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My thought on APEX 5.0 plans
The below are plans for APEX 5.0, not marked in stone objectives... So there are no promises it will all make it in APEX 5.0 and things might be different in the final release. David didn't show any pre-release, but if this release follows previous version, most likely at ODTUG KScope '13 (end of June) the APEX team will show something live.
The focus in APEX 5.0 is on improved developer productivity, which is great to hear for us developers.Below you find the main areas the APEX development team is looking into and what my thought are on them:
Modal Dialog
At the moment you can use some plugins to create modal dialogs, but in APEX 5.0 you'll be able to declaratively declare modal pages (so real pages no regions) with a nice UI where you can add buttons on the modal and have modals on top of modals. Yes!
Drag and Drop Layout Editor (different view)
With HTMLDB 1.5, the first public release of APEX, we had the Component View where you saw the definition of your page. Since APEX 4.0 we got next to the Component View the Tree View, which allowed you to see the definition of the page the way it gets rendered. Using that view also increased productivity as you could drill-down faster to certain areas or right click on components to create other things and, based on where you were, it would skip steps in the wizard.
APEX 5.0 will introduce a new view the "Design View". This is a more visual UI to build your pages. You find the Page Elements on the left, the Layout Editor - Source in the middle, and the Component Library below that and finally the Property Editor on the right. The following screenshot is showing the concept:
So you can do drag-and-drop to create your page elements and edit them straight in the property editor. You keep doing that till you are happy and after hitting Apply Changes button it gets saved. So when you edit your page, remember the changes won't be applied automatically only when you hit the button (which I find good).
I do wonder how the Layout Editor will work with for example responsive design; will it do ratios (percentage) or will it depends on the theme that it will be "pixel perfect"? When the early adopter comes out, it will probably be one of the first thing I want to see how the html gets generated behind the scenes.
I also wonder if this editor will work on a tablet (iPad). Would be cool to be in a meeting, grap your iPad and discuss requirements, you quickly drag items on the screen hit Apply Changes and presto they see immediate results.
It will also be interesting to see how they implement the Layout Editor behind the scenes as there is so much information on the screen. When do they get more data through an Ajax process or do they load most of it on the initial load?
The other thing that David asked was who would like the APEX team to keep maintaining all 3 views. Most people like to stick to what they know and don't like to give up something, but if the APEX team needs to maintain all 3 views, it will be time consuming. So if it comes down to get more features or get to keep the 3 views, I probably would give up a view for more/better features :-)
HTML5 capabilities
APEX 4.2 already introduced many HTML5 features and I'm a big fan of having more of those declarative available; things like new input types, improved HTML5 charts, incorporate more CSS3 instead of images, use CSS3 animations for transitions, latest jQuery Mobile features (panels, responsive table, dual range slider) etc.
Another thing I would find interesting is, if they looked into local storage and offline capabilities declaratively. I never heard that would be on the list for APEX 5.0, it's just something I threw in, in this section for the future to think of.
PDF Printing
Designing your pages for PDF Printing has been something that isn't as declarative and easy to do as creating for example pages. The APEX Listener has now build-in FOP support, so they can use that and in APEX 5.0 they will add additional declarative formatting options and will make it easier to work with different templates, add control break and master/detail reports.
Web Service Support
They look into improving the Restfull web services publising capabilities, so it's easier and more performant to integrate with other databases and be in a more SOA architecture.
In a next version of SQL Developer you'll be able to define DML stored procedures using future SQL Developer
Improved framework and enhancements to the packaged applications
This is something that is true for every version. Many small changes are done that makes APEX just a little bit better, more user-friendly and more productive.
The new packaged applications were already included in the latest APEX 4.2 patch set.
Another area they look into is allowing third-party apps to be included as packaged applications. This is especially useful in the Oracle Cloud.
Multi-Row Edit Region Type
The current tabular forms are a bit old school - they got introduced in HTMLDB 1.5 and got native validations in APEX 4.0, but apart from that it's still a bit behind what you can do with normal page items. For example multiple checkboxes are not declarative in APEX 4.2 tabular forms.
APEX 5.0 will introduce the Multi-Row Edit Region Type. It will be a new Region Type, so it would be a manual change of your existing tabular forms to move to that.
The biggest advantage for the APEX team is that they don't need to maintain the old code. I'm more than happy to switch my tabular forms manually to get a more feature rich experience.
This new region type would also allow to create a master-detail-detail page.
Currently they are investigating different plugins; JQGrid is one of them which might be used behind the scenes.
Multiple Interactive reports
This has been on the list for some time, but it looks like APEX 5.0 will allow any number of IR to be defined on a single page.
Application Builder Security
The security in APEX is a big area and has been increased in every release. In APEX 5.0 they will allow different authentication schemes to be used to control developer access and there will be more pre-built schemes to pick from. Although David didn't mention it, I hope SSO with AD is one of them and a remember me functionality will be declarative available.
Websheets
APEX 5.0 will continue to modernize and enhance websheet capabilities, improve usability, evolve the user interface and simplify the creation and maintenance of data grids.
Websheets are as good as every other Wiki, but with Data Grids, which are so much more powerful.
Again the above are things the APEX development team looks into, so it's not guaranteed it will make it in APEX 5.0. So when I said "APEX 5.0 will, read it as APEX 5.0 might".
