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OpenSQLCamp was a huge success! I took videos of most of the sessions (we only had 3 video cameras, and 4 rooms, and 2 sessions were not recorded). Unfortunately, I was busy doing administrative stuff for opensqlcamp for the opening keynote and first 15 minutes of the session organizing, and when I got to the planning board, it was already full….so I was not able to give a session.

• Comparing Non-Relational Databases: MongoDB, Tokyo Tyrant, CouchDB by Igal Koshevoy of Pragmaticraft
• Drizzle Client Rewrite – Clark Boylan leads the requirements and design discussion for rewriting the Drizzle Client
• Drizzle Plugin Hacking
• Drizzle is Not MySQL with Changes – Brian Aker gives a talk on Drizzle, and how Drizzle is not MySQL.
• Fractal Trees – by Bradley Kuszmaul of Tokutek
• Geographic Operators in SQL (PostGIS) by Webb Sprague
• Goal-Driven Performance – Peter Zaitsev speaks about how to achieve goal-driven performance.
• Graph Engine for MySQL – by Antony Curtis
• Intro to Cassandra
• An Intro to CouchDB: What caught Ubuntu’s eye by Mike Miller (Cloudant)
• Maria – MySQL founder Monty Widenius talks about Maria, and the past, present and future of MySQL.



• Memcached functions in MySQL
• mk-query-digest – Baron Schwartz talks about mk-query-digest, which parses logs and can capture live MySQL action to analyze, transform, filter, review and report on queries.
• MongoDB
• SQL For the Insane – Dan Colish presents SQL For the Insane – crazy SQL tricks presented at the November 2009 OpenSQLCamp in Portland, Oregon.
• SQL vs. NoSQL Panel moderated by Ronald Bradford and including:
  
  • Brian Aker – Drizzle
  • Monty Widenius – MariaDB
  • Selena Deckelmann – PostgreSQL
  
  
  • Eric Evans – Cassandra
  • Mike Dirolf – MongoDB
  • Mike Miller – CouchDB

• PBMS, BLOB, S3 Storage and Backup – Barry Leslie of Primebase talks about PBMS, BLOB, S3 Storage and backup with the PBMS Daemon.
• Operations Aspects to Running DBs in the Cloud – Joe Williams from Cloudant talks about: automation (config management, dynamically adding nodes) performance (adding nodes to increase performance, disk tuning) and availability (what if a node goes down?)
• Speak HTTP to your Database – John David Duncan speaks about lessons learned from mod_ndb
• Storage Engine API – Bradley Kuszmaul of Tokutek describes his ideas for a storage engine API for MySQL.
• Using and Optimizing Databases on Flash by Peter Zaitsev
• Xtrabackup tricks – Peter Zaitsev talks about Xtrabackup tricks.

Lightning Talks (same as previously posted, nothing new below):


• All the lightning talks below in one continuous video (just over 54 minutes total)




• The Graph Engine (Antony Curtis)


• Cluster/J, a new set of Java APIs to MySQL Cluster 5.1 (John David Duncan)


• Sphinx, the fulltext storage engine (Peter Zaitsev)


• iiBench, the Indexed Insertion Benchmark (Bradley Kuszmaul of Tokutek)


• JJtree in Coco


• Integrating OSS with Windows (Tom Hanrahan of Microsoft)


• Trainwreck, an agent for MySQL replication (Domas Mituzas)


• Column Stores (David Lutz of Infobright)


• I Play With Data, about doing real statistical calculations of data, when SQL gets in the way (Joseph di Paolantonio)


• Your Guide to NoSQL (Brian Aker)


• PL/Parrot The call for PL/Parrot in Postgres is put out there (Jonathan “Duke” Leto)

It always seems cold when it’s time for the UKOUG annual conference in Birmingham, and duly it turned out to be the coldest day of the winter so far. It seems somewhat eerily quiet at the conference today, but maybe that is to do with the ukoug holding multiple conferences throughout the year for the [...]

I'm doing a self-paced ADF 11g training class. And I wanted to use version control to make it easier to recover from mistakes. While I have been playing with GIT - I wanted to use Subversion since it has native... mark.wilcox

Everybody is posting about their agenda so  I think  it is my turn.

I’m pretty sure , I will come up with something to share with you.

