The last day... the most difficult one for me. Meeting all the people at the conference and listening to all sessions in the previous days is very nice but also very demanding and intense. The tiredness, the jetlag and all those expressions you start to feel.
So giving a presentation on the last day is a challenge. From early in the morning Lucas and I were on stage for the APEX vs ADF shootout. Some people said there were 300 people in the room, but others counted around 150, so let's say we had a lot of people ;-)
I like to be on stage with Lucas, he's a very knowledgeable person and amazingly objective about the tools. Whereas I'm the very *pro* APEX one ;-) Some ADF people told me I need to balance more, which I might do in the future as there are also some nice features in ADF. Not that I'll use ADF in the future, but it's not bad to know more about it.
In the Netherlands we did the presentation a little bit different. We had more time so we had more time to do Q&A. This time I spent quiet a lot of time on Interactive Reports as I thought it's one of the nicest features and less time explaining how I build the complete application. After the session I got some questions how I did things in the Survey app. I'll try to blog about the survey application in the next weeks.
In the Netherlands I went first, but this time Lucas presented first. I changed my style a bit so I followed the same steps as Lucas. I started from scratch and at one time I thought to just build the whole application in 30 minutes, but then I got an error. I didn't use triggers in the app I created in December, but when I followed the wizards during the demo, I forgot about that and said to APEX to use a trigger. Of course the trigger didn't exist. After I created it, the first demo worked. Of course, my second demo didn't work anymore. I normally don't create a trigger and just use the sequence, but as I created the trigger in the first demo, I overwrote the value.
I got a bit nervous when I got the error as I didn't know what was happening (although the errors where clear and related to the data model). Of course I blamed Lucas for the error ;-)
I could fix it and the demo worked, but only in the evening I knew exactly why it went wrong. In the morning everything still worked, but because I changed the order of my demo's (first creation of app from scratch of showing the app I created in December) it didn't work from the first time. It's always a risk to do live demos, but I like it so much, so not doing it is not an option for me ;-) You find the application here (here my blog post after the shootout in December).
I felt better after my presentation in the Netherlands. I think I should have done it more like when I did it in December and do it a bit different, but it's always after the presentation you know it. I wonder what the people thought about it.
Literaly after the session the adrenaline went away and I started to feel the tiredness even more. I went with some friends to a nice restaurant next to the Mississipi river. There were some great pictures taken... I hope I'll see them on some other blogs! Afterwards we walked a bit around and went back to the hotel. In the evening I crashed and had a nice sleep.
The next morning I flew back to Belgium over Chicago. Coincidence, but Marcie, who's doing the OBE's of APEX on OTN was on the same flight!
Friday, June 20, 2008
ODTUG08 - Thursday
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6 comments:
did you practice? It looked like you didnt know what to say you were very nervous
You were too hard on the other guy, almost aggressive sometimes. Not good
Your demo was not good, boring to watch when things dont work, you should have practiced it 100 timesuntil you got it right 100%
I was not impressed with apex, when asked if it scaled you just said "yes" you didnt give any facts or examples
Not good, the other guy had prepared his answers and was very good, I think you lost a lot of potentially apex sales.
I'll stick to ADF, I wanted to see what apex can do and what I saw did not impress me.
Thanks for being honest. It's always hard to hear if somebody didn't like it. I'm sorry to hear that. I also agree I was nervous and that I have done better presentations.
But about the demo; at least I knew what was going on and could fix it, whereas Lucas had also an error and couldn't fix it. But yes, I agree that my demo had to work. I shouldn't have changed the order.
About scaled: I said ADF scales on the middle tier, whereas with APEX you scale on the database. I also gave an example of apex.oracle.com and Cern, both have a lot of customers and data. Metalink is another example or think.com, which have a lot of visitors/hits.
I think the Interactive Reports are definitely interesting in APEX. Lucas already blogged about flashback he integrated in ADF, because he liked it when I showed it.
Thanks.
As for scaling you might want to take a look at this posting that David Peake did.
It shows the usage numbers for apex.oracle.com that runs on a very modest box.
http://dpeake.blogspot.com/2007/11/statistics-on-apexoraclecom.html
As far as the anonymous poster above I think he is APEX “basher.”
Matter of fact he probably pronounces it “App”EX.
About the scalable question: I think you answered the question constructively in a live environment, as a newbie I understood exactly what you said.
I also thought you were “the bully” of the show, but how could you not resist; I would have done the same. It was very entertaining from both ends and Lucas did great as well.
In the end I was convinced that using APEX is the right path. So your sales went up!
WAIT! Apex is a NO COST solution........enough said.
Regards,
Michael H.
Hi Michael,
Thank you for the support. Greatly appreciated.
Dimitri
Thanks to you and Lucas for putting in the time and sharing your efforts with the rest of us.
I was really hoping this "shoot-out" would provide some sort of head to head camparison of ADF vs. APEX features and perhaps some clearer indication of what sort of requirements would lead me to use one or the other.
Any chance you could provide something like this?
Thanks,
Rob S.
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