You want a specific feature in APEX? Log it in the Feature Requests app: http://apex.oracle.com/vote
More info on Oracle Application Express (APEX): http://apex.oracle.com
WebCenter for Transportation: Azul Linhas Aéreas Brasileiras
Oracle Customer: Azul Linhas Aéreas Brasileiras (Azul Brazilian Airlines )
Location: São Paulo, Brazil
Industry: Travel and Transportation
Employees: 4,500
Azul Linhas Aéreas Brasileiras Reduces Time Needed to Update Web Content and Marketing Campaigns and Offers Simplified Ticket Purchasing Process
Azul Linhas Aéreas Brasileiras (Azul Brazilian Airlines) has established itself as the third-largest airline in Brazil, based on a business model that combines low prices with a high level of service. Azul serves 42 destinations with a fleet of 49 aircraft. It operates 350 daily flights with a team of 4,500 crew members. Last year, the company transported 15 million passengers, achieving a 10% share of the Brazilian market, according to the Agência Nacional de Aviação Civil (ANAC, or the National Civil Aviation Agency). Azul also forecasts a high growth rate for the next few years due to the sporting events that will take place in Brazil in 2014 and 2016—the World Cup and the Olympic Games, respectively.
The company wanted to offer an innovative site with a simple purchasing process for customers to search for and buy tickets and for the company’s marketing team to more effectively conduct its campaigns. To this end, Azul implemented Oracle WebCenter Sites, succeeding in gathering all of the site’s key information onto a single platform. Previously, at least three server and corporate information environments had directed data to the portal. The single Oracle-based platform now facilitates site updates, which are daily and constant. Azul can now complete the Web site content updating process—which used to take approximately 48 hours—in less than five minutes.
A word from Azul Linhas Aéreas Brasileiras (Azul Brazilian Airlines) “Oracle WebCenter Sites provides an easy-to-use platform that enables our marketing department to spend less time updating content and more time on innovative activities. Previously, it would take 48 hours to update content on our Web site; now it takes less than five minutes. We have shown the market that we are innovators, enabling customer convenience through an improved flight ticket purchase process.” – Kleber Linhares, Information Technology and E-Commerce Director, Azul Linhas Aéreas Brasileiras Challenges
- Provide customers with an innovative Web site with a simple process for purchasing flight tickets
- Bring dynamism to the Web site’s content updating process to provide autonomy to the airline’s strategic departments, such as marketing and product development
- Facilitate integration among the site’s different application providers, such as ticket availability and payment process, on which ticket sales depend
- Oracle Product and Services
- Worked with Oracle partner TQI to implement Oracle WebCenter Sites and modernize Azul’s Web site—its main communication channel with customers—enabling it to provide an easy and simple airline ticket sales process
- Gained development freedom in all processes—from implementation to content editing—thanks to the tool’s flexibility
- Gathered all of the Web site’s key information onto a single platform, facilitating its daily and constant updating, whereas the information was previously spread among at least three IT environments and had to go through a complex process to be made available online to customers
- Launched the new Web site during the busy season of summer time without incurring any loss in sales volume (despite the fact that the company considered it natural to have an 8% drop-off in sales due to the change in technology), enabling it to reinforce its public image as a bold and innovative company
- Absorbed the increased sales generated at vacation’s time y the social network campaign to announce the re-launch of the Web site on the company’s third anniversary, preparing the airline’s site to accommodate rapid travel flow growth due to the major sporting events that will take place in Brazil in 2014 and 2016—the World Cup and the Olympic Games, respectively
- Reduced time needed to update banners and other Web site content from an average of 48 hours to less than five minutes
- Enabled the marketing team to dedicate less time to the Web site’s content updating process and invest more energy in strategic planning, gaining competitiveness in the commercial airline market thanks to the new site’s dynamic real-time updating based on a user-friendly platform
- Simplified the flight ticket sales process thanks to tool flexibility that enabled the company to daring in design and improve Website usability
Why Oracle
“After evaluating the leading tools on the market through meticulous research, we chose Oracle for the freedom its tool offers in all processes—from implementation to content editing—as well as its excellent campaign and content segmentation method.” – Kleber Linhares, Information Technology and E-Commerce Director, Azul Brazilian Airlines
PartnerAzul Linhas Aéreas Brasileiras worked with Oracle partner TQI to put the new ticket sales Web site online using Oracle WebCenter Sites. With the project’s integration carried out by TQI, it was possible for Azul to make the Web site its main communication channel with consumers.
“We were very impressed with TQI’s work. Even while working under a tight schedule, they managed to meet the deadline. Further, the attention they dedicated to the project and the experience their team demonstrated with different advanced technologies left us very satisfied,” Linhares said.
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EM12c Disk Busy Alert for Oracle Database Appliance V1 & X3-2
Due to a Linux iostat bug BUG: 1672511 (unpublished) - oda - disk device sdau1 & sdau2 are 100% busy due to avgqu-sz value
This forces host level monitoring to report Critical Disk Busy alerts . This Bug will be fixed in an upcoming release of the the Oracle Database Appliance Software.
This workaround is to disable Disk Activity Busy alert in EM12c. After the issue is resolved the user now has the responsibility to remember to reenable this alert.
The alert in the document makes me laugh though
Note: Once you apply the iostat fix through an upcoming ODA release, make sure that you re-enable this metric by adding the Warning and Critical threshold values and applying the changes.
Rman backup compression
Did you know you can make your backup at least twice faster with a single line ?
Demo :
RMAN> backup as compressed backupset database;
Starting backup at 2013-06-05_13:08:01
...
Finished backup at 2013-06-05_13:13:59
6 minutes for a compressed backup on a NAS with 24 Channels and 100Gb of raw data. Not bad. But look at this !
