worthy of suspicion?  

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Useful article on regex in Oracle 10g

cd has written an introductory article on regular expressions in the 10g database. As he doesn't have a blog (imagine!) he has posted it in the OTN PL/SQL forum. In this first article cd shows how we can use Oracle's regular expressions to determine whether a string contains a valid number.

For those who don't know, regular expressions are a way of searching text for patterns rather than literal matchings. It's a cool way of manipulating large amounts of text, including .CSV files and programs. I'll just mention a little utility I have found very useful: the Regex Coach. This nifty piece of freeware (written in Lisp!) provides us with a sandbox in which we can test regular expressions against a target piece of text to see what they will find. It handles replace too. Very useful if you are just starting to find your way around regex. Check it out.

Regex is a topic big enough for a whole book. The book I have found useful is the Mastering Regular Expressions) by Jeffrey E.F. Friedl and published by O'Reilly. Even though reading it does make me think I ought to know more about perl than I actually do.

Update

cd has subsequently published two further articles about Regular Expressions in the OTN forums:
Part Two deals with testing Regular Expressions.
Part Three looks at complex formats such as IP addresses and discusses the 10gR2 enhancements.

UKOUG Dev. Eng. SIG 19-SEP-2006

When I introduced the agenda yesterday morning I said I thought it was quite forward-looking, all about new stuff - new features, new tools, new architectures. It turns out it was really all about rebadging of old stuff and integration of existing applications. Very much a case of "back to the future". Hmmm. Still at least the SIG kicked off with something innovative. Julius Kisielius (UKOUG) ran a session of Speed Networking. This is a bit like Speed Dating, only without the exchange of bodily fluids. This worked quite well as an icebreaker and the buzz it generated lasted well beyond coffee time.

Ben Wooton (Oracle) presented on migrating workgroup databases to ApEx and XE. Workgroup databases is code for "Excel and Access". Ben fought hard to stop dissing Access all the time, but his key point is valid. Anybody who has done consultancy has been to places where the IT Dept has too process and not enough delivery and users have filled the gap with ad hoc lightweight databases. These breed like rabbits and frequently become essential to the business, without having any proper oversight, especially of data integrity and security. I was quite concerned but not surprised to hear Ben say that one of the sites where he had taken his crusade against such practices was a police force. Ben's talk gave a useful overview of the considerations for migrating from such jury-rigged environments to a consistent and coherent ApEx one.

Next up was David Rowe (Rocela) talking about Oracle Customer Data Hub. I vaguely knew that CDH came out of Applications but I hadn't realised it basically was E-Business Suite. Seriously, the first step in implementing Customer Data Hub is installing EBS. Ouch. I found this talk stimulating and useful. It was an architectural rather than heavily technical. The main point about data hubs is consolidating the data in all your systems so that you have a single view of Customer (or whatever type of party your business is interested in). This is not a one-off exercise but a continuous process of sharing, synchronisation and correction. As you might have guessed, the biggest issues here are not technical but procedural and cultural. It certainly showed me how far my current project still has to go before it even approaches being a proper data hub.

Forms: back like it never went away

After lunch Grant Ronald(Oracle) presented the headline new features for the next release of Forms (currently just version 11, marketing suffix yet to be decided). Many people I talked to during the speed networking session had come primarily to hear this talk. The focus of the next version is on administration, deployment and integration with other applications. Although there were a number of new features there wasn't much to set the pulse racing - useless diagnostic logging and tracing makes you hot. The only thing that I would have found useful in the days when I was a Forms developer is the ability to respond to external events. Several projects I worked on would have benefited from that.

So whilst I accept Grant's assertion that Forms is still a living and supported tool, I think the days when a new release of Forms was a major event have long gone. As a SIG chair this is disheartening because it means that the main theme for Forms presentations remains migrating from client/server to the web. So I'm thinking about running a SIG with a retro programming theme - client/server and character-based Forms, RPT, user exits and Pro*C. [1]

The final presentation of the day was supposed to be Susan Duncan (Oracle) talking about the development roadmap to Fusion. Unfortunately her VMWare demo blew up and sent her laptop into meltdown. I'm going to ask Susan to have another crack at doing her presentation next year, if yesterday's experience hasn't left her too traumatised. Anyway, Grant vamped gallantly for forty-five minutes on the future of Forms and E-Business Suite. Although EBS version 12 is scheduled to be on the "Fusion Stack" (basically the JDeveloper J2EE framework) it will still contain screens written in Forms, due to pressure of time. One interesting aspect of this process is that Oracle won't be producing tools like the FMA. EBS are not migrating their Forms screens to ADF and JSF, they are rewriting them. This is because the Fusion version of EBS has to incorporate elements of PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, Seibel and anything else Larry takes a fancy to, so straight migration is not a viable option. Grant rounded off with a quick showing of the new pre-beta rich client (JSF and AJAX) and a simple how to do Forms-type stuff in JDeveloper.

Summing up

Overall this is an interesting time to be in Oracle development. For a while back it seemed as though Oracle were turning their back on their Tools customers, what with the de-supporting of Forms client/server mode and the slow throttling of Designer. But during the last twelve months there has been a flurry of activity. JDeveloper continues to grow relentlessly. It will eventually be a sophisticated suite of tools aimed at a number of different user roles. The JDev team have learnt from Eclipse and have rebuilt JDeveloper as a plug-in framework,so different users can customise the IDE to their own needs. There's still some way to go in reducing the complexity of it; I frequently lose panels when I'm working in the IDE (although I'm getting better at finding them again). SQL Developer and ApEx are two new initiatives, although they are actually existing functionality productized and then marketed. Ben Wooton said a couple of times that he though ApEx is positioned wrongly as a replacement for workgroup databases, because it is actually more powerful than that. In the future the marketing of ApEx may change: there is currently not so much a steep learning curve as an actual discontinuity between building a simple application in ApEx and building an enterprise system using JSF and ADF. Oracle needs a development tool to bridge that gap. Funnily enough it ought to be Forms. We shall see.

In the meantime it seems certain that Oracle has final woken up to something Microsoft has known for a long time: the value of mindshare. Get developers building applications with your products and you can monetise things later. So Oracle have decided to love developers again. We can see this not just in the tools space itself but in the Oracle Develop initiative at Open World. Now if they could just bring themselves to address the question of modelling everybody would be happy...

Finally my heartfelt gratitude goes to all the presenters, to Julius at UKOUG for his galvanising e-mails and to everybody who attended. Tomorrow I can start worrying about the next SIG.

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[1] At the moment I'm only joking but if people are genuinely interested in such an event then who knows?

Clarke's Three Laws of Office Life

First law: For every situation there is an equal and apposite Dilbert cartoon.

Second Law: The number of meetings required for any process is proportional to the quality of the biscuits provided at meetings.

Third Law: The bloke with the most annoying laugh is the one who finds everything funny.

Many office laws - The paper tray is always empty when you need a hard-copy right now - are just special cases of the more general Sod's Law. Whereas these are, I think, genuinely fresh insights. However, I'm not claiming originality. The First Law of Online Life is that somebody has always thought of it before you did.

At last the agenda for the DE SIG

or "Sisyphus Revisited"

or "Where Have All The Oracle Developers Gone?"

