Collaborate 08 - Monday

On Sunday evening I went to the SIG reception. It was nice to already meet some of the regular faces, but the real welcome reception was planned for Monday.

Today, Collaborate started at full speed... breakfast in a hall, packed with people, a lot of sessions, people running everywhere, the normal conference stuff ;-)

There are a lot of people, but it's unbelievable that you bump into people you know. In the morning, while I was updating the online APEX schedule to fit on an handheld, we met Bill Ferguson. Bill is also doing a lot of APEX. It was really nice to meet him in real life.


My first session was "Extend your existing Business Solution with Application Express developed functions" by Wolfgang Scherrer.
Wolfgang talked about how he extended his cobol application with Oracle Application Express. The first modules were developed on an Oracle XE database with APEX 2.1. The connection between APEX and the (old) cobol application was first through ODBC and later through Oracle Heterogeneous Services. He finished by saying he's planning to look into APEX 3.1 and take over more modules of the cobol application.

My second session was "The UPs and DOWNS of Loading External Data via APEX" by Tony Jedlinski.
Tony is a well known person in IOUG. He's a member of the IOUG board and a long time member. Tony was also Apex Developer of the Year 2005. Tony talked about different features in APEX all related to data. The standard upload of excel files, pdf support, upload of your own files etc. APEX has a lot of possibilities out of the box.


The third session I followed was something I'm not that familiar with; "Oracle, LDAP and AD (Active Directory) Integrating the Three Together" by Debra Addeo.
Debra talked about the general concepts of LDAP and how Microsoft implemented LDAP in Active Directory. She briefly touched the integration with APEX, but a more detailed presentation about that integration is planned for later this week.

Lunch was served in a big hall. It's quite impressive to see so many people having lunch.


The next session I followed was "Taking APEX Applications to the Next Level" by Todd Arave.
Todd talked about his experience in APEX applications and how you can benefit from using features like Shared Components when you are developing multiple applications. I also believe it's a good idea to have a Master application where others subscribe too (for ex. for LOVs, templates, Authentication schemes etc).

My last APEX session of the day was "APEX Cheat Sheet" by Karen Cannell.
I already know Karen for some time and I always like to listen to her view on things. This presentation is a very good starting point for people when they played with APEX for some days. All the difficulties Karen discovered while she was working with APEX, she wrote down in this presentation. The f?p syntax, when to use which syntax &ITEM., :ITEM, v('ITEM') are only a few examples of all the goodies she talked about.

At 3.30 PM I planned to meet Steven Feuerstein to talk about life and some updates on iloveplsqland.net. We decided to pick one last session of the day before we would work a bit.

So my last session of the day was "All about Autonomous transactions" by Michael Rosenblum.
Michael discussed when to use Autonomous transactions in triggers and procedures (PRAGMA AUTONOMOUS_TRANSACTION). He was very funny at times as he talked what could go wrong or when you would get unexpected behavior. For these kinds of features it's best that you know a bit of the Oracle database.

At 6 PM the Exhibition Hall opened where we got some food. I had a quick chat with David Peake and David Gambino at the APEX booth.

In the evening there was a Welcome Party, but I was too tired to stay long at it. I decided to go into the hot tub and have an early nap. The jet lag is getting stronger...