Weblog for the AMIS Technology corner
Archive for October, 2006
Live Report from Oracle Open World 2006 – (Dutch) op Donderdag 9 November, 18.00 bij AMIS
Oct 31st
Van 21 tot en met 26 oktober vond in San Francisco het grootste Oracle evenement ooit plaats: Oracle Open World 2006 met 42.000 bezoekers, 1400+ sessies en een onwaarschijnlijke hoeveelheid informatie. Marco en Lucas hebben op OOW 2006 AMIS vertegenwoordigd en zullen in deze sessie verslag doen. De sessie begint om 18.00 uur met een gezamenlijk diner en duurt tot pakweg 21.00 uur.
Verwacht ondermeer informatie over het Unbreakable Linux programma (dat Red Hat aan de rand van afgrond zet), het nieuwe Web Center (dat Oracle Portal wel eens de das zou kunnen omdoen), over Marco’s geheime ontmoeting met Ken Jacobs en met Oracle’s nieuwe product voor Business Process Analyse. Read the rest of this entry »
Extracting Master-Detail data from an XMLType with a single SQL statement
Oct 31st
Probably this is old news for all of you who have lots of experience with XMLDB, but for me this is something new. In order for me to remember this sort of stuff, I need to write it down (I am getting older, you know) hence this blog. What I needed was a way to extract the data from an XML and insert all the values into two relational tables with a Master-Detail relation between them. The XML was initially stored in a table with a column of XMLType. This is the structure of the XML that needed to be processed:
<SinterklaasWishlists>
<child>
<name>Tim</name>
<wishlist>
<article>
<artno>21491269</artno>
<description>Crane</description>
<price>12.50</price>
</article>
<article>
<artno>21499517</artno>
<description>Keyboard</description>
<price>10</price>
</article>
<article>
<artno>21521591</artno>
<description>Crime Investigation Game</description>
<price>9.95</price>
</article>
</wishlist>
</child>
</SinterklaasWishlists> Read the rest of this entry »
Oracle Enterprise Linux available [ for free! ]
Oct 28th
Oracle Enterprise Linux is now available from the Oracle unbreakable 2 program and ISO’s can be downloaded for free – see Sergio’s blog here: http://www.orablogs.com/sergio/archives/001838.html. I heared from Dimitri Gielis on the OOW2006 that Sergio switched from the APEX team to the new linux team.
The ISO’s are based on the RedHat distributions sets but stripped from all the labels. As add-on you now can get your support from Oracle as described on linux.oracle.com and http://www.oracle.com/technologies/linux/index.html, or for starters info look here: http://technology.amis.nl/blog/?p=1386.
ISO’s are available for the 32 bit and 64 bit Linux hardware environments. Both sets are "update 4" (unsure if they were build via RedHat AS or ES versions?). RedHat EL 32 has update 8 as it’s last distro. All in all – interesting stuff.
Update:
I extracted the ISO’s and they are called R4-U4-I386-diskx (where x is 1..4), so I guess it is save to assume that they were based on RedHat 4.
Oracle Business Process Analyst (BPA) Suite for Business Process Modeling, Analysis and Simulation (live from OOW 2006)
Oct 27th
"We can learn from SAPs lessons learned" was one of the justifications for working with IDS Scheer on BPM. BPM includes a set of activites that organizations perform to either optimze their business processes or adapt them to new organizational needs. I am sitting in Salon 9 of the Mariott Hotel in San Fransisco and about to see the unveiling of the Oracle BPA product – which is by and large a renbranded/relabeled version of the ARIS tool from German company IDS Scheer. With Oracle BPA, the Oracle SOA Suite will be complemented with functionality for Modelling Business Processes, on an architectural and analysis level – feeding into the more technical design level of BPEL. Oracle BPA also support Simulation of Business Processes and works together with Oracle Business Activity Monitoring for monitoring the actual execution of the processes.
Oracle BPA is on a "very aggresive timeline" and though Oracle staff are not allowed to give any definite dates, the suggestion between the lines was that Oracle BPA will be released early (very early?) 2007.
Read the rest of this entry »
OOW2K6 – Unbreakable Linux – The next stage
Oct 26th
Unbreakable Linux
Mr. Larry Ellison’s keynote blew everything of the table for today; at least it did for me and let’s be honest, this is (IMHO) great news. OK, the rumors were there for a long time, but then again, it was never out in the open and confirmed.
