I am having fun today. Today I started in earnest with my preparation for the RedDatabase Symposium, a very promising three-day event on the Oracle Database, with a total of nine day-long sessions on topics such as Optimizing Oracle RAC and Oracle BI EE as well as Oracle Data Guard and the Oracle Query Optimizer. Somewhere in the heart of the program, you will find a session that I will present. Titled: Advanced Application Development with the Oracle Database. This symposium takes place in The Hague – some 12 minutes light-rail-ride from my home. Quite comfortable – and I could spare the organizers the cost of my hotel room.
When I agreed to do this presentation, I was not quite sure what it would be on. But as I am starting to get a feeling about everything I want to talk about. The second half of the session gets off to flying start with the statement: "SOA is BAD". (I will explain what I mean by that. Hint: BAD is an acronym).
For the past four years I have spent a lot of time at getting to know the database better. From an Application Architect’s and Developer’s point of view. Do not expect me to talk about SGA, Trace files, Latches or a split-brain RAC. But I will tell you about the facilities available in the Oracle RDBMS (10g and a bit of 11g) for putting together a sound application architecture and making the database work for you and your application.
We will discuss the changing role of the RDBMS in a multi-tier environment, where the clients are no longer Client/Server Forms applications and the database can be accessed from virtually anywhere. How to deal with (Java) Architects who strive for ‘database independence’ and ‘database portability’? What should be done where in such more complex architectures.
How to make the database work in a SOA environment? How can we apply some of the key concepts from SOA in our database – even if we do not formally adopt SOA and have no BPEL engine or Enterprise Service Bus.
What can you to do make the Database more active: not just responding to queries, but proactively sending out messages and engaging the help of others – services within the firewall or even on the internet! How can we optimally leverage database functionality to build relations with the environment – after all the database is no longer a lone ranger!
Of course SQL is an important element during most of the day. I am still amazed at the SQL functionality I have learned between 2004 and today. Back in 2004 I thought myself a more than decent SQL programmer. I have come to realize that back then I certainly knew not half of what Oracle had to offer, and today it offers much more than that. I hope to surprise you with a number of valuable, useful yet fairly unknown functions and features. And if you do know them all, you might well win the quiz that I will weave throughout the presentation.
I am sure that attending this session will make you a better informed Oracle specialist – I know that it will do that for me – who is even more equipped for working with the Oracle database in an increasingly more complex environment. With some understanding of what the environment expects from the database and what it has to offer. I welcome discussion, so please come and think along.
Some of the topics I have just prepared – heavily borrowing from material gathered over the years in presentations at Oracle Open World, ODTUG, OBUG and during many training-sessions at AMIS – include:
- How to keep SQL in the database (and out of the client)
- Building a Service API using Views and PL/SQL (leveraging cursors, table functions and collections)
- Business Rule implementation by any means possible (including Unique Expression Based Index, Materialized View, Compound Trigger)
- Proxy Authentication, light-weight client users and Application Context
- How to stop time (sysdate) and how to go back in time (Flashback)
- Using Virtual Private Database for Organisation, Period and Language context enforcement
- START WITH hierarchical queries new style (using connect by queries in combination with in line views)
- Sending Chat Messages from the database
- Publishing RSS feeds from and consuming RSS feeds into the database
- Increase perceived performance
To read in more detail what exactly I have promised to present and demonstrate, you can look at my session’s program.
In case you are interested in this symposium, I would very much like to see on the 11th of March. I think it is going to be good fun – as well as quite useful and interesting. You can register at the website for the RedDatabase Symposium at: http://www.reddatabase-symposium.com/RS0803 . If you already have registered for a different session on Tuesday, you are of course welcome to switch and attend mine (I believe until a week before the actual event).
