OOW07 - APEX Meetup on Monday

I posted a while ago that John and I would be trying to arrange an Apex Meetup at OpenWorld.

We created a simple Apex App for people to register which night was their preferred night and it was a close tie between Monday and Tuesday, so we flipped a coin and thought that monday was the best choice.

So, the ‘official Unofficial Apex Meetup’ is now Monday 12th November at the “4th Street Bar & Deli”, at 7pm. It’s on the same night as the OTN night, so you can come along, have a drink and a chat with some like-minded Apex people before heading to the OTN night.

See you there,
Dimitri

OOW07 Day -2: Flight to San Francisco

I didn't have much sleep tonight as I had to be at the airport at 5 am. The days before leaving for an event are always a bit hectic: clients want things finished before you leave, other meetings, finishing blog posts that are in your draft folder for weeks, packing ...

Once at the airport it's better, you just need to follow the crowd. Before I always flew from Brussels to Chicago, but this time my stop was in London Heathrow. John and I arranged so we could travel together. It's much more fun not having to travel alone.
The airport in San Francisco was again Oracle "colored" (see pic). SFO will be for one week "OracleFrisco".

My battery dried out quickly, so I couldn't do all the things I planned to do. But the good side was I could catch up with movies. I must say that British Airways pampered us a lot. We could select out of a large library of films (individually) and had as much food and snacks as we wanted. Although I'm not sure that's so good for my weight ;-)

This event will be special, not so much because I'm presenting at the biggest Oracle event, but more because it's the first time I must leave a little baby behind. Matthias described it nicely; daddy will miss him.

This time I'm staying in the King George hotel, the hotel where more known Oracle people are staying; Mark Rittman, Patrick Wolf, Carl Backstrom just to name some. I'm sure we'll have a great time!

Although I had to travel for more than 17 hours (which passed fairly fast) and left early on Friday in Belgium, I can still enjoy Friday evening in San Francisco (time difference of nine hours).

In the late afternoon John and I went for a little snack and a beer, in the place (Fourth Street Bar & Deli) we had a lot of fun last year. This evening we also had a couple of beers with Patrick Wolf in an Irish House which the concierge recommended us. It was good to catch-up and have some nice chats.

Tomorrow, Saturday, I'll probably relax a bit and try to rest as much as possible, because from Sunday onwards my agenda is filled for 150%... to start with the APEX Roundtable.

Bye, bye daddy

While my daddy is sleeping his last ours before he leaves to San Francisco, I thought to write you something again.

It's the first time I won't see my daddy for some days. I'll miss him so much. Daddy told me he'll miss me too. To ease the pain of not seeing eachother he installed a webcam and he told me he'll call me a lot. It will be strange if mummy needs to make my food all the time and I don't have my daddies breast to sleep on. If I've a bad dream my daddies shoulder is so comfortable and his breathing makes me calm. I hope his voice isn't to different over the phone.

I'm catching weight and a lot of power... I wonder if after 9 days I will win the wrestling from my daddy ;-)

I know it's not easy for my mummy neither, but daddy don't worry, I'll give her all my love and I'll protect her. Although I'm still little and mummy needs to do everything alone now, I'm learning quickly. I'll be brave and support mummy.

I hope you will all support my daddy, as I feel it's not easy for him neither. On Sunday and Thursday my daddy is talking to some of you. He believes it's important to support the APEX community.

If he's silent for a moment, you can be sure he's thinking about me!
Just be nice to him so he gets back on track ;-)

Quest Toad on Oracle 11g not supported

Are you already on Oracle Database 11g? If you're not, it's really cool ;-)

Nevertheless, this post is to warn all developers out there using Quest TOAD for Oracle.
The current release of TOAD is 9.1, this version is not supported with Oracle 11g (client). But even more important, the version that comes out half of November, TOAD 9.5 (see screenshot below which is a beta), isn't working with the Oracle 11g client neither!

I logged a support ticket at Quest. The support over there is really quick and helpful. In less than a day I got a message back that they were going to try it themselves, it went even to the technical people (development team) and after a few mails of back and for I got this final message: "Unfortunately, it was confirmed by our team's technical lead that Toad version 9.5 only support Oracle server 11g and not Oracle client 11g. My only suggestion for you is to install another client on your machine that is 10gR2 version or lower."

