Weblog for the AMIS Technology corner
Data Warehousing & BI
Report from Oracle Open World – op maandag 17 oktober, 17.00 uur bij AMIS in Nieuwegein
Oct 11th
Het zal je niet zijn ontgaan dat vorige week in San Francisco Oracle Open World woedde. In een krappe week legde Oracle voor zo’n 45.000 bezoekers de strategie neer, de roadmap voor tientallen productlijnen en ook een serie nieuwe aankondigingen. De meest opvallende lanceringen: de Oracle Public Cloud, de Oracle NoSQL database en Big Data Applicance, de Exalytics machine voor BI ‘at the speed of thought’, de algemene beschikbaarheid van Fusion Applications en Oracle Social Networking.
AMIS was met zeven medewerkers aanwezig op Oracle Open World – om sessies te bezoeken, presentaties te geven, met productmanagement te overleggen, nieuwe producten te bekijken, op de demo grounds met productontwikkelaars te spreken, ervaringen uit te wisselen met peers van over de hele wereld… enzovoort.
Op Maandag 17 oktober verzorgt deze AMIS equipe een presentatie waarin de belangrijkste bevindingen vanaf de conferenties worden gedeeld. Bijvoorbeeld: wat wil Oracle met die Public Cloud? En: wat is de roadmap voor SOA Suite en OSB? Wat gebeurt er met APEX? Is Database 12c al binnenkort te verwachten? Is de opmars van ADF verder doorgezet – en wat houdt dat precies in? Wat zijn de andere aankondigingen van Oracle – zoals NoSQL, Big Data Appliance, Exalytics en Oracle Social Networking? Verwacht ook de eerste screenshots van Enterprise Manager 12.
Deze avond is ook een goede gelegenheid om tips te krijgen over de specialismen van de toekomst, de manier waarop Oracle mobilisatie van applicaties aanpakt en hoe de virtualisatie verdergaat. De achtergronden bij WebLogic en de nieuwste inzichten rondom data integratie (OWB, ODI, GoldenGate) passeren de revue. Hoe staat ADF ervoor? En wat is huidige situatie van WebCenter? Is de integratie van OSB in JDeveloper al gereed? En hoe zijn de plannen voor SOA Suite? Hoe vult Oracle de verdere ontwikkeling van BPM (Suite) in?
Hardware (appliances en de Exa-familie), virtualisatie (Oracle Virtual Machine en Virtual Assembly Builder), operating system (Oracle Unbreabable Enterprise Linux en Solaris) en de Exabus vormen het fundament voor de ‘engineered to work together’ configuraties. Ook hierover de recent ontwikkelingen belicht.
We kijken naar de status van Java: hoe staan de community en het platform ervoor? Wat gebeurt er met SE, FX, ME en EE? Zit de sfeer er een beetje goed in?
Uiteraard is er volop gelegenheid tot vragen stellen en discussiëren.
De sessie vindt plaats in Nieuwegein (Edisonbaan 15), begint (stipt) om 17.00 (inloop vanaf 16.30 uur) en duurt – onderbroken door diner – tot pakweg 21.00 uur. Toegang is gratis.
Zie voor details en om je aan te melden: http://www.amis.nl/evenementen/616
Database Transaction Recorder – Adding Who to When and What to make Flashback take over from Journalling tables
Feb 6th
In previous articles, I have suggested that the arrival of the Flashback Data Archive in Oracle RDBMS 11g allowed us to finally say goodbye to journalling tables. Keeping track of all changes and previous states of our records in our own dedicated tables is no longer required, was my statement (for example in http://technology.amis.nl/blog/2453/oracle-11g-total-recall-flashback-in-the-hands-of-database-designers-and-application-developers-at-last-and-the-end-of-journalling-tables). Not only would using Flashback Data Archives require less programming, it improves performance for DML operations substantially and also provides a lot of functionality at our fingertips, as Flashback Queries easily incorporate historical records in straightforward SQL queries and using dbms_flashback we can even turn back time and regard all data as it was back then, using the same application and all the same queries.
