Weblog for the AMIS Technology corner
KC Oracle Development Tools
Part of the Puzzle: Oracle XMLDB NFS Functionality
Feb 27th
This story is long overdue and no its NOT about the Oracle Database 11g Database File System (DBFS). Its about an “undocumented” NFS functionality that, maybe someday, will be serviced by the XMLDB XDB Protocol Adapter. This post is “long overdue” because the actual attempts to try to figure it out were done during the bank holidays between X-mas and new year 2009.
So what is it all about. I once discovered in the Oracle 11gR1 documentation a small entry in the xmlconfig.xsd XML Schema regarding NFS elements that look like that they are or will be used for enabling NFS functionality based on the Oracle XMLDB Protocol Server architecture. In those days, when Oracle 11gR1 was just of the shelve, I made a few attempts, based on the xdbconfig.xsd XML Schema to adjust the corresponding xdbconfig.xml file that controls the XDB Protocol Server functionality, to see what would happen. At that time I only was able to get this far (see the picture) and I promised myself that I should look deeper into it trying to figure out if I could get it working and/or what the concepts were that made it tick in the XMLDB architecture but somewhere down the line I just didn’t come to it and it got “forgotten” by me due to my daily DBA workload.
Automatic testing Oracle Service Bus using Hudson, maven and SoapUI
Feb 23rd
A lot of current projects are implementing some sort of service based architecture. Testing in this architecture becomes more complex. When implementing an OSB project with Scrum you test-automation is imperative. Scrum will require more frequent testing of your system. This is only feasible (in time and money) when you automate as much as possible.
Using soapUI you are able to create visually SOAP tests on your OSB implementation and running them against the defined infrastructure (develop, test, acceptance). SoapUI enables with easy tools to implements verification and validation of the responses of your OSB implementation. When running the test you are also able to set limits in SLA response times on all the calls. This way you are able to monitor depreciation of performance in older parts of your OSB implementation when adding new services.
You can record and edit your SOAP test easy with the soapUI interface and edit it later. When you maven-enable your project it is quite easy running your tests when you implement the “maven-soapui-plugin” (see my other posting http://technology.amis.nl/blog/3061/automated-soap-testing-with-maven). In the meantime version 3.0 of this plugin is released.
When implementing this with Hudson you do not have to convert the results.xml into a Surefire report. Hudson will manage this for you. Hudson will also enable you with an historical overview of all your test results.
Sneak Peek and what can come of it
Oct 26th
Last Tuesday we did a Preview of the upcoming OPP (Oracle PL/SQL Programming) Conference which will be held in Atlanta, Georgia soon.
This preview took place in our office in Nieuwegein, The Netherlands. About 17 people attended this free preview. At regular intervals we do free "Knowledge Center" presentations. Keep a close eye on our Agenda to see future events.
ADF DataBinding: Yet another thing it does for you.
Aug 17th
Today I encountered something that I have seen frequently. While developing an ADF application developers tend to invoke methods on an application module directly, instead of invoking them via the bindings framework. You might get some unexpected results and some additional work too…
Correcting this behavior afterwards can be very annoying and time-consuming. In this blog, just to let developers know, I describe what you could do to prevent this error. Read the rest of this entry »
DELETE in the MERGE statement
Jul 29th
The Merge statement was introduced in Oracle 9i and improved upon in Oracle 10g. In Oracle 9i only the INSERT and UPDATE parts were supported, in Oracle 10g DELETE was added. The "merge_update_clause" and "merge_insert_clause" became optional. The basic syntax for the MERGE statement:
DELETE can only occur in the "merge_update_clause" of the above schema. This means that it must occur in the WHEN MATCHED THEN clause. Until recent, I missed this part of the description of the "merge_update_clause" concerning the DELETE operation. First I will show you what I thought, then I’ll show you where the behavior is documented.
My ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2009
Jul 1st
Every year ODTUG – Oracle Development Tool User Group – organizes a conference, called Kaleidoscope. This time it was in Monterey, California.
If you have never been to this conference, you are missing out on something great. A lot of great presentations, great food, lots of time to network and meet a lot of great people.
Anyway, this year was fabulous again.
In this post some of the highlights of that conference.