It's hard to believe that you need to install an Oracle Server just to get your development environment (TOAD) running ;-) Nevertheless, a workaround is to install Oracle 10g client, which I don't want to do as I'm connecting to 11g databases.
Or go for SQL Developer, a free alternative of Oracle.

A screenshot of the error "OCI version 11.1.0.1.0 is not supported"

I'm using both SQL Developer and TOAD as I think both have strengths and points to improve.
This post isn't to favor for SQL Developer, it's just to warn you... on my Windows Vista pc I'm obliged to go for SQL Developer as TOAD is not working with my Oracle 11g client.

What should you say to students when teaching Oracle?

A few weeks ago I teached a group of students some parts of the Oracle Database.

When talking about new features and the things of Oracle I think are really good, I started to talk about Oracle Application Express. On the fly I did a demo of APEX and talked about Rapid Application Development. The students were really attentive and sometimes I heard an "ohhh" ;-)

The demo was the start of a very interesting discussion. The students have a course called "Rapid Application Development", it's not APEX, it's .NET. When I heard that, I thought "fine", how do they call APEX then: "High Speed Application Development", "Rapid Application Development times 10", "Application Development at Warp Speed", ... ?

But that wasn't the most interesting part yet! Apparently the students had to do a project: their development a part in Java and a part in .NET on an underlying Oracle database.
The students thought it a good idea to create packages and put the logic inside the database. They showed their teachers and they gave this feedback: "The database is for your data, the logic you put inside your application (middleware/java/.net)"... I'm not sure about you, but I disagree with that statement!

I prefer to have as much logic/validations/business rules etc as close to my data, in other words, if I can do it in the database, I will do it. For me it doesn't make sense to only use the database as a data store. What changes the most? I would think the front-end! Do I always need to recreate all the logic again? If today I use Java, at the same time I use APEX, C# and Flex on the same data, I need to write my logic four times? And will the implementation be exactly the same? I come from the DBA side and in general DBA's prefer to know what you're doing. If the same package/procedure/function in the database is called by all development environments we know exactly what's happening. It can be tuned appropriately, statistics can be kept, auditing etc. I even didn't talk about data consistency...

One of the arguments was "performance": if you always need to go back to your database server, too many round trips... Ha! What about the performance of putting everything in recordsets and treating these recordsets? Maybe I can do the same in one SQL statement by using analytical functions? Why not using materialized views? Who does best to handle the data in the most performant way?
Of course I also use some client side things to check if a field is filled in, so I avoid a server roundtrip, but it's not true for data/logic etc.

There're so many great features in the Oracle database that people using the Oracle database as just a data store are not knowing and not using. It's a pity.

Nevertheless, we had a lovely discussion about this topic, but afterwards I thought I was maybe too hard for the teachers. It's a fact there're two groups of people out there. In my experience a lot of JAVA developers are doing it the "put logic in your middleware/app" approach, where as people coming from the database prefer to have their logic as close to their data.

My question... What should you do when you get such a question (logic inside the database or not)?

My demo system: VMware 6 + OEL5 + Oracle DB 11g

It took me longer to install my demo system as I thought. So be warned when doing this yourself.

My current laptop is a Dell Latitude D820 with 2GB of RAM running a dual boot: Windows XP and Vista. Before I used Windows XP as my demo system, but with the service packs and other installation of software which can interfere with my Oracle config it was too risky to keep it as non-fail demo system. I also wanted to use Windows Vista, but on that, the Oracle database is not supported. Update: according to this it's supported on Windows Vista Business, Enterprise, and Ultimate editions.

So I thought to start using VMware images as demo system. I already tried it in the past (the Oracle VM's) but found it too slow, so I was sceptic about it. But I must admit, it's running fine at the moment.

The time I started with my VM's, Oracle DB 11g for Windows wasn't even out, so I choose for Oracle Enterprice Linux 5 (OEL5). Oracle is putting a lot of effort in linux and using it as their "main" development platform, so most of the soft should come out first for this operating system.

I first used VMware Server (free) to install OEL5, which did work. But when playing with linux and trying to get my network working, I just had one problem after another.
I couldn't understand why it failed, so I tried to use VMware Workstation (not free), which I was sure was supported for Windows Vista. After 5 minutes everything worked.