Finally the full agenda for the Development Engineering SIG is published on the UKOUG web site. It's quite close to the wire ( the meeting is 19th September) but at least we made it. At one point I thought I was going to have to postpone the SIG until after the Conference because it looked like I couldn't get enough speakers. When I started n July the process of assembling the agenda I had the promise of presentations from three people who had not been able to make the previous SIG. Alas none of them could make September either. So instead of having to find just two speakers I suddenly had an empty agenda to fill, over the summer holiday season. That we do have a full agenda is really down to great support from our Oracle Buddies, Grant Ronald and Stephen Wallace, and sterling organisation by Julius Kisielius in the UKOUG office.

In the end I think it is quite a good line up:

• APEX - Ben Wooton, Oracle
  
• Oracle Data Hub Offerings - David Rowe, Rocela
  
• What’s new in Developer Forms 11g - Grant Ronald, Oracle
  
• The future of Application Development in Fusion - Susan Duncan , Oracle
  

So lots for developers - something on Forms, something on Fusion, something on TAFKAH - and something for systems architects too.

There are three obvious points about this agenda.

One is the omissions. Nothing on JDeveloper, nothing on SQL Developer, nothing on esoteric topics like PHP or .Net. Well, we cannot cover everything in every meeting and the DE SIG has a very broad waterfront to cover. Also, I have to work with what I can get. The Lord knows I have tried to get a PHP on Oracle presentation. I have struck out with three different sources. Maybe next year it will happen.

Secondly, there are two talks about Forms (the talk on Fusion will outline how Oracle is moving its applications from Forms to the Fusion tool set, which is Java-based). I was forwarded an e-mail recently from someone observing of the presentation on Forms 11g, "what is there left to say about Forms?" Now Grant will disagree but I have a certain sympathy with this viewpoint: Forms has been around for a long time and once you've got over the hurdle of migrating from client/server to web there really wasn't much new stuff in Forms 10g. However, a large chunk of the UKOUG development community are using Forms and I owe it to them to include talks on the tool set. As long as Oracle is supporting and indeed extending Forms there is news for the SIG to convey. Anyway, I asked this person what topics they would like to see in a DE SIG agenda. Naturally I am still awaiting a response.

Lastly, the speakers. Three are from Oracle and the fourth is from Rocela, a consultancy founded by ex-Oracle employees (indeed I think David is ex-Oracle himself). Again this is question of working with what I get given. At every SIG I stand on my hind legs and solicit presentations from the audience but the actual presenters are almost always from Oracle itself, other consultancies and vendors. These are three classes of people for whom presenting is a core skill. If you work in sales, pre-sales or consultancy you have to be able to explain technical subjects to a variety of audiences in a fluent manner. Obviously I am profoundly grateful for the support the SIG receives from the chaps and chapeses in Oracle but it would be nice to hear from some more "real people".

Call for papers

I guess many in the DE audience don't feel the compulsion to present or are too shy to talk in public or just don't think they have anything to talk about. Over the years we have tried to introduce a couple of different formats to encourage new speakers - short slots talking about a particular little utility or tool which we've found useful, war stories about when some project went horribly wrong - but these haven't taken off. Which is a shame, because giving a presentation can be rewarding in its own right - just ask Bob Baillie. So if anybody reading this (in the geographical environs of the UK) does feel inspired to give a talk please contact Julius at the UKOUG office (or leave a comment here). And don't worry if you have not spoken in public before, we will provide support. Indeed the UKOUG offers free course in presentation skills to its members (although you don't have to be a member to present at a SIG).

Developer SIGs vs DBA SIGs

The lack of "civilian" presenters does give me concern because it is a symptom of a larger problem, namely the relative small audience we get at the SIG. Normally we get between the mid-teens (Birmingham) and the low thirty-somethings (London). These attendance figures have been fairly stable for years now and seem to bear little relation to the agenda's content. By comparison the DBMS SIGs regularly get audiences in three figures. On the face of it this is ought to be surprising. After all, there are a lot more developers than there are DBAs. We could take 'em easy in a straight fight. So why are the DBA-oriented SIGs so much stronger?

Well, for starters their target audience is easy to define and relatively homogenous in its interests. If you look at the agenda for the newly-founded Oracle on Windows SIG you see the topics you would expect - availability, performance tuning, monitoring. DBA stuff is DBA stuff, only the peculiarities of the OS change. There is a large corps of excellent non-Oracle speakers, many of them "names" in the community.

The Development Engineering (Tools) SIG is different. The need for brackets says it all. Our audience is diffuse, our remit broad, our focus fuzzy. The community is diffuse, split between many different programming tools and job descriptions. It is hard to put together an agenda that will appeal to enough people that they will take a day out of their working schedule to attend. A VB.Net code monkey is unlikely to be interested in an agenda of mainly Oracle Forms presentations with a single talk on ADO. This is exacerbated by the trend towards platform agnosticism: J2EE developers tend to regard databases with distaste: they are closed, proprietary, difficult, non-extensible, nasty things. The whole point of frameworks like Spring and Hibernate is to shield Java developers from the database, so why would they want to attend, let alone speak at, a meeting dedicated to the Oracle database?

(Lack of) Conclusion

How I solve this conundrum is a different matter. It's been acknowledged for years that the UKOUG is failing to reach the developer community, and this failure extends beyond just the DE SIG: papers in the Development stream for this year's Conference constituted a scant 4% of the total submissions. Perhaps the problem is that there is no "Oracle developer community", just lots of people who develop stuff that happens to run against Oracle databases.

Anyway, for the moment at least I can relax. I have a SIG meeting with a full agenda to chair. But I know the satisfaction of organising a successful SIG will last until approximately 20th September. Then it will be replaced by the sinking realisation that it has to be done all over again.

My OOW2K6SF agenda

I've been really impressed with the schedule for Open World this year. I know some people regard the conference as a marketing exercise on Oracle's part. And indeed it is. But it's so much more than that. It's chock full of interesting presentations. In particular Oracle have really made an effort to provide talks of interest to the developer community. So I think the presentations on offer more than justify all the keynotes. And anyway Collaborate didn't offer free tickets to the ACEs.

A couple of other people have posted their schedules, so here is mine. It is my blog and it is all about me.

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Sunday, 22 October 2006

2:00 PM - "Scaling to Infinity: Partitioning Data Warehouses in Oracle"

Frankly I can't think of a better cure for jetlag than listening to Tim Gorman talk about database partitioning ...

3:30 PM - "Inside Oracle Business Intelligence Analytics Server"

... unless it's listening to an equally jetlagged Mark Rittman talk on some BI technology about which I know nothing whatsoever.

In the evening it's the Editor's Choice and ACEs dinner. I get two invites for this but I won't be claiming two dinners.

Monday, 23 October 2006

11:00 AM - "The Future of Database Technology, from Oracle Development"

If Mark is correct this will be something to do with 11g beta. Rather annoyingly it clashes with Bryn Llewellyn's talk on enhancements to PL/SQL in 11g. I guess this is a deliberate piece of scheduling but still rather annoying.

12:30 PM - "Developing PL/SQL Programs, Using Automated Unit Testing"

I suppose I really ought to turn up for this one.

3:15 PM - "Database Worst Practices"

Tom Kyte should give everybody a checklist on entry so we can tick off our sins as he enumerates them.

4:15 PM - "10 Things You Should NEVER Do in PL/SQL"

And that goes for Steven Feuerstein too. I expect I'll have to attend the OTN Night wearing a hair shirt and dragging round a large candle.

Tuesday, 24 October 2006

10:45 AM - "Using Oracle Advanced Queues to Facilitate Near-Real-Time Integration"

By the time I get to SF I will already have had a crack at this task but I'm hoping to pick up a few tips from Robert Corfman which I can bring back.

