APEX @ UKOUG

I'm running behind with my blog posts!

On Monday I went to see David Peake's presentation about APEX now and in the future. Although I already saw this presentation multiple times it was nice to see it again and see the reaction of the public. And to be honest, I should do a new post about APEX 3.2 (Forms migration) as the screens change every time he does the presentation ;-)


That session was also the start to meet all the other APEX enthusiasts.

Later that afternoon I went to Tom Kyte's keynote about The Best Way. I always like to hear Tom speaking. Basically he said that it depends circumstances what "the best way" is and that "the best way" can change over time, which is ofcourse, very true.

After the opening party we organized a little APEX Meetup. We had some nice drinks and went to a pizza place with 8 people. We had some great fun! From left to (back to) right: Joao, Roel, Anthony, John, myself, Simon, David and Paulo. Thanks guys for the lovely evening and special thanks to Simon and David to get us a round. The pictures says all...


On Tuesday it was John Scott's turn to talk about APEX Best Practices. Especially after Tom Kyte's presentation this was a great presentation ;-) To be serious, the best practices, or hints and tips that John talked about I don't think will change that quick over time. To name some of his best practices: not everybody need to login as an admin, use bind variables, use page comments and locking etc. So great things to follow I would say.


Later that afternoon I went to see Marco Gralike with his presentation about XMLDB. Marco is very knowledgeable about XMLDB and I strongly believe APEX and XMLDB can work nicely together. For ex some of the techniques are used in DG Tournament or the APEX Blog Aggregator.

Later that day there was a Tools debat about APEX, JDEV and Forms. The product managers of Oracle were in the panel: David Peake for APEX, Duncan Mills for JDEV and Grant Ronald for Forms. It was a relaxed chat about the different products and to be honest I'm not against any of the products. I think they all fit in an environment and can even work nicely together. One of the messages was that Forms is supported till 2017! So why would you migrate if Forms is still doing everything you need? But if you are looking for something else you can migrate to APEX or JDEV. We (Apex Evangelists) don't tend to do a full blown migration at once, but a softer approach where both environments work together for some time. So far that works well for our clients. I'm not sure you knew, but in the past I also developed in BC4J (around 2003) and I must say things in JDEV land have changed quickly. At that time I found it hard to decide which UI to choice (BC4J, UIX etc), but today it seems JSF is the way to go.
I found the talk very interesting and definitely something that would fit in every conference.

Later that afternoon I went to Steven Fueurstein's Weird PL/SQL. If you didn't have a change yet to see Steven, try to attend one of his sessions. They are always nice to follow. He basically talked about the "strange" decisions/things in PL/SQL. If you go to the I Love PLSQL site you can see these things and send Bryn Llewellyn a mail and ask to change it. (btw that site is created in APEX)

My last session of the day was from Sue Harper about Developing with SQL Developer. This was more one of an introduction where she covered a lot of different things you can find in SQL Developer. But I promised myself to do another post about that and the nice integration with APEX.

I'm going to try to do another post about the other sessions tomorrow.

APEX Meetup @ UKOUG on Monday

Next week the UKOUG conference is going on. I'm flying to Birmingham on Monday and will stay till Thursday. I believe UKOUG is one of the biggest Oracle conferences in Europe. It's a pity it's the same time as DOAG, but that is mostly towards the German speaking people. 

There are also some APEX presentations at UKOUG:

What’s Hot and What’s Not – an Overview of Oracle Development Tools	Mr Sten Vesterli	01/12/2008 11:00 - 12:00 Track Track 5
Oracle Application Express Now and in the Future	Mr David Peake	01/12/2008 13:10 - 14:10 Track Track 6
Application Express Best Practices	Mr John Scott	02/12/2008 11:05 - 11:50 Track Track 4
"Tools: APEX, JDEV, Forms, SQL DEV - the choice is yours"	Mr Grant Ronald	02/12/2008 13:15 - 14:00 Track Roundtables
A Delicious Blend of BI Publisher and Application Express Bursting with Flavour!	Mr Nathan Morgan	03/12/2008 11:45 - 12:30 Track Track 8
Mastering charts in Oracle Application Express (APEX)	Mr Dimitri Gielis	04/12/2008 09:25 - 10:10 Track Track 5
(Re)Developing a logistic application in APEX in the real world	Mr Roel Hartman	04/12/2008 15:05 - 15:50 Track Track 5
Securing an APEX application on a Microsoft platform	Mr Andy Ogg	04/12/2008 16:25 - 17:10 Track Track 5

