Collab07 - Day 2 - Sessions + APEX SIG and Meetup

After having had a short night, the second day of sessions started.

Below the sessions I followed on Tuesday...

Session 1 - The Best 11g New Features - Rich Niemiec

I really like to see Rich presenting and again it was a really good session, although I have to say that I think this was one of his most challenging ones! He got a lot of questions and because he didn't investigate everything yet (the product is still in beta), he didn't know all the answers!
But hey, who knows everything?! But I had the impression that some people expect sometimes "everything" from somebody as famous as Rich Niemiec.
As the title says, this session covered some of the new features of 11g Rich found best. I'm not sure if I'm allowed to post something about these new features here, so I won't go into much detail. Some of the things I saw were:
- a big "health" icon on the first page of Enterprise Manager (Grid Control)
- the invisible index
- virtual columns
- PLSQL enhancements as caching
- new ways of partitioning
- more automated features

Session 2 - Search, Protect or Disclose with APEX, Javascript, LDAP etc. - I. Persand

This session described a part of an APEX project she did. She explained some of the nicest features she had used to accomplish her goals.
She showed her search facility (a function in the where clause), some Javascript she used to hide/show certain items and how she integrated the LDAP server of her company and conditions in APEX.

Session 3 - APEX: Delivering Pages in 3 seconds or Less - John Scott

The first public AE presentation at Collaborate 07. I liked Johns session. It was an advanced session with in debt knowledge how you can achieve better performance in APEX applications by using two different methods: Caching and Compression.

For the caching he showed an application which handles an upload of a picture. The first application shows the image without Expiry date, the other one, with an Expiry header. The performance gain is enormous. I suppose John will blog about it himself, or you can have a look at his whitepaper how you can do and test it yourself. That was also something I liked in his presentation, everything he did you can do it yourself. All steps were clear and well detailed (especially in the whitepaper).
I also use Image Caching in DG Tournament (and previous WC 2006). Remember when my app first got announced on Tom Kytes Blog? That time we got 10.000 hits an hour and saw the bandwidth increasing enormously, then I implemented this caching and saw the difference!

The compression can be done trough mod_gzip (or others). In the presentation he explained the mod_gzip implementation and what you would gain when using it. Impressive really, and I'm happy that Shellprompt/APEX Evangelists is using this technique for all the hosted applications.

Session 4 - APEX SIG - Steve Howard (& J. Scott, T. Jedlinski, D. Gielis)

Steve Howard, President of the IOUG APEX SIG, presented the direction we will take with the APEX SIG. You can expect some new things in the near future: a new website, blog mining, newsletter, .... More will be announced on the IOUG APEX SIG website.
We also discussed what our SIG should be doing and one of the things from the public was that we should consolidate the "new feature request" or "most annoying things" or "bugs list" etc. So you may expect something in that direction too.
We also need all APEX developers (you!) to help us out with this SIG, as at the end it's each of us (or the members of the SIG) who makes it happen.

After the session I had a chat (and some pictures) with other APEX developers. On the left a picture together with Michael Smith (aka "Spatial Developer of the Year 2006") and on the right a picture together with Justin Patterson (a frequent APEX forum user)

Session 5 - Introducing BI/XML Publisher - John King

This session was a brief intro into BI Publisher. He showed some basic functions of BI Pub and what his experiences were when he first implemented it.

APEX Meet-up

After OOW APEX Meet-up, we held our second APEX Meet-up, and again I found it really enjoying meeting some other APEX lovers away of the session rooms. We had some nice chats about APEX, live and Las Vegas. Thanks guys for the lovely evening!

As I got a lot of reactions on a picture I took at OOW (me and a nice looking lady), I thought to do it again... the result... this is how you get served when you order something in the Luxor hotel!