1:15 PM - "Bringing Open Source Software Development Practices and Principles Into Your Company"

Brian Behlendorf was one of the founders of Apache, so he should know what he's talking about here.

2:30 PM - "Developing Solutions to Real-World Problems with Oracle Content Database"

I'm all in favour of tackling real-world problems. I hope somebody from Metalink attends to discover how to properly tag documents with metadata to help searching ;)

In the evening it's the Bloggers' dinner. Once again Mark Rittman is organising this and he's settled on the Thirsty Bear Brewing Co, which is a block down from the Moscone Centre.

Wednesday, 25 October 2006

11:30 AM - "Oracle Forensics: Collecting Evidence After an Attack"

Another annoying schedule clash, as this is on at the same time as Vipin Samar's talk on securing our assets. In the end I have opted to find out how to discover whether anybody has hacked into my system rather than trying to keep the intruders out in the first place. Perhaps this is a bad call.

2:30 PM - "Data Design Reviews: Using Extreme Humiliation to Ensure Quality Data Models"

Kent Graziano wins my vote for the best presentation title of the conference. Fortunately Kent has the chops to produce insights to go with the smartarse titles.

4:00 PM - "Dynamic SQL in a Dynamic World"

As an old skool programmer I tend to distrust dynamic programming in anything except unusual circumstances: too unreliable, too slow, too risky. So I'm looking forward to hearing a different point of view from Dulcian's Michael Rosenblum.

Thursday, 26 October 2006

9:30 AM - "Don't Let It Happen to You: Encrypt Sensitive Information in Your Oracle Database"
More on security. An area I went to learn much more about.

10:30 AM - "Meet The Experts Panel w/ Tom Kyte"

I'm joining the inestimable Mr Kyte on the OTN sofa. Possibly an enormous act of hubris on my part.

11:00 AM - ""Best Practices for Upgrading to Oracle Database 10g Release 2"

Hoping for a few tips as this is an upcoming task which I'm facing at the end of this year.

And after that I'll be leaving on a jet plane.

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As I have observed previously last year's attendance made OOW2K5 quite intense at times. This year I think the additional twelve thousand attendees will turn the Moscone Centre into a veritable pressure cooker. So at some point I shall slope off for an hour to check out SFMOMA. This is slapbang next to the Moscone Centre and is an ideal place to consider issues of process and design from a different perspective.

Quest launches Toad Data modeler

Quest have added Toad Data Modeler to their product set. They've given it the rather boring acronym TDM (try saying it aloud). As far as I can tell it is a separate product to TOAD rather than a module with the existing IDE. The licensing costs strike me as a little steep but I guess it's still only half the price of bog standard TOAD for Oracle itself. Under the hood it is CASE Studio, which Quest bought a while back.

Anyway, it supports both Entity Relationship Diagrams and Data Flow Diagrams. Which is actually jolly exciting: I can't remember the last time I drew a DFD but it was probably in 1999, the last time I worked under SSADM. As a possible replacement for Oracle Designer I think the biggest drawback is that it doesn't separate the logical and physical models: they're just two views we can toggle between. I don't know how many people actually maintain two separate models these days, but I would guess that the sort of people who care about data modeling are likely to be the sort of people who would want to keep the logical and physical models separate. And the rest of us will continue using Schemester or some other freeware. (There is going to be a freeware verson of TDM but it won't have all the features enabled; most notably it will lack reverse engineering).

Interpretation: TOAD stays one hop ahead of SQL Developer. Or two if you're one of those people hung up on the performance of your tools.

Update

I suppose I ought to make it clear that I haven't actually used TDM. I have had bad experiences when using a crippleware version of TOAD IDE. But maybe I will download the evaluation copy and see whether it cuts the mustard or cuts the cheese.

Niagara vs Intel: Round #1

Sun have just published a benchmark comparing the performance Oracle 10g on one of their CoolThreads servers against a four-way Xeon server running Linux. The benchmark is the iGEN-OLTP benchmark. This is significant: when I attended a Sun presentation on the new Niagara chips earlier this year CoolThreads was positioned for calculation intensive applications, web servers, etc. rather than data intensive applications.

The headline result?

When running the Oracle database 10g, the Sun Fire T2000 CoolThreads server outperformed an equivalent 4-
way Dell PowerEdge server equipped with the latest 64 bit Intel Xeon processors by over 3.5x, while
consuming 1.6x less power and occupying 50% of the data center space. It was able to do this while achieving
a 3x better price / performance ratio.

One interesting difference is that the PowerEdge install was Standard Edition (four CPUs) but the Sunfire had to have the Enterprise Edition, because the Niagara chip counts as eight CPUs. Of course, through the magic of Oracle licencing policy for Niagra chips we only pay two per processor licences. This means the price differential between running SE on PowerEdge and EE on SunFire is marginal ($65,000 and $80,000 respectively). Of course, if the application needed to use Enterprise Edition functionality the price of the PowerEdge installation would increase dramatically. As it is, the cost of the hardware represents only a quarter of the total cost in both cases.

So, an intriguing benchmark. If only because it offers sites one way to move up from Standard Edition to Enterprise Edition on the cheap.

India enforces a Blogspot blackout

The Indian government is blocking access to blog sites, apparently because terrorists use blogs to communicate. As somebody commented on Boing Boing,

Not only is this useless (because the terrorists can simply use proxies), it's akin to shutting off the country's telephone service because terrorists talk to each other through phones.

In the short term the blog-out is just incovenient for people. I helped one OTN forum user this morning by reproducing an entry from Scott Spendolini's blog (crucial to the success of their project apparently). But we cannot do this for everybody. The Boing Boing article includes a site with some workarounds. Unfortunately (like this blog) it's on Blogspot and so is useless to anybody whose ISP has already blocked their access.

In the long run, we can all agree the Mumbai bomb was horrific. Of course governments need to take measures to apprehend terrorists and prevent further carnage. The question the Indian government ought to be pondering is, will restricting access to the internet, by hobbling its tigerish software industry, end up doing more damage to the Indian economy, for no discernible return?

Update: 20-JUL-2006

According to Shivam Vij at Rediff this measure was actually aimed at suppressing individual sites which promote religious intolerance. The fact that it was applied wholesale to blog domains is due to a misunderstanding on the part of the ISPs. Consequently the blockade should be lifted soon. We shall see.

Preparing for Open World 2006

I am going to San Francisco this year, courtesy of OTN's complementary Open World passes for ACEs. Fortunately my Technical Director has agreed to authorise the expenses, which are coming out of a marketing bucket - so expect to see me in an LCMG polo shirt :) I'm joining Mark Rittman and Tim Hall in the Brit enclave in the King George Hotel, which sounds rather interesting. Apparently they do afternoon tea in the English manner. With luck this means BOP in a pot and not a teabag in a chipped mug.

However, I won't just be swanning around SF: I'm speaking too. OOW has accepted my abstract on developing PL/SQL with automated unit tests. To be honest I wasn't expecting this, as my submission was a last minute impulse. I had had some nice feedback from the presentation I did on utPLSQL at the UKOUG DE SIG last month, so I thought, what the heck. A good call, as it turns out. Apart from anything else, the best way to defuse co-workers' accusations of going on a jolly is a rejoinder of, "I'm presenting, actually".