 

10:05 – 12:05 – Practical Oracle Capacity Planning – Tanel Poder

12:35 – 13:35 – The Oracle Wait Interface is Useless (sometimes) James Morle-Tanel Poder

13:50 – 14:50 – Parallel Processing -Christian Antognini  or Latch and Mutex Contention Troubleshooting- Tanel Poder

15:15 – 16:00  Anatomy of a SQL Tuning Session Wolfgang Breitling

 

With this agenda, I have to miss  ”How to backup and recover enormous databases”  by Husnu Sensoy  and “Good indexing-Show CBO where to go” by Piet de Visser (I hope I can catch his presentation at some of the SIGs,   according to me he is one of the best presenters of Oracle World I watched so far very entertaining and teaching) so I will be a bit sorry at the end of the day. I really hate to choose between parallel sessions

Hope to catch some of you there.

http://www.oracle.com/webapps/events/EventsDetail.jsp?p_eventId=101955&src=6773869&src=6773869&Act=85
See you there

Oracle released 11g R1 Patchset 1 has now been released on all supported platforms. Posted via email from Virtual Identity Dialogue... mark.wilcox

• The Tom Kyte Blog: http://asktom.oracle.com/tkyte/ Pointers to the material that was previously hosted on http://asktom.oracle.com/tkyte
• SQL Profiles [PDF] Paper about SQL Profiles by Christian Antognini
• Articles & Presentations by Joel Goodman A list of User Group presentations and articles that Joel wrote or co-authored and published in the past few years. Presentations were made to the UK Oracle User Group Conference, at DBA SIGs or both.
• Articles & Presentations by Harald van Breederode A list of papers Harald (co)-wrote and published over the last few years as well as presentations he created and presented at various user group meetings throughout Europe.

Related articles:

• links for 2006-08-04
• links for 2006-07-21
• links for 2006-08-11

The JSR 316 (Java EE 6) has been approved by the “Executive Committee for SE/EE”. See the vote result details here.

It is interesting to see that the Web Profile has no optional component. In fact all these guys are required:

• Servlet 3.0
• JavaServer Pages (JSP) 2.2
• Expression Language (EL) 2.2
• Debugging Support for Other Languages (JSR-45) 1.0
• Standard Tag Library for JavaServer Pages (JSTL) 1.2
• JavaServer Faces (JSF) 2.0
• Common Annotations for Java Platform (JSR-250) 1.1
• Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) 3.1 Lite
• Java Transaction API (JTA) 1.1
• Java Persistence API (JPA) 2.0
• Bean Validation 1.0
• Managed Beans 1.0
• Interceptors 1.1
• JSR-299 1.0
• JSR-330 1.0

You can find all specs (Java EE 6, Web Profile and Managed Bean) here. Looks like there are now three standards that less or more do (somehow) Dependency Injection:

• Managed Beans
• JSR 299
• JSR 330

As the Managed Bean was optional for a JSF 2.0 implementation, it is now (somewhat) required to be implemented. Well Apache MyFaces did that already… And, of course, the JSF RI /Mojarra/ did that too.

Despite a number of useful blog entries out there it seems that calling EJB 3 from BPEL is still stumping people so thought I would go through the steps.  Note that these are much easier than in earlier releases of... antony.reynolds

Yesterday we spent the day trial to solve this problem. The actual solution, once the problem was found, took a couple of minutes to solve. Usually this issue will arise when there is a network misconfiguration. We did check that... alejandro.vargas

My agenda for day 2:  9:45 Bob Mycroft – Database connections 10:55 Graham Wood – What’s new in 11g 12:05 Connor McDonald – 11g for Developers 13:15 ME – Beginners’ Guide to Partitioning 15:00 Paul Hancock – Database Character Sets 15:55 Luca Canali – Compressing very large data sets 16:50 Alex Gorbachev – Connection Management 18:05 Me – back in the UKOUG lounge [...]

I am presenting since 2007. My first “appearance” was in Birmingham and like Alex Gorbachev said in one of his blog posts, this conference is special for me. Probably also due to the X-mas atmosphere outside; everything has a comfy and warm look and feel (despite the weather). From time to time, I ***SPAM*** people with a small token of “Thank You”. “Small” is actually not that true, in this case you could kill someone or something with it. Its a “thanks” for time spend too clear some stuff up for me and or supported/pushed me in taking the extra mile (despite my lack of confidence, thinking I had it not in me). Anyway…

Since 2006, my token of saying “Thank You” to some people; I will give away a totally useless, but also typical Dutch traditional present. No, not stuff to smoke, also not Dutch liquorice (candy), but wooden clogs. Some of those “spammed” people even dare to show this – LOL – like Alex during his Hotsos presentation in 2008 (see: “The Latest OAK Table Member“). Holland isn’t very preserving regarding its traditions so this is also my way of keeping it alive.