RMAN> configure compression algorithm 'low';
new RMAN configuration parameters are successfully stored
RMAN> backup as compressed backupset database;
Starting backup at 2013-06-05_14:06:09
...
Finished backup at 2013-06-05_14:08:29
RMAN> configure compression algorithm clear;
RMAN configuration parameters are successfully reset to default value
By configuring this magic parameter, it is now more than twice faster ! This is incredible !
Go to your cashier and grab some coins to get this amazing advanced compression option !
Improving data move on EXADATA IV
Reducing storage requirements
In the last post in this series I talked about how we sped up the move of data from operational to historical tables from around 16 hours down to just seconds. You find that post here.
The last area of concern was the amount of storage this took and would take in the future. As it was currently taking 1.5 TB it would be a fairly large chunk of the available storage and that raised concerns for capacity planning and for availability of space on the EXADATA for other systems we had plans to move there.
We set out to see what we could do to both estimate max disk utilisation this disk space would reach as well as what we could do to minimize the needed disk space. There were two considerations minimize disk utilisation at the same time as query time should not be worsened. Both these were of course to be achieved without adding a large load to the system, especially not during business hours.
The first attempt was to just compress one of the tables with the traditional table compression. After running the test across the set of tables we worked with, we noticed a compression ratio of 57%. Not bad, not bad at all. However, this was now to be using an EXADATA. One of the technologies that are EXADATA only (to be more technically correct, only available with Oracle branded storage) is HCC. HCC stands for Hybrid Columnar Compression. I will not explain how it is different from normal compression in this post, but as the name indicates the compression is based around columns rather than on rows as traditional compression is. This can achieve even better results, at least that is the theory and the marketing for EXADATA says that this is part of the magic sause of EXADATA. Time to take it out for a spin.
After having set it up for our tables having the same exact content as we had with the normal compression, we had a compression rate of 90%. That is 90% of the needed storage was reduced by using HCC. I tested the different options available for the compression (query high and low as well as archive high and low), and ended up choosing query high. My reasoning there was that the compression rate of query high over query low was improved enough and the processing power needed was well worth it. I got identical results on query high and archive low. It took the same time, resulted in the same size dataset and querying took the same time. I could not tell that they were different in any way. Archive high however is a different beast. It took about four times the processing power to compress and querying too longer and used more resources too. As this is a dataset I expect the users to want to run more and more queries against when they see that it can be done in a matter of seconds, my choice was easy, query high was easily the best for us.
How do we implement it then? Setting a table to compress query high and then run normal inserts against it is not achieving a lot. There is some savings with it, but it is just marginal compared to what can be achieved. For HCC to kick in, we need direct path writes to occur. As this data is written once and never updated, we can get everything compressed once the processing day is over. Thus, we set up a job to run thirty minutes past midnight which compressed the previous days partition. This is just one line in the job that does the move of the partitions described in the last post in this series.
The compression of one very active day takes less than two minutes. In fact, the whole job to move and compress has run in less than 15 seconds for each days compression since we took this solution live a while back. That is a time well worth the 90% saving in disk consumption we achieve.
It is worth to note that while HCC is an EXADATA feature not available in most Oracle databases, traditional compression is available. Some forms of it requires licensing, but it is available so while you may not get the same ratio as described in this post you can get a big reduction in disk space consumption using the compression method available to you.
With this part the last piece of the puzzle fell in place and there were no concerns left with the plan for fixing the issues the organisation had with managing this log data. The next post in this serie will summarise and wrap up what was achieved with the changes described in this serie.
Travel and Transportation: Doing great things with Oracle Technology
Schneider National Implements Next-Generation IT Infrastructure to Continue Leadership in Transportation and Logistics Industry
Oracle Customer: Schneider National, Inc.
Location: Green Bay, Wisconsin
Industry: Travel and Transportation
Employees: 18,000
Annual Revenue: $1 to $5 Billion
Schneider National, Inc., a leading provider of truckload, logistics, and intermodal services, serves more than two-thirds of the FORTUNE 500 companies. Its customers rely on Schneider National’s transportation and logistics solutions to transport their products reliably, cost-effectively, and safely to markets in 28 countries.
Challenges- Create a next-generation IT platform to efficiently and consistently manage the quote-to-cash process across the company’s various business units and support long-term growth objectives
- Improve ability to provide drivers, customers, and business partners with convenient access to the information and services they need
- Improve back-office processes to support greater operational efficiency and profitability
Schneider's Online Tools Today:
Schneider's online tools provide
customers, transportation service providers and corporate suppliers with
a secure environment to conduct their freight management needs. These
tools will help access information that will reduce costs and
improve visibility to information to better serve their customers.
Track loads and retrieve documents, all with the click of a mouse. More than 2,000 Schneider Customers use the online tools to manage their transportation.
