Looking back at UKOUG 2011

Now that the UKOUG annual conference in Birmingham is over, it's time to write my thoughts down. As this was the second time that I attended the UKOUG conference, I already knew that it is a big conference. Lots of great speakers and a very good agenda. On the agenda were very interesting session, sometimes making it very hard to choose which session to go to. Guess you can't complain about that.

APEX: Make a report row clickable in Report

When you create a "Report with Form", there will be an icon in the report which allows you to navigate to  the form page. Only when the user clicks the icon this navigation will take place. For the current project, this was not what they wanted. They wanted to click on the row instead of just the icon. This can be simply implemented using jQuery.

Upgrade to APEX 4.1: Invalid Login Credentials

Always a good idea to upgrade on a Friday.. not... In the past I did numerous upgrades to the latest APEX release, and never really encountered big problems. It was always very smooth, kudos to the APEX-team. If something went wrong it was mostly my own fault, which I will admit now. Because of the history of going very smoothly, I dare to do an upgrade on Friday morning. And it did go smoothly, the upgrade to APEX 4.1 ... until...

Using jQuery to determine the checked items

In one of my APEX pages, I needed to know in javascript which checkboxes are checked. The checked values are placed in an item as a semi-colon (;) delimited list. To be able to do this I created a Dynamic Action which was quite easy.. what wasn't that easy (at least for me, and that's why I want to keep it here so the next time I need this) was to write the javascript expression to get the values.

Oracle Open World 2011: Oracle Database 11g Features for Developers by Connor McDonald

Yesterday I had the pleasure of attending a session by Connor McDonald. I heard a lot about him, his presentation style, and I even did a book review back in 2005. Everybody I talk to who attended a session by Connor - ever - is always very positive on his presentation style. And it is very impressive, humor, technical knowledge, all the ingredients are there to keep you focused on the content. The opening slide, he put on as you walked in the room invited you to move forward as the presentation has code sample in a fontsize which he showed on the slide. The room filled up, and it was a large room. There was another benefit of being in the front of the room, apart from being able to read the slides, he handed out chocolates - starting from the front. Talking to Connor later in the evening, he told me it takes months to prepare for a presentation, and it really shows. If you get a chance to see Connor do a presentation, attend it and make sure to arrive early! Part of the presentation was on Edition Based Redefinition, and because I presented on that subject before I believed there was a flaw in his presentation. But there was not, I was mistaken. The rest of this blogpost shows you where I was mistaken, and Connor was absolutely right.

Oracle Open World 2011; Unstructured Data and Multimedia SIG

Oracle Open World is underway. My first session, which I didn't plan, was on Unstructured Data. There is a lot of unstructured data going around, as opposed to relational data, and it will only increase in the future. The number of images and videos will only increase in the future. Especially for this, Marcelle Kratochvil is putting together an Oracle Unstructured Data with Multimedia SIG, just to spread the word on unstructured data and multimedia. She even put up a website (to be moved in the future) with white papers, preseentations, and links to other useful information. This site can be found at https://sites.google.com/site/ommuds/home. Head over there and check it out. She also showed some very nice examples of customers using multimedia. Unfortunately I had to leave at this time. Even though I didn't plan on attending this session, it was very interesting - too bad I had to leave for a different session, but I will surely be investigating more on unstructured data.

Where am I, what am I doing.. Oracle Open World 2011

This post is more for me than it is for you, at least I will have a place to quickly check where am I supposed to be going next.The rest of this post is basically just my schedule for the upcoming week in San Francisco. Really looking forward to all the sessions, meeting old friends and making new ones. So if you see me walking around, please come up and say hello.

Quick: How long is this string?

Riddle me this: how long is the following string:

to_char (10, '0999')

Oracle Open World / Java One Preview bij AMIS

Op maandag 19 september zal er bij AMIS een Oracle Open World Preview sessie worden gehouden. Een groot deel van de Nederlanders die het dit jaar gelukt is om aanwezig te zijn als spreker op Oracle Open World zullen hun presentaties geven in Nieuwegein. AMIS-ers Lucas Jellema, Alex Nuijten, Peter Ebell en Aino Andriessen zullen in drie parallel sessies presentaties verzorgen. Daarnaast zullen andere Nederlandse presentatoren - zie hieronder de lijst met sprekers - presentaties verzorgen. Heb je dit jaar niet de kans om in San Fransisco aanwezig te zijn, meld je dan aan voor deze preview sessie Oracle Open World 2011!

Business Rule: Only One per Day, but keep the time

The business rule states:

Only one entry is allowed per ID and per day and the time should be recorded.

The table involved (simplified for the blog post)

SQL> create table test

  2  (id         number

  3  ,inspection_dt date

  4  );

Wouldn't it be nice if it was possible to do it like this?