Oracle Enhances XBRL Reporting Capabilities with UBmatrix, Inc.
Jun 27th
Oracle posted a press release about their involvement and commitment for UBMatrix XBRL technologies last Wednesday saying (among others):
"To help publicly held companies facilitate the preparation, publishing and automatic exchange of financial statements in XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language), Oracle will embed UBmatrix, Inc.’s leading XBRL technology into Oracle’s Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) System, Oracle announced today."
"Oracle and UBmatrix are also working together to provide enterprise class storage and management for XBRL-based information in Oracle® Database 11g. Using Oracle Database’s XML DB feature, organizations can easily and quickly store, access and query their XBRL data."
A lot of you might ask themselves: "Who are or what is UBMatrix?" and "How does it all fit in…?"
UBMatrix is one of those small but cool companies that have an idea and drive that idea to bigger heights. Their ideas about how to deal with XBRL and how to make it more succes full are very innovative. XBRL is an open standard to exchange and/or embed business and financial related data via XML. "Nothing more and nothing less…", but applying it has a great impact to other systems, sometimes called "the ripple effect".
XBRL is becoming the standard for financial information exchange and reporting demonstrated by the XBRL programs being driven by the SEC, FDIC, and the European Central Bank Supervisors. My Dutch Tax Office has embraced it and among others setup a taxonomy for XBRL (The Dutch Taxonomy Project). This "central hub" (the Dutch Tax Office) will eventually cause more and more organizations to exchange their data via XBRL (therefore the "ripple effect").
The setup for the Dutch Taxonomy project background is simple…
Enhancing fast queries using “Tapio-Indexes”
Jun 4th
During the years I have a lot of times encountered performance problems that ended up to be fast queries (less than 10ms) which are executed very much. In these situations the execution plans, from such queries can look like:
OPERATION OPTIONS OBJECT# NAME
-------------------- -------------------- ---------- -----------------------------------
SELECT STATEMENT .
SORT ORDER BY .
TABLE ACCESS BY INDEX ROWID 120713 XXX.TABLE_WITH_MANY_COLUMNS
INDEX RANGE SCAN 121558 XXX.INDEX_WITH_FEW_COLUMNS
In a lot of cases we deal with a query for example which is returning fewer columns than exists in the involved table like four, from an involved table having twenty columns. Although the execution plan looks already pretty “OK”, it still results in a query which is in top three most resource taking queries.
To enhance the query we can use “Fat Indexes” or nowadays better known “Tapio Indexes” (I call them like that nowadays). What are these kind of indexes…. In principle nothing really new, but for me a couple of years ago an (re)eye opener by Tapio Lahdenmaki. This Finish independent database performance consultant and instructor gave a presentation at Miracle Open World 2007 in Denmark, I attended. Tapio can present this topic in a very special way, and in my opinion “his message” should be known by all developers and dba’s.
Schrijf je in voor de ODTUG Sneak Preview op 15 juni 2009!
May 26th
Op maandag 15 juni 2009, een week voordat in Monterey de ODTUG 2009 plaats vindt, heb je de mogelijkheid om alvast te horen wat negen sprekers in de VS gaan presenteren, onder hen twee Oracle Aces en twee Oracle ACE directors.
- Aino Andriessen (AMIS Services) – ADF Development: More tales from the Trenches
- Lonneke Dikmans (Approach Alliance) – Top Ten Tips: Best Practices for Designing Services, Events, and Business Processes
- Olivier Dupont (iAdvise) – APEX at the Belgium airport
- Dimitri Gielis (APEX Evangelists) – Mastering an APEX page
- Roel Hartman (Logica) – How to integrate APEX and Oracle Forms?
- Lucas Jellema (AMIS Services) - Truth and Dare—The Story of How an Oracle Classic Stronghold Successfully Embraced SOA
- Toon Koppelaars (Rulegen) – Fat databases: A layered approach
- Ronald van Luttikhuizen (Approach Alliance) – Customer case: Implementing SOA in a database-centric environment
- Alex Nuijten (AMIS Services) – SQL Holmes – The case of the missing performance
In drie rondes kan steeds een keuze worden gemaakt uit drie presentaties over een aantal uiteenlopende onderwerpen, onder andere APEX, ADF, SOA en de database.