Customer Capabilities
- Access to information specific to services and information available to their customers
- Easy and timely tracking of extensive information regarding their orders
- Ability to set customized order tracking searches that can be run with the click of a mouse at their convenience
- Access to view, print, email and fax order related documents
- Request and receive spot quote pricing
Transportation Service Provider Capabilities
- Access to information specific to services and information available to service providers
- Ability to search for freight available to be moved for Schneider
- Easily provide tracking updates for Schneider freight
- Quick and easy access to payment information
**** Oracle Product and Services that contribute to Schneider's successful solution:
- Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1.1
- Oracle Human Resources
- Oracle Incentive Compensation
- Oracle Learning Management
- Oracle Financials
- Oracle Purchasing
- Oracle iReceivables
- Oracle Order Management
- Oracle Order Management Integration Pack for Oracle Transportation Management, Oracle E-Business Suite, and Siebel CRM
- Oracle Transportation Management
- Oracle Business Intelligence Suite, Enterprise Edition
- Oracle Hyperion Financial Reporting
- Oracle WebCenter Content
- Oracle WebCenter Portal 11g
- Oracle WebCenter Capture
- Oracle Identity and Access Management Suite
- Oracle Identity Manager
- Oracle Identity Manager Connector
- Oracle SOA Suite 11
- Oracle BPEL Process Manager 11g
- Oracle Enterprise Service Bus
- Oracle Business Rules
- Oracle Business Activity Monitoring
- Oracle B2B for EDI
- Oracle Data Integrator
- Oracle Application Integration Architecture Foundation Pack
- Oracle Enterprise Manager
- Oracle Application Development Framework
- Oracle JRockit
- Oracle WebLogic Suite
- Oracle Coherence
- Oracle Database 11g
- Oracle Real Application Clusters 11g Other Details:
- Used Oracle applications, middleware, and development tools to create a next-generation IT platform to drive profitability, reduce costs across all divisions, and position Schneider for continued growth
- Leveraged Oracle SOA Suite to integrate Oracle E-Business Suite, Siebel CRM, Oracle Transportation Management, third-party, and custom applications
- Built 400 BPEL processes that generate over 60 million composite instances across five SOA clusters
- Leveraged Oracle B2B for EDI with over 900 trading partners
- Leveraged Oracle Data Integrator and Oracle SOA Suite to set up a shipment hub that provides real-time shipment data to enterprise applications handling more than 500,000 updates per day
- Enabled secure access to enterprise applications
- Implemented a centralized repository for digital content and documents that drives dynamic enterprise portals
- Enabled drivers to quickly update their benefits, view online training, and check their pay statements
- Provides customers and partners with convenient access to the information they need
- Enables more streamlined monitoring and management of software and hardware
- Enabled more consistent processes across functional areas, ranging from sales and operations to finance, improving order accuracy, profitability, on-time service, and payables management
- Reduced days for sales outstanding significantly
The post below is a repost from January by one of my fellow WebCenter teammates, Christie Flanagan. I thought it was a great post to highlight yet another customer in the Travel and Transportation vertical doing amazing things with Oracle technologies.
Holland America: Optimizing the Online Customer Experience with Oracle Real-Time Decisions By Christie Flanagan on Jan 14, 2013Prior to the holidays, we spent some time on the WebCenter blog focusing on how to optimize the online customer experience using segmentation and targeting with Oracle's web experience management solution, Oracle WebCenter Sites. We also introduced you to Oracle's real time decisioning engine, Oracle Real-Time Decisions, which can be used in combination with Oracle WebCenter Sites to enable automated targeting and segmentation.You can check out those posts using the following links:
- Why It Is So Important to Know Your Customer
- Segmentation and Targeting: Your Tools for Personalizing the Online Customer Experience
- Defining Your Online Segmentation and Targeting Strategy
- Optimizing the Online Experience with Oracle WebCenter Sites and Oracle Real-Time Decisions
Today, we're expanding on this theme and featuring a guest post from Oracle sales consultant, Sumeet Prasad. Sumeet is part of the Oracle Real-time Decisions strategy team. Sumeet has been with Oracle for six years and has twelve years of experience in the real-time decisioning space. This post will give you a very good sense of the truly powerful capabilities of Oracle Real-Time Decisions for optimizing the online customer experience.
*****
Holland America is a wholly owned subsidiary of Carnival Corp. It is recognized as a leader in the cruise industry’s premium segment. Holland America Line’s fleet of 15 ships offers nearly 500 cruises to 320 ports of call in more than 100 countries and is expected to have carried over 750,000 cruise passengers in 2012 that visited all seven continents.
Like many in the travel industry, Holland was looking for ways to increase revenue and margin in a poor economy. Maximizing the revenue from their passengers was important to increasing overall revenue. The travel industry is trending towards more online bookings and customers are increasingly more web savvy. Holland’s existing websites for both cruise booking and shore excursion provided a one size fits all approach in regards to customer experience.
Holland America decided to utilize Oracle Real Time Decisions (RTD) to help achieve their goals. They went live with RTD in June of 2012 within their Online Shore Excursion booking process. They had 2 primary business goals for this initiative:
- Leverage Real-Time Decisions to help increase booking revenue for Shore Excursions, Indulgences, Spa and Dining by optimizing cross-sell and up-sell offers in the web channel through adaptive learning and multi goal arbitration
- Leverage Real-Time Decisions to improve the overall customer experience by providing personalized and targeted content, and product recommendations throughout the Shore Excursion selection experience.
RTD provides Holland America with a cross channel, centralized decision management service for Customer Experience Optimization. RTD enables real-time intelligence to be instilled into any customer interaction, thus Holland is able to learn and predict which shore excursions, indulgences, and dining options are most appropriate to deliver to a customer. By learning from every single interaction and adjusting their processes in real-time, Holland America always takes the best course of action and optimizes the value of each opportunity.
The RTD Decision Management Framework provides for user-defined business rules, automated segmentation, real-time predictive models, test and control capabilities and user defined performance goals for optimizing decisions. Both rules and models can operate on historical, transactional and contextual real-time information. This allows Holland America to treat every customer coming to the Shore Excursion site as a “segment of one” and provide for personalized and optimized customer experiences.