On a side note, regarding “alive”, Alex lost his clogs due to the Australian customs service, apparently they though clogs are alive and therefore he wasn’t able to move it back from Australia to Canada… Ehhh? I wonder what is more “alive” in Australia that fits the definition…

I wanted to give Doug some clogs as well, but due to the time pressure I wasn’t able to bring some originals during the UKOUG Conference in 2008. In all I was lucky enough that year, that could make it up due to the fact that I met Mario who actually wanted to meet that Doug fellow…

A good prank needs some decent preparation after all !

Doug has something with stuff that has to be “distinguished black”  and a certain degree of woman approval (see “OOW 2009 – Swag Round-up“), so an idea was born…

The making of “Distinguished Black” Clogs

There are a lot of different (painted) variations but I started out with a blank one.

The stuff I needed for this exercise, was a lot of coffee, time and the following…

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I got some raw blank clogs (you probably have to be Cary Millsap to actually make them from scratch) and painted them with “hoogglans” (DU) black.

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I did this during a week multiple times (I think 6 times total) and in between I sometimes dared to use sandpaper to make it more shiny…(if not only to get rid of the mistakes I made during my newbie attempt)

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Some fiddling around with Microsoft Powerpoint and some test prints give me the “ACE” (Director) label/designation that I needed to paint, in gold, on those already very very shiny black clogs…

Click on the picture to enlarge

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At this stage I had the following end result…

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After some extra protective paint layers (approx. 4) and the finishing “ACE Director” (approved) sticker, I ended up with the following result…

Click on the picture to enlarge

Not bad for a first attempt. Now just hoping that Doug won’t travel with those clogs abroad. Someone from customs might think they are alive…

How can a day when all I did was give one presentation seem so eventful? I suppose that's conference life, or at least my conference life. Changed days from my first UKOUG in .... wait a minute ... 10 years ago? Sigh.

I suppose most of yesterday was a bit of a disaster personally. Other than a few quick hellos, I spent all my time holed up putting the finishing touches to my presentation and making sure the demos were just right. I've just started using OEL on VMware so I can run 11gR2 on my laptop so it's a fairly new configuration. But the demos worked time and time again when I tried them in my hotel room. (You can sense it coming, can't you?) Which made it all the more galling when the damn things ran like an arthritic tortoise walking uphill with some heavy shopping bags. I can't remember ever having demos go so wrong because I always make sure they're well practiced. God knows what happened, other than a real slow-down. In the end, they did complete, by which time most people had left the room, but a few huddled round my laptop at Martin Widlake's suggestion so hopefully people got something out of it. But it wasn't really the demos that bothered me, despite everyone pointing that out later ;-), because those things happen but it just wasn't a very good presentation for all sorts of reasons I won't trawl through. One of the worst I can remember, to be honest, so I wasn't in the best of moods. (Actually, there was probably a worse one a few months ago, but as it was only to one colleague, that wasn't so bad )

Still, if you're in a bad mood, you might as well go and have drinks and dinner with friends to cheer you up so I did and it did. I managed to spend a little bit of time with so many people, I won't bore you with the list but thanks to those who pointed out the good bits of the presentation as well as the bad and hats off to the Oak Table for not going to an Indian for this years meal. I suppose that's why they were a bit cheesed off when I turned up 45 minutes late! I also have more belongings than when I arrived in Birmingham - more on that later, no doubt.

It was the latest I've ever been in the Tap and Spile and if you want a general indication of my state of mind, Alex G finally signed me up to Twitter in the pub! Sigh. Let's just call it an unfortunate drinking game incident

So 2 hours to my next presentation and normally I'd be super-confident. I've done it loads of times and could talk about the OEM Performance pages for days, but here's the thing. Having promised people I'd show the 11gR2 stuff, can I really trust OEL/VMWare. I'm sitting here running tests and they're just about ok, but ....

One of the major features of the Oracle Utilities Application Framework is that the installer for the framework (and the related products) generates all the technical configuration files necesary for the products automatically using prebuilt templates provided by the product.... Anthony Shorten

I’m now back in my hotel room, having escaped from the Focus Pubs at the end of Day 1 of the UKOUG Technology and E-Business Suite Conference in Birmingham. It’s been a long day, with an 8am meeting on the stand in the exhibition, a stint in the speaker ready room prepping my demonstrations, and then delivery of two sessions this afternoon on OBIEE, Essbase and Oracle Warehouse Builder 11gR2.

This year we’ve brought most of the consulting team along to the conference, as a way of getting to see people who are often working away on-site, and so that everyone can get to meet the great delegates, speakers and partners at the conference. Here’s the team at the start of the day, having just set up the demo and waiting for the opening of the exhibition.