Tip: When using Windows Vista use VMware Workstation 6 or higher!

The steps I did to get my demo system up and running.

Create a new VMware machine

1. Select "New Virtual Machine" from VMware to create the hardware specification
2. Go for a Custom virtual machine configuration - Linux - Linux kernel 2.6.x
3. I used 1GB Ram, 20GB diskspace, a cd-rom and bridged ethernet
4. Go with the defaults of the wizard

Install Oracle Enterprise Linux 5

1. Download Oracle Enterprice Linux from OTN
2. Unzip the file, you should get 5 iso images
3. Mount the first cd in your VMware console (Edit virtual machine settings - connection - use iso image)
4. Start the Virtual Machine
5. If everything is fine, it will boot the OEL5 cd and will start the wizard for the installation
6. I used most of the default settings during the installation
7. Use a static IP address
8. Select some more packages as default (Customize software packages to be installed) for ex.: Legacy Software Development, Graphical Internet, Development Tools, System Tools
9. During the installation you'll need to change the cd's (right click on the cd in VMware, Edit and select the other cd)
10. Reboot the system and finalize the installation

Configure your linux

1. I had to change the monitor to be able to get a higher resolution
2. You can also opt to install the VMware Tools which give you some more features
   (I had some problems with these tools as they changed my network settings)
3. If you prefer to change your shell (for ex. bash instead of ksh), you can do that by using: "chsh". You need to logout and login again so the settings are applied.

Install Oracle Database 11g

1. Read the installation guide (!). Even the most experienced people sometimes forget to read the installation manual. Something can change in time, the system requirements change, ...
2. Especially in linux you need to review your kernel parameters and required packages.
   Some of the packages that weren't installed as default, for ex.: libaio-devel-0.3.105-2, unixODBC-devel-2.2.11-1. You find most of the required packages on CD2 and CD3.
   You can use the "rpm -Uvh" command to get them installed.
3. Create users and groups:
   # groupadd -g 501 oinstall
   # groupadd -g 502 dba
   # useradd -g oinstall -G dba -s /bin/ksh oracle
   # passwd oracle
4. Append the following to the /etc/sysctl.conf file as the root user and run /sbin/sysctl –p (this command makes the settings immediately applied):
   kernel.sem = 250 32000 100 128
   kernel.shmmax = 536870912
   net.ipv4.ip_local_port_range = 1024 65000
   net.core.rmem_default = 4194304
   net.core.rmem_max = 4194304
   net.core.wmem_default = 262144
   net.core.wmem_max = 262144
5. The Oracle Universal Installer will verify the requirements, if they are not met you'll get a warning. Before going further, you should review the failed items and resolve the issues.
   Do retry and if all steps are passed successfully, you can start the installation.
6. I did a normal Enterprise Edition install with the preconfigured database.
7. You may also check your environment variables (for ex. in /home/oracle/.bash_profile) for the oracle user ($ORACLE_HOME, $PATH, $ORACLE_SID etc.) Make also sure you include the Oracle bin directory in your PATH (export PATH=$PATH:$ORACLE_HOME/bin) so you can run commands from everywhere.

Configure Oracle Application Express (APEX)

1. To configure APEX you can follow the instruction in the Postinstallation tasks
2. Before, I always used Apache as my webserver for APEX, but now I thought to go for the embedded PL/SQL gateway
3. As most of you know, with 11g APEX is preinstalled ;-) The installation is made so easy!
4. Open a terminal and go to $ORACLE_HOME/apex
5. Connect with SQL*Plus as sysdba and run @apxconf
6. It will ask you for the port of the Oracle XML DB HTTP server. I'm not sure 8080 (default) is a great port to use as it's sometimes in conflict with other products... so I used 7779.
7. The final step is to ALTER USER ANONYMOUS ACCOUNT UNLOCK;
8. Go to your fixed ip or hostname in a browser: http://192.168.2.150:7779/apex/
9. The first time can take some time, but you should see APEX coming up
   

Tip: Read the manuals!

Some screenshots of my system


If you want to read how to install something like above but in Rac, Frederik (Frikkie) Visser wrote a very good article.