In the not too distant past, Flashback knew quite a long list of limitations that made it almost impossible to make any changes to a table definition and still retain the historical data. With recent improvements in 11gR2, most of these limitations have been removed and DDL such as adding, renaming and removing columns and constraints is now possible for tables with an associated Flashback Data Archive.
One element of journaling tables is missing in the Flashback Data Archive and from the Flashback Queries. In addition to the When (timestamp for the DML operation) and the What (type of operation and the old values of the data record) it would be nice to know WHO caused the change to occur.
It is important to discuss right at this point what we mean by WHO in this respect. In the past that used to be the USER – the database user committing the transaction. However, in today’s multi-tier world with Service Bus components and Web Applications accessing the database through pooled Database Connections, the database user is usually not indicative at all of the real user behind a transaction. The end user behind the operation is usually (or should be) available from sys_context(‘userenv’, ‘client_identifier’), set by dbms_session.set_identifier() or directly on the connection (in JDBC for example). For our journalling purposes, we need to record or retrieve the real perpetrator and therefore the client identifier.
This article describes ways to record and later on find the client identifier value at the time of the transaction.
AMIS@OOW
Oct 7th
Yesterday evening we had our annual Oracle Open World review at our office in Nieuwegein. Around eighty people attended and all were very involved with the session. Five AMIS employees were at Oracle Open World, and each one covered one area of interest.
Before dinner Lucas gave an overview of the trends and topics that were covered at Oracle Open World. Just to convey the sheer size of OOW, Peter illustrated this by facts (number of people attending, number of lunches served, etc) as well as by photos. I’m still very impressed that they covered a four lane street (Howard street) by a tent, just to serve lunch… amazing.
Marco and myself gave an overview of what AMIS was doing at OOW, as well as the Oracle ACE Directors briefing right before OOW started.
There were a number of goodies that we took from Oracle Open World to give away this evening. We decided to do it a little different this year, we organized a BuzzWord Bingo. Each of the attendees was given a bingo sheet with some of the buzzwords that would be covered during our presentations.
Before we went for dinner six people had bingo and got their goodies to take home.
This time we had a Mexican Style dinner, very lovely. Lots of discussion of the topics and trends covered in the first part of the evening.
After dinner the more technical details where covered. Starting with Marco who covered the new hardware as well as Oracle Linux and Oracle VM. Then it was my turn to tell about the Oracle Database, SQL Developer, SQL Developer Datamodeler and APEX.
Peter talked about the SOA Suite and Fusion Middleware. Aino had the last slot, and covered JavaOne.
Around 21:15 (9:15 PM) all session had finished, and the bar “Cafe@AMIS” was opened. About an hour later it was time to call it a night. All in all a very succesful, very informative evening.
Thank you all for coming to our “show” and hopefully we’ll do the same for Oracle Open World 2011.
Oracle Open World 2010 presentation: Forms2Future: the ongoing journey into the future for Oracle based organizations
Sep 21st
Many organizations around the world have adopted Oracle technology for developing custom applications. Over the past two decades, they may have used PL/SQL, Reports, Forms, Designer, Portal or the Web PL/SQL Toolkit. Many of these organizations have come to face new challenges: more agility or functionality, new user groups or channels or more efficient maintenance. Or they fear getting stuck in the past, running out of support or qualified and motivated resources. What is the right way to approach the future? What mix of tools, how and when to adopt which new technology, how to build a business case? This session recounts various more and less successful warstories of organizations that embarked on a journey into the future.
Peter and I today did our session together about the road to the future for organization that heavily us Oracle software. It was a good session with a lot of interesting questions. It is quite clear to me how much confusion there is, how many organizations are struggling with defining their future plans. How many people hear mixed messages from for example Oracle sales people. And how they simply would like to get a clear, untainted and unbiased picture of what the options (and reasons) for making future oriented moves. This presentation for many attendees proved a valuable step in that direction. We would like to continue these conversations!
Oracle RDBMS 11gR2 – new style hierarchical querying using Recursive Subquery Factoring
Sep 29th
Oracle Database 11g Release 2 introduces the successor to the good old Connect By based hierarchical querying, called Recursive Subquery Factoring. The basics are described in a previous article: http://technology.amis.nl/blog/6104/oracle-rdbms-11gr2-goodbye-connect-by-or-the-end-of-hierarchical-querying-as-we-know-it. This article will show some additional examples of using this recursive subquery factoring syntax.