As you can see I'll talk about charts in Oracle Application Express on Thursday. I'll start to explain how you can create charts in APEX and make them prettier and what is happening under the hood. I'll discuss there are different versions of charts in APEX (based on Anychart 3.3 and 4.1) and at the end I'll also try to quickly show the apex migration kit to Anychart 5.

In the APEX Forum we also talked about having an APEX Meetup on Monday after the opening party (20.30h). We'll probably meet at the entrance of the opening party or you can follow David Peake, John Scott, Anthony Rayner, myself or some others to the "APEX heaven".

See you in  a few days!

and the best speaker of the UKOUG 2007 is...

Some people published the feedback they received from their presentation at the UKOUG.

I read first Marco Gralike's post how he felt with his scores. It's always interesting to see how the audience react to your presentation. You learn a lot from the evaluations afterwards. Worst would be you thought you did a great job and afterwards you find out people didn't like it. You can always learn something to make the presentation better!

But when I read John Scott's post about his evaluation I was really impressed with his scores! Unbelievable high scores! I wonder what scores Tom Kyte and Jonathan Lewis get? They must be used to these scores I guess... although I think people start expecting more and more from you when you're at that level. For ex. I saw some presentations of Rich Niemec and I believe he's a confident speaker. But at Collaborate last year he got some though questions from the audience and people expected he would know all that (it was a presentation about the new features of the 11g database). He didn't know some of the questions and some of the public started to become "angry". I don't know anybody who knows everything, but I know a lot of people knowing a lot ;-)

To come back to John's presentation, that was indeed a really good one. Especially the debugging of APEX applications through SQL Developer I found impressive. Immediately after the session a lot of people congratulated him, then you know you did a great job. Congratulations John! I guess you must be close to the "best speaker" award!
If you want to see him presenting soon... London, March, at the European APEX Training Days.

I also did a presentation at UKOUG about the integration of BI Publisher with Oracle Application Express and getting some advanced reports out of it. You find my scores below... Not as high as John, but I'm happy with them ;-)

UKOUG Thursday

After a good sleep John and I went for an English breakfast. To be honest, I expected more about the breakfast, especially as I already stayed in Reading and Manchester where the breakfast in these hotels were amazing. But it can also be that I'm getting used to the "big" meals ;-)

The first session I was in was about APEX Security by Peter Lorenzen. He did a nice job, it's definitely an area people are interested in. I would have shown more demo's, but the downside then is that you can't cover the amount of content Peter covered now.

Next on my agenda was the famous talk by Steven Feuerstein about PLSQL Best Practices.

Although I already saw the presentation, I like to listen to Steven. The way he presents and the content are so good and I learn by repetition ;-) For ex. playing the SET game during his presentation was really fun.

In the afternoon everybody was leaving and the UKOUG was already history...

In the evening John showed me a part of Leeds and we had some nice Indian food.
On Friday I headed back home. My last flight of the year...

UKOUG Wednesday

Wednesday morning I arrived in Birmingham. The weather wasn't great, dark clouds and rain.

I went to the hotel, the Jury's Inn, but couldn't check in until 2pm, so I headed to the ICC buildings where the UKOUG conference was being held. Luckily it wasn't to far from the hotel, only a 5 min walk. The building was quiet impressive: lots of glass and big.

I registered as a speaker and went to my first session, which I was a session chair for, which means I had to introduce the speaker. The speaker was John Scott, does that ring a bell?