I have mixed feelings about my third OOW. San Francisco is a cool place and I'm really looking forward to going back there again. It will also be nice to meet up with some of my fellow ACEs in meatspace rather than the forums. I hope the OTN area has a prime location this year. But the scale of the OOW2K6 enterprise is daunting. Indeed, 41,000 delegates is a scary prospect. There are towns smaller than that. It will be interesting to see how the facilities cope. Last year was bad enough. Between sessions the corridors of the Moscone centre were filled migrating geeks. The queue for Larry's keynote was already outside the building an hour before he was due to start talking. And that was a mere 29,000 delegates.

This year I foresee Soviet-era length queues for everything: Starbucks' coffee, internet access, the toilets. This is where jetlag gives us Europeans an edge: we're up and wanting to check our e-mail whilst the natives are still asleep. A good strategy for a successful conference will be to figure out where everybody is heading and go some place else. Avoid the queues by choosing minority-interest sessions. Face it, you're not going to get into any of Tom Kyte's presentations unless you take a sleeping bag and camp out in the foyer overnight. So come and hear me talk instead.

On becoming an ACE

Someone in the OTN forums wants to know whether they can nominate themselves to be an ACE. Quite recently one of my Dutch colleagues asked if I could advise them how to become an ACE. The answers to both questions is "No". I stumbled into ACE-hood. I was one of six charter winners of the OTN Community Awards (later rebadged as the ACE program) back in 2003. Five out of the original six people were nominated by OTN for participation in the OTN forums. Now there are many ways to become an ACE.

You could maintain a compelling blog like Mark Rittman. You could single-handedly create a tradition of best practice in PL/SQL programming like Steven Feuerstein. You could become the leading expert in installing Oracle on Linux like Werner Puschitz. You could run an excellent community website, give deep answers to questions on Oracle listservers and write a book on the Cost-Based Optimizer like Jonathan Lewis. Being an OCM didn't do Laurent Schneider any harm. Or, of course, you could just be as knowledgeable, dedicated and evangelical as Tom Kyte.

In that light, becoming an ACE for just answering questions in the OTN forums looks like the easy option. And it is. All that is required is patience with newbies, time to read and research questions, a basic level of writing ability and a willingness to engage across a variety of topics. Enthusiasm for good programming and administration is important. A sense of humour can be useful (but also dangerous: not everybody will get the joke). It also helps to know what you're talking about although I've never let this hold me back ;) For what it's worth I wrote on how to be a good guru some time ago.

In the end, you can't set out to become an ACE. It's something that happens to you along the way, a sign that somebody else has spotted your efforts and deemed them worthy of merit. Nor should you bother to try to become an ACE. If the activity is not meaningful to you irrespective of ACE-hood then you probably won't make the grade anyway. The perks are not that great (a complementary pass to Oracle Open World but meet your own expenses and that cool ACE logo whenever you post in the Forums). But the recognition is priceless. In this respect it's not unlike a janitor in the MoD being given the MBE for thirty-five years of service (i.e. cleaning toilets).

The bar has certainly been raised since I was nominated. If I look at some of the people who are now ACEs I think I must have walked into the wrong club. But I am an ACE too and I've got the sweatshirt to prove it.

Musings on seashells

Not C shells, seashells. The offline version of the Guardian is giving away wallcharts of flora and fauna and yesterday's was Seashells. Whilst reading it with my son I was struck by the peculiarity, indeed the suggestiveness, of some of the names given to seashells. There are the obviously sniggersome: knobbed whelk, dog cockle, winkle (even Fred found that funny). Then there are the obscure trades from the Victorian underworld: ocean quahog, queen scallop. We have insults from a Hardy novel: common piddock, thick tellin. Finally, the unpleasant medical conditions: warty venus, spiny helmet.

Any of you who think I'm making too much of this are invited to consider the Linnaean name for the grooved razor clam: solens vagina.

First sighting of 11g!

A colleague was showing me a Metalink note (#4463574.8) he was reading whilst trying to diagnose PLS-0123. The thing that grabbed me was that this bug was not reproducible in 11. This was my first sighting of a mention of version 11 of the Oracle database, albeit still qualified as future version.

To answer the burning question, yes it still has the G for Grid suffix. Although I suppose that may be subject to change under marketing pressures.

Has anybody seen an announcement of features for database 11g? I know there's been some stuff about Forms but not much else. Presumably there will be lots of under-the-hood tweaking for Fusion but what else?

Vale billg!

So Bill is reprioritising his life. He's swapping his failure to stem the tide of computer viruses for vaccination programmes against human ones.

Actually it is too easy to mock Gates's tenure at MicroSoft. Nobody makes that much money without getting a lot of things right. On the same day as Gates made this announcement Joel Spolsky publishes an article recalling his time managing the Excel team. In it he explains just what it was that made billg so good.

UKOUG DE SIG Report: Birmingham 13-JUN-2006

Well, the Development Engineering SIG has survived Birmingham once more. I must admit there was a point when it seemed cursed. I had two presentations penciled in for the June SIG since the beginning of the year but in the event neither speaker could make the date. Then at the last minute Zend couldn't provide us with a technical presenter so we had to pull their talk on PHP too. Still, on the day it went pretty well. Everybody who had booked turned up and we had a couple of walk-ins too.

The agenda was focused on the more traditional aspects of Oracle development. The morning kicked off with, er, me talking about Unit Testing Utplsql. This had been billed as a talk on QUTE, which I had chosen as a goad to spur me into learning this new tool. Alas, work and other commitments conspired to deprive me of sufficient time to do this properly and it didn't take me long to run into several problems with QUTE. So I had to fall back on Utplsql, which I know well and which also works. I was (shamefully) still polishing my demo code on the train up to Brum. Fortunately none of the delegates had seen my previous 2003 talk on this topic and none of them were using Utplsql either. Whilst this mean my presentation taught them something new it is vaguely depressing that in 2006 there is still such a low take-up of automated unit testing.

Next on the agenda was Kavitha Prakash from Oracle Support, who talked about tools for monitoring network traffic in web Forms applications. This was a neat introduction to an esoteric area. Kavitha is an old friend of the SIG and offered us a couple of topics; I chose this one because I think networks are an area most of us ought to know more about. I had hoped this would be interesting, at least in part, to people other than Forms programmers and I think it was. I certainly shall be downloading Ethereal and monitoring my own network traffic.

Filling the tricky slot between coffee and lunch was Alan Maxwell from Oracle Consulting, with a presentation on BPEL. Whilst this was I think the fourth or fifth time I have seen an Oracle employee do the Loans demo there were several interesting nuggets in Alan's talk. To start with Oracle are positioning BPEL away from just web services and more towards general workflow (one of the test cases Alan mentioned has no web elements at all). I was also taken by the notion of using BPEL in just parts of a process (say by adding new steps to an existing set of tasks). So we don't have to BPEL-ise an entire workflow in one step. Finally there were a couple of tantalising mentions of the Rules Engine; this is a topic I shall pursue in the future.

After lunch Duncan Mills, J2EE evangelist and SIG stalwart, presented some techniques for getting more out of ADF. Specifically this was targeted at people who know how to achieve a certain UI effect in Forms but are stymied when it comes to doing the same thing within JDeveloper. I know how that feels. Anyway Duncan's presentation demonstrated how far JDeveloper has come since the first version of BC4J which I used back in 2000. Most of the techniques Duncan showed involved taking the stuff generated by drag'n'drop wizards and making changes in the underlying XML files. So we still have to know a lot more about the ADF plumbing than we needed to know in Forms. On the flip side JDeveloper offers a lot flexibility than the 4GL black box.