The essence of this recursiveness: the subquery consists of two queries unioned together. The first query returns the root-nodes, the starting points in the tree or network. The second query is used to continually retrieve the next step or level: it refers to the subquery itself and finds the next node level based on the levels (root and zero or more previously retrieved levels) already retrieved by the subquery.
In code:
Oracle Database 11gR2 – New analytical function NTH_VALUE
Sep 15th
You are probably familiar with the FIRST_VALUE and LAST_VALUE analytical functions that were introduced some time ago into the Oracle RDBMS, in the 9iR2 release I believe (or at least that is when they made their way into the Standard Edition). These values are used to find the first respectively last value in a window in a partition that has been ordered in a certain way.
Oracle introduces a new, related function in 11gR2, called NTH_VALUE. Instead of simply the first or last value in an analytical window, we can ask for a specific row number, such as 2nd row (ND_VALUE?), the 7th or the 223th. This article shows the syntax for this new function.
The “X” Product – An X(ML) Database Opportunity?
Oct 1st
"Exadata – Extreme Performance Warehousing", that’s how the presentation on the last Friday morning from Oracle Open World started (Orig. Presentation Title was "Oracle’s New Database Accelerator: Query Processing Revolutionized") while speaking about the new database machine. And indeed it was a revolution and it took the blogosphere by night. My notes from this session are already "for historic use" because a lot of people already blogged about it.
Another nice side effect is that Kevin Closson started blogging again. If you want to know all about there is to know regarding the "Exadata" hardware then you now can read up on Kevin’s: "Exadata Posts" page and FAQ’s. It must have been hard for Kevin not to blog about this cool piece of machinery and its smart database software.
So if you want you can skip the following, because it is old news
Oracle Data Mining meets performance method “GAPP”
Sep 29th
Sunday 21 September 2008 at Oracle Open World, I had the opportunity to present my method "GAPP" once more (HOTSOS 2008 and Planboard may 2008). This time I also mentioned how the method can be used with Service Oriented Architectures (SOA). For people not knowing what "GAPP" is all about I give a small introduction to the method. I also like to tell you why I started with “GAPP” in the first place and what the added value is of the method above other methods.
"GAPP" means General Approach Performance Profiling and can be used to find out where in your architecture the most wait time variance can be explained from your business process. "GAPP" makes it possible with very little data, in higly complex technical infrastructures, still be able to find the performance bottlenecks for a specific business process. The nice thing about the method is that it is not only able to pinpoint a bottleneck which is already there, it is also able to pinpoint a future bottleneck in a normal running system. This is something what only "GAPP" can do.
What makes “GAPP” special:
- The method can analyse the full infrastructure, so from front-end to back-end
- The method is not focussing on one piece of the infrastructure, like only the database
- The method is able to predict how the response time of a business process will react on changes in involved factors
- The method is able to predict when a certain bottleneck will evolve to a real problem
Extreme performance introduced by patchset 11.1.0.7 smart scan
Sep 25th
Larry yesterday did his keynote here at Oracle Open World introducing the "Oracle(R) Exadata Storage Server". This morning I attended a session about the technical details behind the server. In principal the server works with 8 nodes running RAC on Oracle Enterprise Linux 5. For the storage management ASM is used and since 11.1.0.7 smart scan has been introduced. Smart scan has been designed for very big data sources used in queries, like in Data Warehouses, where tables from tera bytes are common. In principle the following is accomplished using smart scan:
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OOW 2007: (most) presentations available for download
Nov 21st
Most of the presentations for the sessions presented at Oracle Open World 2007, last week in San Francisco, can be downloaded from the Content Catalog at: http://www28.cplan.com/cc176/catalog.jsp. You will need to use the username/password combination cboracle/oraclec6 to download presentations. At http://www.oracle.com/openworld/2007/keynotes.html are all the keynotes, of which the one by Ed Abbo is probably the most interesting one.