There are four optimized decisions that RTD makes as part of the Shore Excursion Booking Process. 90% of visitors have the optimized experience (RTD) and 10% of the visitors have the control experience (status quo):
- Decision #1: Show/No Show shore excursions landing page: Determine which flow is best for each customer.
- Decision #2: Which landing page image is best to display?
- Decision #3: Rank order the top excursions on the catalog page for each customer?
- Decision #4: What are the best additional shore excursions, indulgences and spa and dining offers to recommend on the shopping cart page?
Within one month of being live, Holland America saw booking rates increase by 14% for the optimized experience (RTD) vs. the Control Experience (status quo). The success of this first project is helping pave the way for future RTD projects, as well as the adoption of Web Center Sites for building and managing their websites.
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Enhancement Requests and Bugs for Oracle eBusiness Suite
From time to time I create enhancement requests or bugs, commonly on Oracle eBusiness Suite. Additionally I come across enhancement requests that I think deserve more visibility. This page is dedicated to that cause. If you have an Oracle Enhancement Request (ER) or Bug you would like to raise the visibility on, please feel free to comment or contact me.
If you like the looks of one of the Enhancement Requests noted below, log a Service Request (SR) on My Oracle Support (MOS) and ask for your MOS Customer record to be attached to the ER / Bug.
Created Logged By Bug / ER Status Product Description 2013/06/05 See ER 12872320 Open BIP Request to add autofilter functionality to native Excel template (binary) 2012/01/22 Gareth 13616572 Open BIP BI Publisher RTF unable to show a fixed number of lines for a word wrapped cell 2011/05/13 See ER 12423249 Open BIP Adding support of SMTP username/password to "XAPI:EMAIL" bursting for E-Business Suite (EBS) 12.1.X 2010/11/09 See ER 8208646 Open AP/IBY R12 Unable to send Separate Remittance Advice as email attachment in PDF 2010/08/11 Gareth 10019593 Rejected AP/IBY ARXRWMAI - In Receipts Summary form, cannot query by payment server id - PSON (Payment Server Order Number) 2010/07/14 See ER 9908713 Open BIP Need the DeliveryManager API to have a trackback variable for bounced emails 2010/07/18 See ER 9918364 Open BIP Need email body to be set to UTF-8 charset when using East Asian language emails 2010/07/08 Gareth 9891120 Open eAM Need hook to extend EAM Maintenance Work Order Detail Report 2010/06/19 Gareth 9834226 Open AP Need to embed email images Payables/Payments "Send Separate Remittance Advices" 2009/01/07 See ER 7694052 Open AP Does the Supplier Open Interface API Support Updates to Supplier Information? 2005/03/25 See ER 4262148 Open AP Need Public API to manage custom AP Invoice HoldsPS. If you would like to monitor Enhancement Requests, and be notified by Oracle of status updates, create a Favorite in My Oracle Support and ensure Hot Topics (Favorites) emails are on as follows.
Create a Favorite:- Login to My Oracle Support
- Search on the ER / Bug number in the Search box e.g. 4262148
- Click on the orange star next to the Title in the list view, or click on the article and click on the orange star. You should see "Favorite added" status message.
- Go to the Settings tab
- Click on Hot-Topics Email under Personal on the left side menu list.
- Switch On the Hot Topics email, every 1 days (or suitable), and ensure you have checked "Product Bugs Marked as Favorites"
- Save
To see your Favorites, click on the Knowledge tab, then click Favorite Articles in the Recent Activity tab.
Catch ya!Gareth
This is a post from Gareth's blog at http://garethroberts.blogspot.com
Related Posts
First 3 days as a Glass Explorer (Day 2)
Editor’s note: Read Anthony’s (@anthonyslai) full Glass adventure starting with the prologue, the week before, and Day 1 posts.
I met with Jake and Noel the next day I got the Glass. To anyone who tried it, everyone seemed to be pleasantly surprised with the current features. At that time, no Twitter and Facebook integration even existed. Just having Google search, photo taking, video recording, and GPS navigation already made it a great device. Of course, it is still arguable whether it worth such a high price tag; on the other hand, it is all about economies of scale, and the price will go down, although probably not for this year. To me, yes, I do think it is slightly expensive, but I think it is still worth it.
Regarding to the glass piece, the technology behind it is apparently a Google secret, as they were not willing to disclose it during the FireChat Session in Google IO. I think this makes sense as the glass piece is probably the hardest to replicate and copy. I just had a funny feeling as I often get asked, “Is that… Google Glasses?” Well, technically, it is Glass, not Glasses, although I had the same misconception myself.
The other question which I find interesting is, “Did you get it from Amazon?” Although I answered the question seriously, maybe I should have said, “Yes, I got it from Best Buy with a promotional discount.”. The questions I received normally ranged among the 2 extremes, either they know the technology really well, or they have no idea about what it is. As it is not readily available to the general public, only people who are passionate about technologies would have looked into it.
Before Glass become widely available, Glass can be as an excellent ice breaker. People were generally genuinely interested in the Glass experience, and they would approach you and they were about it. In the afternoon, I went to Health 2.0 Refactored. This was how I met up with couple people in the conference and get to know each other.
There were a lot of reports about Glass haters. People mostly have privacy concerns, worried that you are taking pictures, recording videos secretly without their permission. In this era where almost everyone are having a smartphone with a high resolution pixel camera, I do not think this is avoidable. We will just have to live with it.