What was nice was to talk to a couple of first-time delegates afterwards. They both seemed impressed with the SIG. Assembling the agendas for this SIG is a tricky task. We have such a wide constituency that it is hard to get the balance right between breadth and depth. We need to cover a range of tools and technologies but people won't turn up for a single talk out of the whole day. I think we pulled it off this time but I shall await the critique results with bated breath.

The walls of Butrint

Whilst on holiday in Corfu last week I took the opportunity to visit the site of Butrint in Albania. This is a world heritage site, being a city that's been repeatedly occupied and built on by the various cultures that invaded Albania between the seventh century BC and the fourteenth century AD.

As a whole the site itself is oddly unimpressive. Most of Butrint is still covered, so the site comprises a number of isolated ruins separated by woodland. This makes it hard to get a sense of the scale of the place unlike, say, Pompeii or Herculaneum. Still it is worth visting as some of the individual pieces of the site are very interesting indeed.


The original walls of Butrint 

This is part of the city walls built in the 4th century BC by fleeing Trojans (the gateways are far too small and narrow to allow the ingress of a giant wooden horse...) It is difficult to get a sense of scale from this photograph, but the wall is built of blocks of stone about 60cm wide. Each block is irregularly shaped to fit together sturdily.


Roman refactoring 

Now this is how some later conquerors - the Romans - rebuilt the broken city walls in the 2nd century AD. Initially they attempted to reassemble the walls using the original stone blocks but it was too difficult to fit the pieces together. However, the Romans had a technology that the earlier builds lacked: mortar. So they broke the blocks into smaller, more regularly shaped pieces and built the walls anew. The walls are still resisting the overturning moment almost two millenia later.

In other words, it is easier to build lasting structures out of small reusable components than out of large specialised chunks.

Spam: the French don't have a word for it

I received my first spam e-mail wholly in French. Diappointingly it wasn't for a classy French pr0n site, just a variant on the Nigerian 419 scam. I don't think this money belonged to a dictator but my French isn't up to establish just why they can't shift this 12m USD out of the Philippines.

Anyway, I was piqued into discovering the French word for spam. As you probably know the French are obsessive about the purity of their language. One of the tasks of L'Academie francaise is to invent French words to replace les anglicismes. For instance a Walkman is un balladeur . Obviously the L'Academie Francaise has been swamped by new technological terms, because an MP3 player is un balladeur MP3. And spam is just le spam. Not even le pate, although la patee might be more appropriate.

Agile again, again

The May BCS SPA had a presentation from Sean Hanley of Exoftware on Agile development. The presentation was called "The Story of a Story" and focused on the lifecycle of a feature within an Agile project. To be honest a lot of it was stuff I'd heard before. One of these days I'm going to work on an Agile project instead of just listening to other people talk about them.

What I did find interesting was automated acceptance testing. This provides a neat way of validating the delivered feature end-to-end. In particular, these tests exercise the intra-component dependencies. This is crucial when the units tests have been developed using mocked dependencies.

Also, Sean's teams use an Interaction Designer - an HCI expert - to come up with the screen designs. Apparently Java coders aren't too good at UI design. Obviously this breaks the idea that the entire codebase belongs to everybody. But then Sean stressed the need for pragmatism in the pursuit of delivering what the customer needs. Who knows, before long it might be acknowledged that most Java heads aren't too hot at databases either and we'll see the introduction of Persistence Designers.

Sean shared one potentially very useful project technique with us: I'm Bored. When a meeting has gone on too long, stand up, say "I'm bored" and leave. I think I may try that one sometime soon.

The other insight he had on the matter of why we need Agile project methods was this: how many professional gamblers do you know who would bet on the success of an IT project (using whatever metric of success you like)? The answer to that question is not dependent on how many professional gamblers you know.

Well, what is your software like?

Whilst clearing out my Inbox I stumbled across an notification of a recent article by Sean McGrath on software analogies. After discussing two earlier analogies (mathematics and language) he reveals his latest favoured metaphor: "Software is like concrete." Now ain't that the truth!

Oracle Data Vault is released

Actually released is putting it a little strongly. OTN has a page about Data Vault which includes some viewlets. There's no sign of when we will actually be able to get our grubby mitts on it.

Data Vault is a very interesting product which I have been waiting for since seeing a demo of it at OOW2K5SF. Its value proposition is answering two questions:

• How can I stop my DBA reading my sensitive data?
  
• How can I prove that I have stopped my DBA reading my sensitive data?
  

It does this by separating user creation and privilege settings, and the auditing of same, from regular DBA activity. Of course it is not foolproof but if properly implemented it is going to need a conspiracy of at least three people to break Data Vault. A regular database is vulnerable to a single rogue DBA.

There's no details about pricing but the fact that it is listed as a Security Option alongside Oracle Advanced Security and Oracle Label Security should give us a clue.

Fun with password verification

Prompted by a question in the OTN forums I have been having a little play around with the Password Verification functionality. It's quite easy: we just create a function under SYS and add it to the users' profile(s). Oracle provide a sample function that applies some standard rules.

SQL> @C:\oracle\ora92\rdbms\admin\utlpwdmg.sql

Function created.


Profile altered.

SQL> alter user a identified by a
  2  /
alter user a identified by a
*
ERROR at line 1:
ORA-28003: password verification for the specified password failed
ORA-20001: Password same as or similar to user


SQL> alter user a identified by b
  2  /
alter user a identified by b
*
ERROR at line 1:
ORA-28003: password verification for the specified password failed
ORA-20002: Password length less than 4


SQL> alter user a identified by abcd
  2  /
alter user a identified by abcd
*
ERROR at line 1:
ORA-28003: password verification for the specified password failed
ORA-20002: Password too simple


SQL> alter user a identified by a1b2
  2  /
alter user a identified by a1b2
*
ERROR at line 1:
ORA-28003: password verification for the specified password failed
ORA-20003: Password should contain at least one digit, one character and one punctuation


SQL> alter user a identified by a1b_
  2  /

User altered.

SQL> alter user a identified by a1b_
  2  /
alter user a identified by a1b_
*
ERROR at line 1:
ORA-28007: the password cannot be reused


SQL> 

So that's quite nice. But wait a minute, what about this:

SQL> alter user a identified by b1b_
  2  /

User altered.

SQL> 

Isn't there supposed to be some similarity checking? It is definitely there in the utlpwdmg.sql script. So why isn't it working? Turns out it does work but only when the user changes their own password. By the way, notice the REPLACE syntax we need now that we have enabled the PASSWORD_VERIFY_FUNCTION.

SQL> conn a/b1b_
Connected.
SQL> alter user a identified by b2b_ replace b1b_
  2  /
alter user a identified by b2b_ replace b1b_
*
ERROR at line 1:
ORA-28003: password verification for the specified password failed
ORA-20004: Password should differ by at least 3 characters


SQL> 

This part of the checking doesn't work for SYS or any other user with the ALTER USER privilege. There's some helpful in Metalink note #114930.1 which explains Oracle's password management policy. Amongst other things the note says that:

"Oracle recommends that you do not change passwords using the ALTER USER statement because it does not fully support the password verification function."

Apparently we should use the SQL*Plus PASSWORD command or make explicit calls to OCIPasswordChange() to change passwords instead. But apart from the fact that SYS can bypass some of the similarity checking I'm not sure what the differences are. For normal users I think ALTER USER with the REPLACE clause remains a valid option (although using SQL*Plus PASSWORD is probably friendlier).

