ODTUG - P4: PL/SQL Testing, Web development

I'll not blog a lot of technical things from the sessions I followed on Tuesday, only an overview. My good friends of AMIS will post some info about these sessions.

After being for four days in the States (Washington) I'm a bit tired. The other days I woke up at 6 o'clock after having a bad sleep... but today I slept till 7.50! Nevertheless I was more tired than before, so no fitness today.

After having my breakfast and being on the photo with the Dorsey brothers (Paul and Roger, great people btw) I followed following sessions:

1. Six Steps to Unit Testing Happiness by Steven Feuerstein
This was an excellent presentation of the PL/SQL guru. He stressed that testing should be done in the very beginning. You should write your test plan and tests before you do the actual coding.
He showed the latest tool he created to test a PL/SQL application, Qute, now bought by Quest Software, but his version is also available free of charge! If you like more an Open Source flavor of testing software, you can look at utPLSQL (also written by S.F. some years ago).
Six simple steps to unit testing:
1. Describe fully the required functionality of the program.
2. Elaborate the test cases for the program
3. Define the header of the program
4. Build test code that implements all test cases
5. Write the program unit
6. Test, debug, fix, test, debug, fix, ...

2. No, Carry, We're STILL Not Tuning the Right Stuff by Mogens Norgaard akà Moens Longballs Nogood
This presentation will be "bloged" by Alex of AMIS. Mogens talked about the evolution of tuning. The whole presentation was blended with humor. You just need to know him, or seen him once to understand what a great guy he it! Well done Mr. Nogood!

3. Oracle's Advanced Analytics in the Database by Bob Haverstrob
Data Mining... analytical functions... it was all about that. I don't have real experience in the Data Mining area, so I didn't understand everything he was doing. This presentation wasn't my favorite one, I suppose there'll be somebody else blogging about it.

4. Web Services Reality Check: A Practical Guide to using Webservices today by Tugdual Grall
This presentation gave an overview of the evolution of the technology behind webservices. He also explained the difference in SOAP and REST. A demo with JDeveloper showed that it isn't that difficult to create or use a webservice.

5. Quick Web Development Using JDeveloper 10g by Matt Topper
I read the notes of this presentation which I found really interesting. I only went for 1 min. to this presentation as I was really tired from all the information of the other sessions, the match England-Sweden was busy too. ;-) Next to that I'll probably won't use JDev in the near future. But I was interested to see the notes to have a thought about the evolution in this area, as I made an application with JDev 4 years ago...

6. Building Robust Applications in a Database-Centric Way by Toon Koppelaars
Again an excellent presentation! My congratulations Toon!
I completely agree with Toon to put as much as possible in the database. If this is the case, all the latest technologies are just UI's (User Interfaces). If you use .NET, PHP, JAVA or APEX, it doesn't really matter as by every means you connect to the database, the logic to get the required data is the same (for ex. via an API). All business and data logic are in the database and reachable via an API, so if next year a XYZ technology comes out, it's easy to use it.
A lot of people try to create an application that is database independent. But that's just the biggest mistake they can make, as the database is the more stable and robust part of the whole. A database changes not that frequently, as you compare it with the latest technology. At the moment AJAX is hot, maybe in 3 years it will be PSV ;-) Oracle will always be the same...

In the evening we had a nice party with some great food and nice music. The Capitol Steps were the surprise of the evening. They gave a show, including singing, dancing, but most of the time making (political) jokes. There was one sketch with a geek... really funny, even as a not-American I laught a lot!

The pictures of the day you can find here.