That was basically what I did to create my demo system. During this process, I sometimes "cursed" my machine. John Scott was very supportive, but also teased me more than once with "get a Mac"! We'll see ;-)

To all APEX enthusiasts... OOW APEX Roundtable

To all APEX enthusiasts...

ODTUG was so kind to offer me, VP of the IOUG APEX SIG, one of their timeslots to host the APEX roundtable at OOW. This session will be open for *ALL* User Groups. The goal is to talk to all people interesting in Oracle Application Express.

The APEX roundtable (Session ID: S293602) will take place on Sunday from 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM in Moscone West 3014 - L3.

I'm thrilled to announce my panel at OOW:

• Tony Jedlinski - APEX Developer of the year 2005
• John Scott - APEX Developer of the year 2006
• Patrick Wolf - APEX Developer of the year 2007
• ... (depending flights, somebody of the Oracle APEX Development team)
  

Agenda:

1. Quick intro about the SIGs and Panel speakers
   
2. To start the discussion I'll ask the panel about web 2.0, coding techniques, security and best practices (15 minutes)
3. The floor is open to you all to ask questions to the panel (35+ minutes)
   

If you've already some difficult questions for the panel, put it as a comment on this blog, so they can get prepared ;-)

Hope to see you all there!

Use of 11g functionalities (pivot) in Windows

Yep... it's possible! Oracle Database 11g is out for Windows. You can download it here.

Already a lot others blogged about it, but as I'm more blogging about Oracle Application Express, I thought to blog into that direction for this new release...

11g brings you a lot of new features. Especially the PLSQL New Features are useful to any APEX developer. Now you know you can use it on your windows servers too.
One of the new nice things is the Pivot function...

If you want to read more about these new features (for developers), here are some nice links:

• on Oracle-Base (by Tim Hall)
• on AMIS (by Lucas Jellema & Alex Nuijten)
  

I'm not going to install Oracle DB 11g on my windows system as I'm currently creating my VM's for OOW: Oracle Enterprise Linux + Oracle Database 11g + BI Publisher. (I'll blog later the steps I did to create these VM's) I don't want my machine crashing anymore, so I'm preparing myself ;-)

OOW 2007 APEX Meetup

It's that time of the year again, with OpenWorld just around the corner, so John Scott and myself are trying to arrange an APEX Meetup again like we did last year.

If you're interested in coming along to the Meetup, we made a simple application (APEX of course) where you can say which days are best for you (and we'll go with the most popular day).

You can register your interest in the APEX Meetup here.

Hope to see you there!

OOW 2007 Blogger Meetup (by MR)

As last year, Mark Rittman is organizing another Oracle Blogger Meetup at Oracle Open World. Just as last year the fun will be in "The Thirsty Bear". Date & Time: Tuesday 13th Nov, 7pm

You can read all details (and subscribe) on Mark's Blog.

It's always nice to meet the other Oracle bloggers in real life. Maybe you didn't know, but even Oracle bloggers can talk about other things than Oracle and have a lot of fun ;-)

In a few weeks you'll read about the night on several blogs (and this one)!

Oracle Open World fever

Blogs are filling up with Oracle Open World (OOW) messages, people are getting ready to leave for San Francisco, presenters are rehearsing their presentations, meetings are getting planned, sessions are scheduled, ...

Just to show you OOW will be *big* again. Over 50.000 people will move to the biggest Oracle event, San Francisco will be colored red again, the Oracle logo will be everywhere...

This blog and I are preparing for the event too. In a couple of days I'll publish some info about the APEX sessions, my presentation, the APEX roundtable and the APEX meetup.

So... get ready for the "OOW experience"!

Some earlier posts about OOW 2007 and my blog posts of OOW 2006.

Upgrade HTC P3300 with Windows Mobile 6

As I blogged before I'm very happy with my HTC P3300 mobile phone/pda...

During the weekend I upgraded my phone from Windows Mobile 5 to Windows Mobile 6.

There are not that many changes, it's more like a WM5 Second Edition. Nevertheless I think this upgrade is definitely worth! I really needed this upgrade as WEP security for Wifi is from WM6 onwards available out-of-the-box. So now I can connect to my wireless Lan at home and be even more online ;-)

Other features why I believe this upgrade is useful:

• It looks to me the interface is faster and more slick
• Better Outlook with support for html mails
• New tunes / sound themes which can be attached to events
• Improved security
  

Some articles of WM6 I found useful: here and here.