The other concern is that Glass can be used to pull up all your personal information by just looking at you. My question would be, “Where and how do they find your information?” Your name, maybe yes. Social security number, probably not. If they do know about your social security number, do they need to look at you to find it out? As with all technologies, it can serve both good or evil. For example, this can be useful when interviewing candidates. Hopefully, people would have a peace of mind for now, knowing that facial recognition is banned by Google. No more seeing the statistics of your opponent like in Dragon Z.
In my case, no one I met with dislike me wearing Glass, and my experience so far had been great and positive.Possibly Related Posts:
- First 3 Days as a Glass Explorer (Prologue)
- Our Glass Overlords Have Arrived
- Google Glass Details Emerge
- First 3 Days as a Glass Explorer (Day -7)
- First 3 days as a Glass Explorer (Day 1)
BPM 11g - Starting New Task from ADF with BPM API
Sample application - adfbpmapp_ps6_v1.zip implements custom ADF Task Flow with ADF UI Fragment, where regular ADF UI table component is implemented to display current user tasks. Additionally there is a button "Start New Task" to start new process and assign further tasks:
Once "Start New Task" button is pressed, it calls action listener from the backing bean, where BPM functionality is invoked. If task was started successfully and task ID was generated, we are going to report it to the user:
Task is started by getting tasks possible to initialize from BPM context connection for current active user. Process instance is created for such task and task ID is retrieved. In this example I'm getting first available initiable task. BPM API returns initiable task even if user is not granted permission to start it through BPM role, is enough for the user to be part of the process. For this reason there is additional check if user has appropriate BPM swim lane role:
In this example must be granted GroupManagers swim lane role to be able to start new task and call task initializer activity:
User redsam1 is able to start new task through BPM API, information about just started task ID is displayed along with task info in the table:
The same task info is displayed in BPM workspace task flow, where task form can be accessed:
User redsam2 is not granted with GroupManagers swim lane role, and this user can't start new tasks as reported:
MOOCs Beyond Professional Development: Coursera’s Big Announcement in Context
One aspect of last week’s Coursera announcement was the acknowledgement that MOOCs to date have primarily served as a mechanism for professional development, not as a mechanism for serving higher education per se. In the Chronicle article:
Daphne Koller, a co-founder of Coursera, acknowledged that the company was venturing into new terrain. After studying their MOOC users, the company realized that most of them had already earned college degrees, said Ms. Koller. That was well and good, but it suggested to Coursera’s founders that MOOCs would not be sufficient to achieve their ambitions.
“If you’re looking to really move the needle on fundamental educational problems, inside and outside the United States, you’re going to need to help people reach the first milestone, which is getting their degrees to begin with,” Ms. Koller said.
and from the New York Times:
“Our first year, we were enamored with the possibilities of scale in MOOCs,” said Daphne Koller, one of the two Stanford computer science professors who founded Coursera. “Now we are thinking about how to use the materials on campus to move along the completion agenda and other challenges facing the largest public university systems.”
These statements can be understood by looking at the demographic data for students that have been taking xMOOCs (i.e. from Coursera, Udacity and edX) in their first year.
As early as Fall 2012, demographic information was coming out that the majority of MOOC students already had a higher education degree. From Chuck Severance’s slideshare summarizing student data in his Internet History, Technology and Security course on Coursera, we saw that 73% of students answering his survey already had at least a bachelor’s degree.
From Duke’s February 2013 report on their Bioelectricity course on Coursera, 72% of students answering their survey already had at least a bachelor’s degree.
And from the University of Edinburgh’s May 2013 report on six different courses all on Coursera, we find that a combined 70% of students in their study already had at least a bachelor’s degree.
At Coursera’s April 2013 partners conference, they shared that across all courses 75% of students within their system already had at least a bachelor’s degree.
Is this situation unique to Coursera? Perhaps not. In the Summer 2013 issue of Research & Practice in Assessment magazine, Lori Breslow and others studied the Circuits & Electronics course in edX and found that 65% of students answering his survey already had at least a bachelor’s degree.
Of the survey responders who answered a question about highest degree attained, 37% had a bachelor’s degree, 28% had a master’s or professional degree, and 27% were high school graduates.
It is interesting to note that there is virtually no public data from Udacity or its partners. Coursera and their partners have been leaders among the xMOOC providers in sharing data from these courses.
The consistency of data (ranging from 65% – 75% of MOOC students having at least a bachelor’s degree) is actually quite remarkable given the ad hoc nature of surveys and studies.
When combined with the fact that MOOCs to date have not been applied for academic credit, it is apparent that the primary usage of MOOCs has been for professional development or lifelong learning. Not that there’s anything wrong with that . . .
Click here to view the embedded video.
In fact, some of the proponents of the original connectivist MOOCs, or cMOOCs, have exactly that goal in mind of enabling lifelong learning.
How Does This Affect Recent Announcements?
The MOOC providers set out to revolutionize higher education, but as Daphne Koller indicated the usage of standalone MOOC courses to date is not sufficient, despite the huge numbers of enrolled students. The data points to the need for targeting degree-seeking students in a more aggressive manner than the current “it’s open for all” approach while also finding more immediate methods for allowing MOOC students to earn academic credit. To allow for academic credit for MOOCs, the actual course designs and assessment have satisfy accrediting bodies, and the credits have to be accepted by degree-granting institutions.
