Woke up very early this morning due to the time differences between the States and Europe, but this helped me to focus on my first speaker session on the Hotel Marriot premises. My room had some very cute pillars that, I hope not for too many people (76 in total), blocked their sight on the presentation slides. Although I had prepared myself, I got stuck searching for words. I re-caught myself halfway during the presentation, but because the stuff I presented dealt with a lot off concept details, I think I lost some people along the way.
My next sessions were Hand-on Lab sessions from Geoff Lee the Principle Product Manager for XMLDB. In those sessions (I followed both sessions that day), you could learn all about managing structured and unstructured XML with Oracle XML Database 11g. The hand-on sessions dealt with
- Using Oracle XMLDB to store, query and access XML and relational data
- Performing in-place XML Schema evolution
- Oracle XMLDB Web Services for SOA
A lot of the demo’s were based on using SQL Developer of JDeveloper. Avoiding the use off these and directly executing the SQL scripts via SQL*Plus, after reading the examples and understanding them, saved me a lot of time. Time I needed, because it took a time to start-up the VMPlayer demo environment. The demo’s on this environment gave a good impression of the strong points XMLDB has to offer. The JDeveloper demo of the XMLDB Webservices for SOA was a good example of how to build and make use off Native Database Web Service functionality and WSDL. The manual also already had the sessions for Tuesday, which I did examine in the second hour. The examples dealt with:
- Using Binary XML and XMLIndex to aggregate and query unstructured XML data sources
- Using Binary XML, XMLIndex and XQuery to store and Query Unstructured XML Data
Especially the first one was interesting. It contained a good example of how to build a (aggregated) RSS feed while using XMLDB functionality.
I guess I will make someone lucky, by me skipping the hands on lab presentations on Tuesday. On to the next sessions…
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Any presentations or seminars with hands-on training are a good way to assess whether or not a speaker have been effective in informing and making his audience understand the concepts.
I double checked. They were the courses of Oracle Open World 2007, that were already on the OTN Website (the part that is dealing with the XMLDB Functionality)…
You were lucky with your XMLDB hands-on. I was in one of those, and it took me 45 minutes to get to a point where I could do the exercises. I was signed up for a second one and I decided to go somewhere else. Glad it didn’t sour me on all of the hands on sessions because I went to a pretty good two on ADF 11g and a GREAT preview of SQL Developer Modeling.