Object Monkey RIP???

So Jason Gorman seems finally to have pulled the plug on the ObjectMonkey website. True, lately it had turned into a potty-mouthed Private Eye wannabe, with the recent stuff being particularly virulent. Indeed Jason seemed a bit sheepish when I pegged him as Mr ObjectMonkey at the BCS Mini-SPA last year. Nevertheless some of the older material was refreshingly frank and insightful into the realities of software engineering and the project lifecycle, as well as being laugh-out-loud funny. It's like reading an DevX column written by Roger Mellie.

One essay in particular, "The Emperor's New Code", contained a very useful list of advice for a business project manager who needs to make a success of an IT project. Unfortunately the advice is headed Don't be a sh*thead. As a consultant I couldn't give that to a client: they won't read the advice, they'd just think, "He's calling me a sh*thead!". That's the problem with swearing. It is big and it is clever, and a well-timed expletive can be funny. But many people will grep out everything except the cusswords. It's all very well saying, as the Sub-Genius motto has it, "F**k 'em if they can't take a joke" but sometimes it's just not worth it. We end up alienating the people we most need to reach.

Alas, all this, the insights and the profanity, is now 404. Still, unlike Ozymandias, Jason Gorman has left behind more than a few broken links. Thank you Google cache!

Big Trouble In Little Kyoto

The Register has some interesting analysis of the slanging match that has developed between Larry Ellison and Red Hat chief executive Matthew Szulik sparked by the latter's purchase of JBoss.

"Why should [Oracle] buy an operating system when it can rely on partners like Red Hat and Novell to take responsibility for R&D of the distro themselves?

The only possible justification is if Oracle feels that by owning the operating system, it can also "own" a growing number of open source software developers. These developers can then help drive integration between the distro and Oracle's applications. Owning the operating system would certainly confirm the view Oracle is working towards an open- and closed-source stack that is certified to work together."

Of course, putting out a Linux distro means Oracle will be able to position itself in the same space as Microsoft operates, running MS applications on an MS operating system. Certainly Oracle licences look a lot cheaper when we don't have to pay for the OS licence too.

Incidentally, I see Szulik is claiming Oracle is like the old giants of the American automotive industry and that open source software companies are going to do to Oracle what Japanese car manufacturers did to General Motors in the seventies. The problem with such an analysis is that it misunderstands the nature of those Japanese companies. Really those companies were merely the automobile manufacturing arm of giant combines. These keiretsu were derived from the old samurai zaibatsus and each owned a bank, a ship builder, an electronics company, a white goods manufacturer, etc. Such ownership patterns are forbidden by US anti-trust laws but they gave the Japanese a competitive edge: difficulties in the car market could be offset by boom times in shipbuilding.

So really, Oracle producing its own Linux distro is much closer to the Japanese model than it might seem at first. And I bet Ellison, the daimyo connecting primally to his running water and cut unfinished wood, knows it.

Share and enjoy: online participation

What is it about online communities? The internet was spawned a plethora of community types - lists, forums, message boards, blogs, MMORPGs, open source software - in which individuals contribute their time and knowledge to help others in their community. Yet the stereotypical internet geek is a surly, uncommunicative individual with poor hygiene practices and no human friends. So how come we're such a social bunch?

These thoughts were prompted by an online questionnaire about online participation which was posted by an IS Masters student. If you're reading this then you ought to participate by taking his survey. That would be in the spirit of his thesis, which is about the relationship between social capital and knowledge sharing in virtual communities. That is, why people share in online communities when there's no reward.

First let's examine that assumption about no reward. For some people there is an indirect pecuniary reward for their online participation. I'm sure I wasn't the only person who was motivated to buy Tom Kyte's Expert One-on-One because of the AskTom site. Not just because the site acts as an advertisement for the quality of the book but because I felt beholden to Tom because I had got useful advice from the site. Jonathan Lewis says in his DBAZine podcast that his profile within the Oracle community (due to his activism with the UKOUG as well as his website) does help him get work as a contractor. Mark Rittman's blogging won him the Oracle Magazine ACE of the Year 2005 award, which has rewards (in kind). And I'm sure I'm not the only person who's been approached by headhunters because they've come across my spoor here or in the forums.

However, it is obvious that these rewards are trivial compared to the time we all in our various ways spend in the online communities (certainly compared to our hourly rates in the day job). Furthermore most people who contribute in the various forums, lists and blogs are not authors or ACEs. So why do we do it? Everybody's reasons will be different or at least differently prioritised but here are my reasons.

Firstly, my participation, in the forums and this blog, helps me organise my thoughts. Writing things down is a useful discipline. That's why I think people who dash off blog entries casually, as they would an e-mail, are missing a trick. It's one thing to be the first with a hot scoop, another thing to present an insight into some aspect of database programming or architecture in a way that's interesting and useful to others.

Secondly, presenting information in public is a good way to get our own misunderstandings corrected and our assumptions debunked. Ideally we do this ourselves by cobbling together a test case before posting . But if not someone else will point out our bloomers. Over the years I am getting better at not asserting things that I have not tested for myself but I still occasionally slip. And then the vultures swoop.

Thirdly, questions in the forums throw up problems from out of left field. Investigating those issues can teach us new techniques or fresh understandings in areas that our work has not yet taken to. This can make us more effective in our jobs. Or more likely it just appeals to our geeky need to know.

So far this is all about me. Well, it is a blog ;) But, what about the "community"? Doesn't that matter ? Of course it is important. To a large extent our existence as individuals is defined by our interactions with other people. Game Theory teaches us that in order to interact successfully we have to approach other with a presumption of trust people and a preparedness to give openly. In return we can expect gratitude and future co-operation. That's the only way any society can work. So perhaps we contribute to ensure there is a still an active community for when we need to ask for help, even if that means answering many more questions than we pose ourselves.

I think there's more to it than just the strictures of mutual grooming and the Prisoner's Dilemma. There is a warm sense of camaraderie among the regulars in any of these arenas. Interestingly this is often reinforced by communal activities in meatspace - drinking whisky around the old oak table, Oracle-L dinners during the Hotsos symposium, Oracle bloggers' dinners at various conferences.

Finally it's fair to say that online communities are not perfect. It's very easy to lose one's rag when interacting via e-mail. And - especially when the participants don't share a common first language - it's common for insults to be perceived when none was intended. We've had to invent new words to describe anti-social activity in cyberspace. Just recently a MMORPG called Roma Victor introduced virtual crucifixion to punish cheating players. And it is possible to overshare.

In conclusion ... Well, let's close the circle of online participation: start a blog and write your own conclusion!

SQL Developer makes Daily WTF

A few weeks into production and already making its mark in the wider software engineering community. Kris and his team must be so proud.

Mind you, it is a sign of the relative merits of SQL Developer as a tool that the only thing they can find to mock is the code generated by the DDL wizard. As several of the commenters say, most generated code is not the prettiest. Still the code as shown is rather revolting. You wouldn't want to work with anyone who learnt how to program PL/SQL by studying this stuff.

Read the whole thread here.

Red Hat buys JBoss

In this press release Red Hat announces that it has bought JBoss for $350m, although only 40% of that is cash. There's another $70m promised, "subject to the achievement of certain future performance metrics".