And here’s things at the end of the day, during the Exhibition Hall Drinks Reception. We had our famous Rittman Mead beer available again, and it was great to catch up with people such as Paul Vallee, Connor McDonald, Jonathan Lewis, Lisa Dobson and everyone else who stopped by.

The two sessions we ran today were on Essbase and OBIEE Integration, and on the new 11gR2 release of OWB. The Essbase and OBIEE session went well; we had Venkat doing the demos, myself doing the positioning, and then a great questions and answer session at the end where we discussed attendees experiences with the integration and gave some feedback on what worked for us. The slides are available here if you’re interested.

The second session was particularly well attended and was on the 11gR2 version of OWB. Now if you’ve been following our blog, we’ve posted a series of articles on this new release, and we’re particularly excited by the new code template (ODI) features in this release, especially as the integration between the ODI and OWB technologies seems to have been done so well. We were lucky enough to be joined by Craig Stewart, our Oracle ODI representative in EMEA and someone we know well from his attendance at various user group events and indeed our own BI Forum earlier in the year in Brighton. Craig was able provide a “hot off the presses” roadmap slide on OWB and ODI 12g which he’s kindly agreed for me to reproduce here:

What we can take from this are a few points:

• Going forward, the OWB product name will be de-emphasized in favour of “In-Database ETL”, to differentiate itself from Oracle’s strategic data integration platform, ODI
• The 11gR2 version of OWB will be the last in it’s current packaging, and license-wise it’ll now be incorporated into ODI Enterprise Edition. The free OWB functionality will still remain but will be renamed “In-Database ETL” as above.
• ODI 12g is the target version for integration between the ODI and OWB platforms
• There will be an ODI 11g release out in the first half of next year (usual disclaimers apply
• ODI is the strategic data integration platform for Oracle

Again, the slides are available for download here if you want to take a look, and they cover code templates, heterogeneous sources, OBIEE integration, change data capture and web service integration.

Craig is actually going to join me again tomorrow for the ODI and Oracle BI Applications session I’ll be running (14.30 – 15.30, Tuesday, Hall 10b), so again if you’ve got questions on the ETL direction for the BI Applications and the role that ODI will play, come along and we’ll be pleased to answer any questions.

Finally, if you’re around tomorrow (Tuesday) evening, we’re running a BI “Appreciation” drinks session at the Pitcher and Piano, Brindley Place, from 6pm – 9pm. If you’re a BI user, customer, developer, partner etc, or you just know us and would like to join us for drinks and canapes, come down in the evening and it’ll be great to see you.

Want to see what’s new in APEX 4.0, and get a live demo of new features like Dynamic Actions, Updated Flash Charts, Plug-Ins, Tabular Form Validations, Improved Timestamp Support and many other features currently in development? Then come to New York City next Tuesday, December 8th, and visit the NYC Metro Oracle Users Group Day at the New Yorker Hotel:

NYC Metro Oracle Users Group Day

This year, we’re doing the Oracle Technology Solutions Fair as part of this event and I’ll be showing APEX 4.0 all day at the Oracle Database Tools demo table. So don’t miss this opportunity to get a first-hand look at APEX 4.0 in action.

In the first instalment in this series, we covered the steps that we carry out when promoting the initial version on an OBIEE project from development into production. The process is fairly straightforward and it’s generally a case of using the right tools (the Catalog Manager, for example) and following the list of steps. Things get a bit more interesting when promoting subsequent versions of the project from one environment to another, chiefly because you will probably want to preserve what’s in production (reports generated by users, for example, and maybe some hot fixes to the RPD) rather than just overwrite it all with what’s in the development environment.

One way of looking at this is as a flowchart, where the route we end up taking depends on how much development has also taken place in the production environment:

If you want to keep life simple, then don’t allow users to create any reports in production; don’t allow changes to the RPD in production; instead, do all development in the development environment and then just repeat the initial product deployment tasks each time you want to promote some changes, in the process over-writing whatever’s in production. In reality though, this isn’t really practical, as users will at a minimum want to create their own reports and there may be some hot-fixes applied to the production RPD that you want to preserve. If this is the case, you’ll want a follow a slightly more nuanced approach to promoting from development to production, making use of the three-way merge facility in the BI Administrator tool, the selective archive and unarchive facility in the Catalog Manager, and the new Content Accelerator Framework plug-in to the Catalog Manager that’s now available for download from OTN.

Assuming you’re working to this situation and your development team have updated the development RPD, created a few new reports based on these changes and now want to promote them to production, here’s the steps we’d typically follow:

1. If you’re sure that no changes have been made in the production RPD that are not already reflected in the development one, you can just copy across the development RPD to production and have done with it. The safer way to update the production RPD would be to three-way merge the development one into it, as this will preserve the changes made in production or at least prompt you to choose between them and any subsequent updates in development that conflict with them.