To have a real impact on helping students get their degrees, there seems to be two choices:
- Option 1) Replace colleges and universities as providers of for-credit courses or even degree programs
- Option 2) Work with colleges and universities to embed MOOC courses or courseware into for-credit courses or degree programs
The biggest news in the MOOC world in 2013 is the development of Option 2), which is the only viable way in the short term for MOOCs to directly impact degree-seeking higher education students. edX expanded their pilot program at San Jose State University to embed Circuits & Electronics MOOC within official SJSU courses. Udacity also announced a program with SJSU to offer for-credit MOOC-based courses. Udacity also announced the development of a MOOC-only online master’s degree program through Georgia Tech. And now, Coursera also moves to use MOOC courses as the basis for college and university courses.
I do not see Options 1) and 2) and mutually exclusive, by the way. I would assume that Coursera, Udacity and edX will continue to offer standalone MOOCs while also enabling collegiate embedding of MOOCs into official courses and programs.
The post MOOCs Beyond Professional Development: Coursera’s Big Announcement in Context appeared first on e-Literate.
Salesforce.com Real Time integration with Oracle using Informatica PowerCenter 9.5
Many times I come across the requirement of quickly propagating changes from cloud platforms like Salesforce.com to on-premise data stores. You can do this with webservices, but that is not middleware and it requires coding.
How about doing with a data integration tool?
+Informatica Corporation's Informatica PowerCenter can achieve this by using the CDC (Change Data Capture) feature of the Informatica PowerCenter Salesforce connector, when Salesforce is the source in a mapping.
The configuration is simple. All you really have to set up is 2 properties in the Mapping Tab of a Session Task in Informatica Workflow Manager.
These are the properties:
- Time Limit property to -1
- Flush interval property to 60 seconds (minimum 60 seconds)
And here is what these two settings mean from the PowerCenter PowerExchange for Salesforce.com User Guide:
CDC Time Limit
Time period (in seconds) that the Integration Service reads changed Salesforce data. When you set the CDC Time Limit to a non-zero value, the Integration Service performs a full initial read of the source data and then captures changes to the Salesforce data for the time period you specify. Set the value to -1 to capture changed data for an infinite period of time. Default is 0.
Flush Interval
Interval (in seconds) at which the Integration Service captures changed Salesforce data. Default is 300. If you set the CDC Time Limit to a non-zero value, the Integration Service captures changed data from the source every 300 seconds. Otherwise, the Integration Service ignores this value.
That's it, you don't have to configure anything else!
Once you set up these properties in the mapping tab of a session, save and restart the task in the workflow, the task will run continuously, non stop. The connector will poll the Salesforce org continuously and propagate any changes you do in Salesforce, downstream to the premise database system, including INSERT, UPDATE and DELETE operations.
Enjoy!
More reading:
SFDC CDC implementation in Informatica PowerCenter
Thoughts on Intel’s Hadoop distribution
When I heard that Intel announced their own Hadoop distribution, my first thought was “Why would they do that?”. This blog post is an attempt to explore why would anyone need their own Hadoop distribution, what can Intel gain by having their own and who is likely to adopt’s Intel’s distribution.
Why does anyone need an Hadoop distribution? Hadoop is open source, and it would make sense that RedHat and Canonical would package Hadoop and add it to their own distribution – just like they do to MySQL and other open source applications. Instead, we have Cloudera, Hortonworks, MapR, EMC, Intel and probably many more, each with their own Hadoop distribution.
When you try to pick an Hadoop distribution, the first thing you’ll notice is that each one has slightly different set of components. Cloudera includes Flume and Scoop which HortonWorks doesn’t. HortonWorks includes Ambari and a platform by Talend. Having a distribution gives companies a chance to define Hadoop. This matters a lot to new adopters, and especially larger companies – we look at the distribution as an indication of which components are safe to use, and are reluctant to add components outside their distribution. As an example, Oozie and Azkaban are similar tools performing similar task of managing jobs in Hadoop. In my experience, Oozie is far more popular, not because its a superior tool, but because it is part of the popular Cloudera distribution.
There’s a reason Hadoop users prefer to use a distribution as a whole rather than mix and match toolchains: With many components in an Hadoop production system, matching the versions to make sure all the tools are working well together is a challenging task. Companies that release their own distribution pick the correct versions, test a lot and furiously patch to make sure all the components will work as one whole. This is somewhat similar to the way Oracle will announce that 11g is supported on RHEL5 but not RHEL6, except much more so. Of course, Redhat could do the same, as they do to all software in their Linux distribution, but as you can see, they don’t.
When users choose a well known distribution they don’t just get a well chosen and tested mix of components, they also get the option of purchasing support for this distribution. Thats the main benefit for companies selling their own Hadoop distribution: You go to all the trouble of picking components and testing them, so that you are well positioned to provide support for them. Other companies can of-course sell support for the same distribution – Pythian will happily support any Hadoop distribution you choose. But the owner of the distribution has some advantage since it is much more difficult for 3rd party supporters to offer bug fixes in Hadoop code.
Of course, all this doesn’t apply to Intel, who show no intention of selling support.
So why would Intel need their own distribution?
Lets start from basics – Intel sells CPUs. Thats their main line of business. But they also write software. For example, Intel’s C compiler is first rate. I used to love working with it. Intel wrote their own compiler so executables generated with it will always use the best Intel features. This means that popular software would run faster on Intels, because their performance features will be used even when developers don’t know about them (Oracle Optimizer attempts to do the same, but with less success).
How does it apply to Hadoop? Clearly Intel noticed that Hadoop clusters tend to have lots of CPUs, and they are interested in making sure that these CPUs are always Intel, possibly by making sure that Hadoops run faster on Intel CPUs.