SQL> create table test

  2  (id         number

  3  ,inspection_dt date

  4  ,constraint one_per_day unique (id, trunc (inspection_dt))

  5  );

,constraint one_per_day unique (id, trunc (inspection_dt))

                                    *

ERROR at line 4:

ORA-00904: : invalid identifier

This way you still have the complete date information (time is a component of the date column), and only use the TRUNC (inspection_dt) to constrain the data entry.
As you can tell from the error message, this is not allowed.
Oracle 11g Release 1 introduced Virtual Columns which can implement this requirement declaratively.

Splitting a comma delimited string the RegExp way, Part Two

Over two years ago I wrote about a way to split a comma delimited string using Regular Expresssions. Just a little while ago someone asked how to split it when you have more records involved than just one (as I used in my example).

ODTUG KScope 2011: looking back

Last week the yearly ODTUG KScope conference took place in Long Beach, California. I always need to time to let this wonderful event really sink in. The number of sessions and the wealth of information that you get is really quite extraordinary.
In this blogpost I will highlight some of the sessions that I attended.

Oracle 11g Express Edition bug?

Of course you know that Oracle has released 11g Express Edition, still in Beta though. That is probably why I ran into something weird -must be a bug- while playing with it. Here is what I did:

SQL> set echo on

SQL> col "Current_Edition" format a20

SQL> col object_name format a20

SQL> 

SQL> select sys_context('userenv'

  2                    ,'current_edition_name'

  3                    ) "Current_Edition"

  4    from dual

  5  /



Current_Edition                                                                                                         

--------------------                                                                                                    

ORA$BASE                                                                                                                



1 row selected.



SQL> 

SQL> create or replace

  2  procedure hello

  3  is

  4  begin

  5     dbms_output.put_line ('Hello World');

  6  end hello;

  7  /



Procedure created.



SQL> 

SQL> begin

  2     hello;

  3  end;

  4  /

Hello World                                                                                                             



PL/SQL procedure successfully completed.



SQL> 

SQL> select object_name

  2       , object_type

  3       , edition_name

  4    from user_objects_ae

  5   where object_name = 'HELLO'

  6  /



OBJECT_NAME          OBJECT_TYPE         EDITION_NAME                                                                   

-------------------- ------------------- ------------------------------                                                 

HELLO                PROCEDURE                                                                                          



1 row selected.



SQL> 

ODTUG KScope Preview bij AMIS

Ook dit jaar, namelijk op dinsdag 14 Juni, organiseert AMIS de ODTUG Preview. Het jaarlijkse congres van de ODTUG, de Oracle Development Tools Users Group, vind dit jaar plaats in Longbeach, California van 26 tot en met 30 juni. Het is niet voor iedereen weggelegd om daar naar toe te gaan. AMIS biedt, alweer voor het vijfde achtereenvolgende jaar, aan geïnteresseerden de kans om een selectie van de presentaties die daar te zien zijn bij te wonen. Een aantal Europese sprekers zal tijdens de AMIS ODTUG preview presentatie laten zien die ook in de Verenigde Staten worden gehouden.
Tijdens de AMIS ODTUG Preview zullen er drie keer drie parallelle sessies worden gehouden met verschillende onderwerpen zoals APEX, database development, ADF, JHeadstart en SOA.

Programma:

Tijd	Track 1	Track 2	Track 3
16:30	Welkom en Registratie
17:00	XFILES, the APEX 4 Version: The Truth is in There... Marco Gralike & Roel Hartman	ADF Developers - Make the Database Work for You Lucas Jellema	Pipelined Table Functions Patrick Barel
18:00	Dinner
19:00	APEX Face/Off - Designing a GUI with APEX Templates and Themes Christian Rokitta	BPMN: The New Silver Bullet? Lonneke Dikmans	Oracle JHeadstart: Superior Productivity in Developing Best-practice ADF Web Applications Steven Davelaar
20:15	Who's Afraid of Analytic Functions? Alex Nuijten	Overview of Eventing in Oracle SOA Suite 11g Ronald van Luttikhuizen	...and Thus Your Forms 'Automagically' Disappeared Luc Bors

Dit evenement is met name bedoeld voor ontwikkelaars.
Uiteraard zijn er aan dit event geen kosten verbonden, maar het aantal plaatsen voor dit evenement is beperkt, wacht niet te lang. Vol is vol.
Inschrijven via www.amis.nl

Planboard DBA Symposium: Registration Opened

The 6th Planboard DBA Symposium is opened for registration. I'm very pleased to be presenting again at this "For DBA by DBA Symposium". Especially since I'm not really a DBA... :)
Guess the organization committee was pleased with the presentation I did for the fourth Symposium. That time I was scheduled opposite Harald van Breederode, this time it's Frits Hoogland. Hopefully someone will show up for my session... or should I say: "Sorry Frits, too bad nobody showed up at your session". :)
This time I'm doing one of my favorite presentations: "SQL Holmes: The Case of the Missing Performance". Looking forward to it. Hope to meet you there.