Teaching Oracle - the next year

Just as last year (see here and here) I teached a part of the Oracle DBA course to some students.

Last year the students, the school and myself really enjoyed working together, so we decided it would be a good idea to do this more.

I believe the students are well coached by their teachers. The only down-side is that it's very "academic". Having somebody from "the field" talking about their experience and how the teached material is used in "real life", can be a nice added value for the students.

Just as last time I talked for the last year informatics students. I was surprised they were so "open" for Oracle. A few years ago a lot of students were sceptic about Oracle, but I've the impression that it's changing... The students looked really interested in the topics I talked about (for ex. Security and Performance & Tuning).

Next to the "official material" I talked about the evolution of the Oracle database (10/11g with APEX ;-) and beyond) and also about the free Oracle database (XE) which they can try themselves.

Again I liked it a lot... it's nice to hear from these students what they're interested in these days and what they think about Oracle.

In a few days I'll teach the second group this material.

I hope my baby will be more gentil

My wife sent me this link (trailer)...

I can't say "Oh My God!", I should say "Oh Baby" ;-)

Having a baby changes your life. I can speak out of experience now.
It's wonderful but also very demanding. It's very different being with three than just with two. Our baby is changing so quickly, unbelievable what an evolution we all have been going through.

Oracle APEX Forum - Week 39

*** After a long time, I finally said to myself to start this Oracle Application Express Forum Wrap-up again ***

My goal is to put some links to the forum that took my attention in the last week. Sometimes these posts made me laugh, sometimes they made me cry and some of them I found really interesting.

The most interesting topics:

• APEX 3.0.1 installation on Vista: A step-by-step guide to install Oracle Application Express on Windows Vista
• Patrick posted some possible Bugs: here, here and here. They are all about Select Lists
• Already heard about Extjs. There's a nice (long) thread on the integration of that with APEX. For me this is just another 3rd party product integration. In APEX it's easy to do that. I integrated for ex. Yahoo and Google widgets. There're so many, nevertheless I wanted to include it in here...
• Dynamically change Report Template: it's not really because of the report template I include it, but there's a nice technique John and I've been using to reuse queries.
• How to Post Data from Outside Oracle using APEX Application? Really strange some people would like to do it, but I also got this question at one of my customers... so apparently it's more asked.
• Value too long: The length of a form item can only be 32512 bytes. There's a workaround, which Carl Backstrom wrote.
  
• How Store and Enlarge Images In APEX: I didn't look at the forum for some time now, due to my new born baby, but I was surprised to see a link to my blog ;-)
• Empty PDF files generated within APEX 3.0: hmm I think I also got this once when I was doing a presentation. Localizations is very tricky sometimes!
• APEX Line Calendar: Patrick Haston made a nice solution for such calendars
• Problems with APEX & BI Publisher: report column amount limit and text item with %
  

Announcements:

• none

If you saw something in the forums I should have included, you're free to put a comment.

Dinner with Steven

Last night my family and I met Steven Feuerstein. Steven past Brussels on his way to Oslo and was so friendly to invite us for dinner.

It was a special night... it was the first real time we went out with our baby, the first time Matthias went to a restaurant and the first time my wife met Steven.
Of course she already knew him from me talking about him, but I think she was pleasantly surprised we could also talk about other things then PLSQL and APEX ;-)

Although it's already autumn in Belgium it was a nice and warm (for the season) evening.
We went to one of the most famous streets in Brussels, called Rue des Bouchers, basically a street with only restaurants...

It's amazing how fast things go... I think it was June 2006 at ODTUG when I met Steven for the first time in real life. From then on I met him several times on Oracle conference and only a year later we have diner in Brussels. As I already blogged before, I've been always looking up to Steven, so it was a great pleasure to have a meal with him.

I think Matthias will also be proud after a couple of years when he sees the picture of "the PLSQL Evangelist" holding him in his arms. I certainly don't want to push Matthias in the direction of computers and software... there're so many others things in the world to explore, he needs to find his own way. Nevertheless I'm already proud in his place ;-)

Thanks Steven for the lovely evening! And I'm so happy I could share it this time with my family...