Dit jaar staat er zelfs één presentatie geprogrammeerd (van Dimitri Gielis) die exclusief op de ODTUG Sneak Preview bij te wonen is en uiteindelijk niet op de ODTUG te zien zal zijn.
Het is mogelijk om gratis deel te nemen aan deze unieke ODTUG Sneak Preview (aanmeldingsformulier)!!! Maar schrijf je snel in, want vol is vol!!!
De locatie van de Sneak Preview is het AMIS kantoor in Nieuwegein. De toegang tot de ODTUG Sneak Preview, het diner en de verfrissingen zijn gratis. Meer informatie over de presentaties vind je in de activiteitenagenda.
AMIS Query 18 Mei – Een Terugblik op Hotsos 2009
Apr 22nd
Begin maart 2009 werd in Irving, Texas, het internationale Oracle Performance Symposium Hotsos gehouden. Ook dit jaar stond het symposium garant voor inhoudelijke hoogstaande presentaties en discussies over performance. Vier Nederlanders, Jeroen Evers (Fameus), Toon Koppelaars (RuleGen), Gerwin Hendriksen (AMIS) en Marco Gralike (AMIS), hadden het genoegen om ter plekke te zijn en in de gelegenheid om al deze, over de aanwezigen uitgestorte (Oracle) performance verbeterende informatie, in zich op te nemen. Dit jaar was het Symposium sowieso bijzonder vanwege de 2 presentaties van Chris Date en een volledige in-depth training dag met Jonathan Lewis.
De AMIS Query “Een terugblik op Hotsos 2009”, op 18 mei aanstaande, zal een terugblik geven over het Hotsos Symposium van dit jaar en in gaan op vier, door de presentatoren, uitgekozen presentaties, onderwerpen, die op het Hotsos Symposium werden gegeven en die door ons Nederlanders als opmerkelijk werden ondervonden en/of een erg interessant onderwerp is om (ook) over te presenteren.
Jeroen Evers, een van de weinige Oracle Certified Masters in Nederland en OakTable lid, zal inhoud geven op deze avond aan de door hem bijgewoonde presentatie van Amit Poddar over “One Pass Distinct Sampling”. Een pittig onderwerp. Het is echter aan Jeroen toevertrouwd dat hij ons, netzo als in zijn dagelijkse werkzaamheden, een helder beeld kan schetsen m.b.t. de “in’s and out’s” over dit onderwerp.
Toon Koppelaars, zelf dit jaar ook weer presentator op Hotsos, mede auteur van het door velen geroemde boek “Applied Mathematics for Database Professionals” en OakTable lid, gaat deze avond presenteren over zijn visie t.a.v. de presentatie van “Using the PL/SQL Hierarchical Performance Profiler” van Bryn LLewellyn (Oracle) over een van de nieuwe performance profiler tools van de firma Oracle.
Gerwin Hendriksen, Principal Database Consultant en een van de Expertise Managers van AMIS, zal in de rebound, zijn presentatie “Practical Use of Method GAPP to Find Performance Bottlenecks for Business Processes in Complex Architectures” ten gehore geven. Dit jaar werd Gerwin voor de 2e maal gevraagd om te presenteren op Hotsos, maar door het ter plekke kapot gaan van hardware, was hij niet instaat om zijn presentatie kracht bij te zetten en in kleur en geur uit de doeken te doen. Nu eenmalig op herhaling.
Marco Gralike, AMIS, Principal Database Consultant en Oracle ACE voor het specialisme Oracle XMLDB, zal deze avond verhalen over het Symposium zelf door middel van een korte introductie over het fenomeen “Hotsos” en, later op de dag, over Christian Antognini’s presentatie over “Bloom Filters”.
Zie voor meer informatie over de Hotsos sprekers en de gegeven presentaties: Hotsos 2009
Zoals altijd is iedereen van harte uitgenodigd om gratis de AMIS Query “Een terugblik op Hotsos” bij te wonen en aan het begin van de avond zal er eten aanwezig zijn om het navolgende performance presentatie geweld snel en stabiel te kunnen doorstaan.
Schrijf je in via de: AMIS Activiteiten pagina.
Marco