Well that's one Larry can scratch off the shopping list. If it's true that Oracle were offering $500m for JBoss I wonder why Marc Fleury turned that down but accepted Red Hat's much lower offer a few weeks later.

Update

The Register, diligent as ever, has uncovered a cached version of blog post in which Marc Fleury says what he read thinks, or at least thought, about Red Hat.

Which version of Oracle do you use?

The OTN Raptor forum is running a poll on which version of Oracle people are using. At the moment 9.2 is the most popular flavour with over half the votes. However, only thirty-three people have voted so far and I doubt this sample size is statistically valid. So, if you haven't already, click across and cast your vote!

Penguin to be top dog for Oracle

According to this CBR Report Linux is likely to the dominant platform for Oracle database servers next year, toppling Sun Solaris from the top spot. Interestingly, it's not just bad news for Scott. Some of the sites who say they're moving to Linux are currently Windows shops. I suppose they've got lots of Intel boxes lying around.

This would definitely seem to validate Oracle's championing of the Linux platform. By reducing the cost of the OS they have lowered the TCO and so reduced SQL Server's advantage there. Levelling the playing field in turn makes it easier for Oracle to compete on feature comparison. And all without cutting Oracle's licensing fees.

The meaning of "Raptor"

Recently I was browsing Google Images to find some dinosaur pictures for my son when I was struck by the startling resemblance between the old Project Raptor splashscreen and this picture of a velociraptor. Separated at birth? Or just Photoshop?

From the MantyWeb site I learnt that the name velociraptor means "speedy thief". So you can see why the team had to drop the "speedy" bit - it is written in Java after all ;) But why did they have to drop the "thief" bit too? Perhaps because a certain amphibian might start croaking about infringements of intellectual copyright? Surely not.

Anyway, the Extension SDK is now available for the minimal JDeveloper install so I can start to work on my idea for a SQL Developer addin. Or at least I can once JDeveloper has restarted. I see Shay Shmeltzer has posted some tips for making JDeveloper go faster. Might be worth a gander.

Update

In fairness I must report that restarting JDeveloper took less than a minute. It's only when we start it up the first time after a reboot and the JRE is not instantiated that it takes long enough for a coffee break.

California Dreaming

I have just received an e-mail from the UKOUG. Oracle are looking for volunteers to participate in a Beta lab for the forthcoming Data Vault product. This is a very interesting development in database security and one which I have been awaiting since I attended a presentation at OOW2K5SF. So I'm very keen to participate.

The only problem is, the event is in a fortnight's time and the location is Redmond, CA. Somehow I just don't think I'll be able to get this past the bosses. In fact, the phrase "a snowball's chance in Heck" comes to mind.

Oracle XE on Mac: if not now, when?

As soon as Oracle announced XE lots of people asked the question, "When will it be available on Mac?" I'm not aware of any statement from Oracle about why XE is not available for Mac - or Unix come to that. I'm not interested in running XE on a Mac but it turns out this question offers an interesting perspective on Oracle's database licencing policy.

If you look at platforms which are supported for XE - Windows and Linux - what they have in common is the Intel chip. So perhaps the answer to the question lies in the need to restrict Oracle XE to a single CPU. XE does this by binding to a processor at start-up, and apparently this is a lot easier to do with Intel chips than other chip architectures. So my guess is we might see ports of XE to Solaris for x86 and also those new Macs running on Intel chips but not for other *nix flavours.

Incidentally, this came up when I was talking with a Unix sysadmin about Oracle per processor licences and the possibility of Oracle limiting non-XE databases to the number of processors licenced. The conversation started with a discussion of whether Oracle really consider capped Solaris 10 Containers to be hard partitions for the purposes of per processor licensing. Sun say yes, but he thought Oracle might take a harder line on this, seeing as how Containers are essentially dynamic. Anybody have a definitive ruling on this?

Anyway, the upshot is, just because Oracle have built a CPU restriction into the XE install it doesn't mean we're likely to see similar enforcements in the licenced products any time soon. And that means if you've got a tweleve CPU server you need twelve per processor licences, even if you want to run Oracle on only one of them.

Oracle profit announcements

Oracle has just announced profits up 42% on a revenue increase of 18%. That's a pretty good margin they're making. Most of this is from Applications rather than selling more database licences. Apparently, Oracle's strategic acquistions of PeopleSoft and JDEdwards is already bearing fruit.

So that's only another seventeen billion dollars to go before they've paid off the cost of all those acquisistions. Still, at least Larry will be able to sleep soundly at night instead of worrying about whether he can pay more than the monthly minimum on his credit card bill.

New HTMLDB book out

Amazon are now selling Oracle HTML DB Handbook from Oracle Press. I guess nobody told Larry or Bradley that the name was about to change to Oracle Application Express. Interesting that Amazon have chosen to pair it with the Oracle Press book on Oracle Application Server 10g Web Development because TAFKAH is all about building Oracle web apps in as simple a fashion as possible and OAS, er, isn't.

Buy the book now

UKOUG Combined SIG 2006 Report

This was the second time three UKOUG SIGs - Development Engineering, Modelling & Design, and App Server - have combined to offer a shared experience. I like this event because it offers the crucial aspect of the conference (choice) without the boring bits (keynotes from marketing VPs).

The DE Stream

I'm very happy with the DE Stream of this event. Each presentation was valuable and worth attending (no, honestly).

Ivan Pellegrin's presentation turned out to be only tangentially related to Customer Data Hub, which was a bit disappointing. However, his summation of Service Oriented Architecture was very good and interesting; I have sat through a lot of talks on SOA, BPM, BRM and BPEL recently and Ivan's was the most coherent overview of the topic I've heard.

Most interesting fact: SOA is the Dutch acronym for STD (that's the medical STD not the telco meaning).

Jonathan Ellard gave a thorough overview of Oracle's new XML Publisher. Now that Oracle have extracted it from Apps and packaged it as a standalone product this looks set to replace Reports as the tool of choice for producing documents. By modularising the various aspects of a document - data logic, layout and format - it makes documents easier to manage and quicker to modify. It also hands control of the appearance back to the business users. Jonathan demonstrated the cardinal virtue of having a demo in your presentation: you can squeeze it if you're running short of time without affecting the overall shape of the talk. Although he really ought to have had the licensing details to hand. People will always ask that question.

Most interesting fact: Oracle Apps has ~90,000 RDF files.

Rob Baillie's talk on Agile Database Development was really interesting. He avoided the sort of buzzwords that seem to annoy people (refactoring, pair programming) and concentrated on the practices that are key to success in a database project regardless of whether it's "agile": properly implemented source control, a simple, robust and tested build script, and clear demarcation of development code from working code. Rob started his presentation by saying that he hoped everybody else in the Oracle world was building systems liked this and that therefore everybody would feel he had wasted their time. I think it's safe to say that nobody in the audience felt they had wasted their time listening to Rob. It was his first presentation but you wouldn't have guessed it: he was fluent and confident, and his talk was well-structured.

Most useful piece of advice: Assume that the person performing the upgrade is an idiot.

We had a full house for Sue Harper's demonstration of SQL Developer, which I think is testament to the interest there is in this part of the tool space. Sue's an old hand at UKOUG presentations but she's only been on the SQL Developer team for a couple of months so I think it was still an edgy prospect for her. In the course of the demo she discovered a couple of (very minor) issues to raise when she got back to the office. Overall, a good introduction to an exciting new product.