When I entered the room John would present in, I was amazed and tumbled! Unbelievable! What a big and nice room!

John asked me to keep my introduction short as he had a lot to talk about. At OOW he did the same presentation but got 90 minutes, now he had only 60... A challenge!

I followed his instruction and did my fastest introduction ever, 8 seconds ;-)

John did a fantastic job in his presentation about "Debugging APEX Applications", which proves this article and that some people came to him and told him that it was "the best presentation" they had seen so far. Of course I didn't do mine yet ;-) (only joking!)

Right after John's presentation I had to participate in the APEX Roundtable. Jeremy Duggan was the host and in the panel we had Anthony Rainer, Peter Lorenzen and myself. John Scott was in the audience but answered also a lot of questions, so although it wasn't on the schedule, you can state John was in the panel too.
Jeremy asked the people the questions they had or the topics they wanted to talk about, noted that down and then we started to answer them. Some of the questions we had, were about javascript, security, when apex/when java and authorization.

Then I went for lunch, I was really hungry as I had only eaten in the early morning before I left and it was already 2pm (in Belgium time that's even 3pm). The catering and logistic could have been better I think, especially when I compare it to OOW, ODTUG or the IOUG events.

In the afternoon I walked a bit around and finally sat down to prepare for my presentation.

I had to do the last presentation of the day, before the keynote. As I thought the people started to become tired I tried to make it as digestible as possible.

I talked about the integration of BI Publisher and APEX. The more I do this presentation the more I try to put in things of BI Publisher. For ex. Conditional formatting, multiple datasets, ppt output... next time I might talk about the Scheduler and passing parameters to BIP reports.




In the evening John Scott , Peter Scott, Borkur Steingrimsson, Mark Rittman and myself went to a pub. We had some excellent tapas and some beers. They are all really nice guys, we had good talks and laughs! Later that evening we went to another pub, it's the unofficial Oaktable pub I heard later, and it must be said that the more famous Oracle people (bloggers) were in that bar. For ex. I talked to Marco Gralike, Lisa Dobson, Kurt Van Meerbeeck, Doug Burns, Mark Bobak, ... The later the evening the more tired I got, so at 11.30pm I went back to the hotel to get some sleep.

UKOUG first impressions

After too little sleep I left to Birmingham.

The flight went well and at 9 o'clock I was in a cab driving to the conference. At first sight the conference is more "serious". The people look more serious, wear suits and are more formal. But it can just be a first impression ;-)

I forgot my camera cable, so I can't show any pictures before Saturday.

I just finished the roundtable and I'm waiting to get in my room for my presentation, which starts in 30 minutes. In the evening I'll probably go for a beer and an early sleep.

I'll post again in the weekend with pictures, in the meanwhile you my read John Scott's blog or Mark Rittman or Doug Burns or a lot others.

Dimitri @ UKOUG + APEX Meetup

I would normally leave on Sunday for the UKOUG of next week, but at the last moment I had to change plans.

I'll arrive instead on Wednesday morning in Birmingham, just in time to prepare for the APEX Roundtable of 12.25pm in Hall 1 Foyer Level 5. I look forward doing the roundtable with Anthony Rayner and Jeremy Duggan (this time I'm in the panel). I wonder if this roundtable will be different from the one at the other events in the VS (OOW, ODTUG, IOUG).

I'm also giving a presentation about the integration of Oracle Application Express and BI Publisher on Wednesday at 4.35pm. This is the same presentation I did at Oracle Open World.

There're a lot more APEX sessions at the UKOUG, John Scott gives an overview here.

It's a pity I will miss the first two days and the special nights (Blogger Meetup etc), but that's live... you can't do everything or be everywhere at the same time ;-)

John and I are also organizing another APEX Meetup on Wednesday at 7pm. The venue still need to be decided. If you know some good places, shoot! I don't know that much in Birmingham. So, if you want to have some drinks with other APEX users, feel free to join us!

See you in the UK!