Armored pinguin
Worst practices when using Oracle JDBC Drivers – great presentation by Douglas Surber
Oct 25th
I just came out of – well actually, as I am writing this down I am still in it – a very good session on the Oracle JDBC drivers by Douglas Surber, principal developer for Oracle JDBC Drivers. In a very powerful delivery, Douglas discussed the ten worst practices – and their proper counterparts – with the use of the Oracle JDBC drivers. I will try to sum them up as I understand them. One thing that is very clear to me is that a good understanding of the JDBC drivers – and recent changes in them – can be very useful to put it mildly for improving our applications.
Another very important conclusion: the versions of the Oracle JDBC driver and the Oracle database are not tied together. Oracle JDBC Driver 10gR2 can be used with any supported database version so there is no good reason for not using the latest version of the JDBC drivers, even for organisations working with 8i or 9i databases . Read the rest of this entry »
OOW2K6 – and Mr. Kyte has left the building…
Oct 25th
Tuesday – Getting into the spirit
I am just joking, so far I haven’t seen an Elvis look-a-like in town, but I would be very interested how Thomas Kyte felt about his session this morning for this huge audience.
The conference paper
Mr. Thomas Kyte
But I will start with the beginning. I started off this Tuesday morning in the Hilton Hotel, with Thomas Kyte’s presentation "Things you think you know". I hadn’t really planned this session, but I am glad, I am really glad I did. Mr. Kyte is a very gifted speaker and knows what he speaking of, which helps 
.
Despite the fact that I had sometimes the feeling: "OK, what’s the big deal. It should be common knowledge or at least, if you use your common sense, it shouldn’t be a new topic to you". The brilliant metaphors he used, were really priceless, funny and with al lot of wit addressed to the audience, so if that didn’t trigger them to think next time, then I don’t know how you should do it better. Read the rest of this entry »
OOW 2006: Keynote speech at Oracle Develop by Thomas Kurian
Oct 24th
Yesterday (Monday) was the Keynote speech by Thomas Kurian, Oracle VP, that started the Oracle Develop event. In what can be described as a crisp, well organized presentation, Kurian gave an overview of the most important components of the Oracle Development Tools portfolio. In quick succession, we saw introductions and demonstration on SQL Developer, Application Express, EJB 3.0 & JPA, Java Server Faces, ADF Faces, the brief Spring interlude (see The Spring Framework and Oracle – best of pals
), and a lot about the SOA Suite. Then there were announcemens of the Oracle Developer Depot and the Oracle Development Challenge (see earlier posts on our weblog).
Although it was a good presentation Read the rest of this entry »
The Spring Framework and Oracle – best of pals
Oct 24th
One of the themes regularly stressed during the Oracle Develop event (part of Oracle Open World 2006) is Oracle’s key interest in and support for the Spring Framework. Oracle will provide support for developing Spring based applications in JDeveloper, for example through smart bean configuration file editors and easy deployment of Spring powered applications. Oracle 10g Application 10.1.3.1 has facilities for easy manipulation of Spring powered MBeans through JMX. Then there is a lot of Spring usage within Oracle’s products (not necessarily highly visible to us, but still nice to know).
Spring 2.0 is shipping with the Toplink Essentials Reference Implementation of the EJB 3.0 Java Persistence API. There has been close collaboration between the Spring team on the one hand and Oracle’s Mike Keith and others in the Toplink team on the other. There is also further collaboration between the Spring developers and Oracle on SCA (Service Component Architecture – see for example this announcement).
Another example of collaboration was the little play Read the rest of this entry »
OOW2K6 – Newbie impressions…
Oct 24th
It’s amazing how much Lucas already put to "paper", despite all the mishaps we already encountered. The last two days I lost track on Lucas because he has completely different interests / agenda, and of course he also has to prepare for his sessions as a speaker.
Anyway here’s my input to all the great posts on the web already done (have a look at http://www.orablogs.com for most of them). As pointed out a time ago, my main interest is XML DB. Beside those sessions, I will also pinpoint some on performance, Oracle Content Directory and Open Source speeches, like those on Linux and PHP (future directions). These are old interests with whom I try to keep up, but can’t spend so much time on as in the past, because XML DB forces me to read and learn about stuff I put aside me a long time ago, or in other words neglected, for instance object (orientated) relational objects.
As a newbie (so I am fitting the profile) on this conference, I already missed apparently some important keynotes, but reading the posts of others today, I also realized that this makes my life a little bit easier, because it is now out in the open and I can address them, to a certain point, by name (11g).
See the following:
http://www.internetnews.com/ent-news/article.php/3639621
http://www.rittman.net/2006/10/23/oracle-open-world-days-12-database-roadmaps
I will try to make my impressions, as a newbie, a little bit more colorful (pictures!), because I really enjoyed the posts made by my colleague Alex, on one of the last ODTUG meetings in the States where he spoke and attended… 
Read the rest of this entry »