Update: I love PLSQL and ... (.net)

I got some messages about the title of my previous blog post and the picture you get when clicking on Steven Feuerstein's photo on the iloveplsqland.net site.

The title of my previous blog post was a bit to "shock" some people and see what it would do to the stats of my site. ;-) Nothing spectacular of course... but I got a lot of mails or comments about this title. You know now why I did it... it's not Steven's opinion he likes PLSQL and .NET, of course NOT ;-)

To avoid problems or comments in the future I changed the title to a normal one you could expect.

The website got in the meanwhile some small updates. Nothing spectacular, just some improvements Bryn asked.
For ex.: "Can we get an estimate of the amount of PL/SQL they have (both no. of compilation units and no. of source code lines)."
Implementation: On the site you'll see two new fields: Estimated PL/SQL code volume: Lines [ ] Programs [ ]


And finally about the picture... that's Steven (when he was a bit younger)!

Hello world...

Hello,

I'm Matthias Gielis, 4 days old. I'm still with my mummy in the hospital, but I borrowed my daddies laptop to write my first blog post.

They say I'm tall for my weight; 50 cm for 2850 g. All midwifes are in love with me ;-) they pamper me a lot, which I enjoy so much.

My daddy is calling me "little prince" and to be honest I also feel like that. I enjoy being in this world as long as my mummy and daddy are with me.
He also told me; before I was here, he divided his time between my mummy and something called APEX, which I've no clue yet what it is. Now that I'm here he said, he's going to spent also a lot of time with me.
I've the feeling my daddy is really in love with me and can't leave me alone. I'm also very happy with my daddy, when I'm in his arms I'm so at ease and feel secure.

My mummy and daddy took some pictures of me... everybody wants to be on a picture with me! I feel like a little "superstar" ;-)

On my website you'll find some pictures, a little story (in Dutch) and my birth card, which my mummy made for me. Thanks mummy!

From time to time I'll write something on my daddies blog,
Matthias

Announcement: 2nd European Apex Training Days (EATD)

Following the success of our recent European Application Express training days in Brussels, we have set the date and location for our next APEX Evangelists European Training Days Event.

The event will be a 3-day advanced Application Express course (agenda coming soon) and like our previous event will rely heavily on lots of live demos and real world examples and scenarios.

We will need to limit numbers, since once the audience size grows beyond a certain point it becomes more time-consuming to respond to questions and we cannot be as ‘interactive’ as we like to be (which from the feedback from the previous even was one of the things that people felt set us apart from other training events they’d attended).

So, if you’re looking for some advanced Application express training, from people who *really* use it day-in day-out and can help to answer those real-world questions you have, then sign up!

Note that, whilst we are only doing a few of these ‘open’ trainings a year, we are of course able to perform on-site training specifically for your company. So feel free to contact us via the APEX Evangelists site.

You can register directly for the London 2008 training by using this link.

I love PLSQL and...

John Scott and I are very pleased to announce a website we created for our friend, Steven Feuerstein.

A while ago I blogged about "Apex Evangelist meets PLSQL Evangelists" (see also this pic). I met Steven for the first time in real life at ODTUG last year. I've always been admiring him... the way he presents, his charisma, friendliness and of course his PLSQL knowledge.
So, doing this project was a real honour!

Some blogs already announced (even before it was "real" production) Steven Feuerstein's new website, called "I love PLSQL and ... (.net)". The url some websites referenced was wrong. This is the url you should use to see the site: http://www.iloveplsqland.net

Naturally the site was fully created in Oracle Application Express ;-)
It's a fairly simple site, but if you look good, you'll see the integration of some 3rd party products like "Highslide" (click on the picture of Steven!) and "Captcha" (register for an account). You'll also see some AJAX (Asynchronous Update) in the Flash Charts.

We hope you'll like the site and hope it can be a step towards the improvement of the PLSQL language.

John and I really enjoyed making this site... Shall we also make such a site for APEX?

Update: I first wanted to shock people with the title "I love PLSQL and .NET", but finally decided to change it again as I got a lot of reactions ;-) ... (see also other blog post)