To start a three-way merge, you’ll need the following three RPD files

i. A copy of the original RPD as initially put into production (this is known as the “baseline” RPD)
ii. A copy of the current production RPD (which may now differ from the baseline RPD)
iii The development RPD that you want to merge into the current production one.

Once you’ve got all these files together, we can start on the three-way merge of the RPDs.

2. To start merging, open up the BI Administration tool using an offline copy of the current production repository.

3. From the application menu, select File > Merge… and then select the baseline RPD as the original RPD.

4. The merge process will then parse the original and current production RPDs to identify and differences between them. If this is the first time you have updated the production RPD, and you’ve not made any changes to it in production, then this process will come up blank, otherwise it’ll point out any changes between the original and current production RPDs.

5. Now you can select the development RPD that you’d like to merge into the production one. Press the Select… button next to the Modified Repository area and pick up the development RPD. It’s most likely that there will be no conflicts (there may be though if you’ve applied hotfixes to the production one), and so you’ll need to press the Stats button to see what items will be added, deleted or updated during the merge process.

6. Now that the production RPD has been updated, it’s time to consider the web catalog. Again, if you don’t let users develop reports in production, or at least you don’t let them develop in the Shared area, you can just archive and then unarchive the Shared and/or the Users folders from the development web catalog to the production one, using the Catalog Manager, to copy across the new reports. If you just want to migrate a few individual reports though, there’s a new option in the form of the Content Accelerator Wizard that you can use for this purpose.

The Content Accelerator Wizard (CAF) is a plug-in to the Catalog Manager that migrates reports between two environments, and will also create any logical column calculations that the reports depend on but that aren’t found in the target RPD. Coupled with a standard RPD three-way merge this is quite a neat way to migrate individual reports from development to production, as you don’t need to have two copies of the Catalog Manager open at one time and it takes care of any calculated columns that you need.

After installing CAF and making sure that the Catalog Manager is pointing towards a JDK 1.6 or higher, open the Catalog Manager to point to the development environment, and select the report you wish to promote (or “clone”) into production.

7. When the clone process starts, you are prompted to select the target web catalog (this need to be an online catalog, and can be either local or a remote server), and the location of the source and target BI Server repository (RPD) file, which have to be connected to offline. The RPD files are required so that the cloning process can create any logical calculations that are needed by the cloned report (if the report requires full logical columns, you’ll need to add these to the target RPD using a three-way merge).

The wizard then prompts you to select the target subject area that the cloned report will be mapped on to.

8. Next comes the mapping process. The logical columns in the source web catalog need to be mapped to their corresponding columns in the target web catalog, together with dimension levels, something that you need to do manually but that can be saved, as a CSV file, to use again in later migrations. Any new calculated columns are added automatically by CAF, but if there isn’t a corresponding target column to map regular columns to then you’ll need to bring it in via an RPD three-way merge.

9. Finally, the migration takes place, and you can choose to perform a consistency check as well as view the log of migrated objects.

10. Once the migration has happened, you can take a look in the target web catalog and see the new report, ready to run and within the /Shared/Cloned folder. The target RPD will have any new calculated logical columns added, with “Autogen” as the name prefix.

So there you have it, one method to do incremental updates of OBIEE projects. In the next instalment, we’ll take a look at version control using Subversion and TortoiseSVN.

Debra Lilley (one of the UKOUG directors, and famous for a video of being trapped in a lift at last years’ OOW) has just created a UKOUG group on Eddie Awad’s Oracle community. If you are at the conference, or a member of the UKOUG you might like to use the group to comment on [...]

Back in January, I blogged about how the wikipedia entry for Enterprise Content Management was a bit thin... it was tagged as unclear, poor grammar, and in need of expert cleanup. Well, I checked again, and it appears to have gotten worse since I last checked:

Now in addition to being confusing, unclear, and grammatically incorrect... it's also using peacock terms, and is now written like an advertisement.

I'm not sure what to think of this... Is it a turf war between the marketing departments of the big firms? Is it that nobody outside of marketing cares to explain it to a layman, and they can't help speaking in marketing-ese? Personally, I've avoided writing anything there because I know my biases, and was hoping that a neutral expert -- like AIIM -- would take ownership of this page... or maybe some up-and-coming blogger who wants to make a name for himself.

read more

If you follow this blog you know that my laptop is Windows 7 but I live my life in Linux Servers.  As such, I’m a big fan of the bash shell.  I’ve been running Cygwin on my laptops for as long as I can remember to get all of my favorite Linux commands on Windows.  [...]