Most interesting fact (actually not from the presentation but gleaned whilst chatting to Sue afterwards): every person on the SQL Developer team (even the managers) has to build and maintain an addin as their own personal project. I think this is a very good idea: it keep everybody aware of the quality of the user experience and it should provide some useful extensions.

The event overall

As it goes, so it went.

I must say that the turnout was a little on the low side, disappointingly so. Down a third on last year. Why is this? Slough's not that bad. Perhaps it was due to the lack of Forms presentations but I doubt it. Rather it is symptomatic of the broader problem we have on the development side of things. We usually have a much smaller turnout for developer/designer/deliverer SIGs than the DBA-oriented SIGs get.

I confess to being a bit puzzled by this: on any project I've ever worked on, the DBAs have been outnumbered by analysts, designers, developers and project managers by at least five to one. So how the disparity in turnout? I have a couple of theories. One is that the UKOUG memberships tend to be managed by DBAs. This kind of makes sense: Oracle's a database and the DBAs manage the database so why not have them manage the user group stuff too? But I suspect that many memberships are managed by gatekeepers who attend the meetings they are interested in but don't publicise the other SIGs to people throughout their organisation.

My other theory is that developers are only allowed to attend meetings that deal with stuff that is immediately relevant to their current job. This also makes sense. Sending someone out of the office for a day costs, both in lost productivity and expenses. The DE SIG has to cover a very broad waterfront: traditional tools like Forms and Reports, new kids like JDeveloper and TAFKAH, plus PL/SQL, XML and Java generally, third party products, development practices, architecture, etc. It's a rare individual who's going to have a job that requires immediate knowledge of all of those things. But in the fast moving world of technology it is important to have an awareness of all the things that are going on, even if we're not using them right now. So you're a Forms shop: does that mean Java is not relevant to you? Even now Java is a way to add functionality into a Forms application. But Fusion is coming and Fusion is going to be pure J2EE. Once Oracle Apps has completely replaced all its Forms how long will Oracle keep the tool going? Well the roadmap says Forms will be supported at least until 2013 but that's actually not very far away (Forms 6.0 is almost as old now as Forms 10 will be by then).

What is the solution to the case of the missing developers? I haven't got one yet. I think it's what Sherlock called "a three pipe problem".

Last word

I did a quick survey of blog awareness amongst the audience. Whilst just about everybody used some forum or other less than half of them read any blogs. And only six people actually maintained one (including me). Everybody else must have a life or something.

Rumours of JDeveloper's svelteness have been exaggerated

A couple of years ago some of my J2EE colleagues switched from JDeveloper9i to Eclipse. They were not using ADF and they complained of feature bloat. Now there may have been a certain amount of "CV engineering" in this but they did have a point. The JDev download was then about 320MB compared to Eclipse's skinny 80MB. This was not because Eclipse had less features. It was just that Eclipse offered a bare framework and then we downloaded addins whereas JDeveloper made us download everything but we could switch off the bits we didn't want.

When I tell my friends in Oracle this they point out that JDeveloper has changed its approach now and it too offers a bloat-free framework with the option to just install what we need. Er, up to a point, Lord Copper.

I was talking to someone today about SQL Developer and how we could build addins for it, when I realised I had a really keen idea for an extension that would make my life a lot easier. It's a rather obvious idea and I'm sure people out there are already working on it. But it seemed like a good excuse for me to reinvigorate my rusting Java skills. So I thought I would download JDeveloper and have a look at building the addin for myself.

I downloaded and installed the base version, fired up the Update Centre to get the Extension SDK, and ... nothing. Turns out the ESDK has a dependency on the J2EE version of JDeveloper, which is not documented in the Feature Matrix. For reference, that version (without JRE) is 181MB compared to the base install which weighs in at a Jodie Kidd-like 52MB. I'm sure there are very good reasons why the ESDK has to use some J2EE components but bloating out JDeveloper by an additional 300% just to look at the feasibility of building a SQL Developer addin seems a bit daft.

If there is a way to install the Extension SDK without downloading all this all stuff I would glad to hear of it. Otherwise I shall just have to wait until somebody else builds the addin for me.

Update

Yes I do realise that the Mark Twain quote I am alluding to is "Rumours of my death have been greatly exaggerated." But I don't think I should change the title as it will break the URL in OraBlogs.

Update #2

In some late-breaking news it turns out that the dependency on J2EE resides not in the ESDK itself but in some of the examples. Apparently a crack team of JDev ninjas is working on separating the two types of examples even as you are reading this.

SQL Developer is now in production!

SQL Developer build 1467 is the Production 1.0 release. So that's just seven months after the first unveiling of the Raptor stealth project at OOW2K5SF. Obviously a lot of the foundation had been done under the JDeveloper project but it's still pretty good going.

I think Kris Rice and the rest of the team have delivered a very useful product. The key issue they face now is trying to meet the demands for additional functionality (I want to be able to specify a default directory for PL/SQL files and it would be helpful if we could use SQL Developer to edit Java Stored Procedures, although I suspect that's not a simple one to solve). Of course, this is a nice problem to have, much to be preferred over releasing applications to user indifference. Some cheeky blighter (alright, me) has posted a question on the forum asking for a roadmap of future releases, as they cannot maintain the recent flurry of EA releases.

The timing of the announcement is sweet, because tomorrow Oracle's very own Sue Harper will be doing a presentation on SQL Developer tomorrow in the DE SIG stream of the UKOUG Combined SIG. So I think that will be its first official outing, at least on this side of the pond.

My first Oracle WTF

Fame at last! Oracle WTF has accepted my first submission. This was a suggestion in an OTN forum thread on recovering passwords; the poster proposed amending the password verification function to store the username and password in a normal table. It takes a rare kind of mind to come up with ideas like that, subverting the password checker to ensure that every password is long, strong and known to everyone with SELECT ANY TABLE privilege.

Oracle neglects its tools?

CBR reports the outcome of a Evans Data survey of IDE usage (it looks like the actual survey results are only available to Evans Data's subscribers). The top IDE is MS Visual Studio followed by Eclipse. No surprises there. The most liked IDE is Rational Application Developer.

So where did the Oracle tool set come? Well, a lot of people are using Developer Suite, but:

Significantly, popularity did not necessarily translate to satisfied customers. Oracle had plenty of developers who ranked it at or near bottom in almost every category. Of course, it could be argued, the more developers, the more chance to have dissatisfied customers.

This is where it be nice to see a breakdown of the IDE users. CBR reports that "the study claims Oracle has neglected its tools" but that's not wholly fair. Oracle has been putting a lot of effort into its JDeveloper tool albeit to a large amount of indifference from the larger Java community and its existing Developer Suite customer base, if our experience at the UKOUG DE SIG is anything to go by. There is also Oracle Application Express (FKA HTMLDB) and SQL Developer (FKA Raptor) so recently there has been a lot of work within the Oracle Tools group.

What is true is there has not been much good news in the traditional areas: de-supporting client/server Forms alienated many customers and Oracle's treatment of its Designer tool has driven a fanatical set of users to starting developing their own modelling suite ("The Tool", based on Dulcian's BRIM product). So perhaps Evans Data just spoke to a lot of disgruntled Forms and Designer developers. Or a bunch of Java heads who resented having to use a proprietary tool instead of some cool amalgam of Eclipse, Hibernate and Spring.

Blatent plug: UKOUG members can find out more about what's happening in the Oracle Tools space by coming along to the DE SIG stream of the UKOUG Combined SIG day next week in Slough.