Lets look at Intel’s blog post on the topic: http://blogs.intel.com/technology/2013/02/big-data-buzz-intel-jumps-into-hadoop
“The Intel Distribution for Apache Hadoop software is a 100% open source software product that delivers Hardware enhanced performance and security (via features like Intel® AES-NI™ and SSE to accelerate encryption, decryption, and compression operation by up to 14 times).”
“With this distribution Intel is contributing to a number of open source projects relevant to big data such as enabling Hadoop and HDFS to fully utilize the advanced features of the Xeon™ processor, Intel SSD, and Intel 10GbE networking.”
“Intel is contributing enhancements to enable granular access control and demand driven replication in Apache HBase to enhance security and scalability, optimizations to Apache Hive to enable federated queries and reduce latency. ”
Intel is doing for Hadoop the same thing it did for C compilers – make sure they use the best hardware enhancements available in the CPUs and other hardware components available from Intel. The nice thing is that the enhancements are available as open source – Intel doesn’t care that the software is free, since they are selling the hardware!
And since its open source, we can take a peak at Intel’s Github repository: https://github.com/intel-hadoop
What can we find there? We have Project Rhino (https://github.com/intel-hadoop/project-rhino) with Intel’s security enhancements and Project Panthera (https://github.com/intel-hadoop/project-panthera) offering advanced SQL support for Hive and improved performance for HBase. There’s also a benchmarking suite (https://github.com/intel-hadoop/HiBench) and Performance Analyzer (https://github.com/intel-hadoop/HiTune) .
Improved Hadoop security is on the top of the list of things the enterprise needs from Hadoop http://tdwi.org/Blogs/Philip-Russom/2013/04/Hadoop-Functionality-that-Needs-Improvement.aspx - mixing Intel’s well known encryption support on the CPU with the enterprise requirement for improved security is a very smart move in my book. I know that security is much more than just fast encryption, but if Intel can leverage their security brand to create a strong security model for Hadoop, its a welcome effort. The security offerings are promising indeed – key management, unified and integrated access management, and possibly even replacing Kerberos with something better integrated? Sign me on, and from what I heard – my customers are ready to sign too.
None of those were officially released yet, and I didn’t try to compile the code and run, so I can’t say much about what is actually delivered. Perhaps someone did and can comment. But I did notice another interesting detail. The Project Rhino README lists all the Hadoop components that Intel intends to include in its unified and integrated security model:
- Core: A set of shared libraries
- HDFS: The Hadoop filesystem
- MapReduce: Parallel computation framework
- ZooKeeper: Configuration management and coordination
- HBase: Column-oriented database on HDFS
- Hive: Data warehouse on HDFS with SQL-like access
- Pig: Higher-level programming language for Hadoop computations
- Oozie: Orchestration and workflow management
- Mahout: A library of machine learning and data mining algorithms
- Flume: Collection and import of log and event data
- Sqoop: Imports data from relational databases
Looks familiar to anyone? Thats more or less identical to Cloudera’s Hadoop distribution. Why did Intel choose to use CDH? Possibly because of its focus on the enterprise toolchain – those are the tools you’ll need to build an ETL pipeline and a data-science practice on Hadoop. If Intel’s unified solution won’t include these tools, getting the enterprise adoption they are looking for will be a much bigger challenge. However, it does open new questions: Will Intel offer support for the distribution, or will they leave it to Cloudera who already support all the components? And can you have a “unified security solution” that leaves HortonWorks and MapR completely out of the plan?
Its far too early to tell where this will all go, but so far Intel made interesting decisions that make me look forward to the day when they’ll have more to download than just a PDF. If you have thoughts on where this is all going, I’m looking forward to reading your comments too.
Integrating BI Publisher and Forms 11g via web services
A freshly updated white paper on how to integrate BI Publisher 11g reports into an Oracle Forms 11g application is now available from the BI Publisher OTN page along with sample code and a video:
Integrating BI Publisher with Oracle Forms | Download Sample Code | Video
Thanks to Axel and Florin from PITSS and Juergen and Rainer from Oracle Germany
Webcast Series - What's New in EPM 11.1.2.3 and OBIEE 11.1.1.7
I'm actually doing 4 of the 9 weeks (and maybe 5, if I can swing it). Here's the complete lineup in case you're interested in joining:
- June 4 & 6 - Overview
- June 11 & 13 - HFM
- June 18 & 20 - Financial Close Suite
- July 9 & 11 - Essbase and OBIEE
- July 16 & 18 - Planning
- July 23 & 25 - Smart View and Financial Reporting
- July 30 & Aug 1 - Data & Metadata Tools (FDM, DRM, etc.)
- Aug 6 & 8 - Free Supporting Tools (LCM, Calc Mgr, etc.)
- Aug 13 & 15 - Documentation
If you want to sign up, visit http://www.interrel.com/educations/webcasts. There's no charge and I don't do marketing during the sessions (seriously, I generally forget to explain what company I work for). It's a lot of information, but we do spread it out over 9 weeks, so it's not information overload.
And bonus: you get to hear my monotone muppet voice for an hour each week. #WorstBonusEver
Latest analytics tools fuel data-driven marketing
Marketers have a wealth of information at their fingertips for understanding consumers' habits, behaviors, needs and desires, but many organizations are still struggling to make use of this information. By leveraging the skills of database experts and the latest generation of business intelligence (BI) technologies, companies have the opportunity to mine big data for valuable insight, which can then promote a significant advantage over competitors that are unable to do so.
CMSWire reported that 42 percent of data consumed by marketing firms comes from external sources, such as social networking sites. The news source explained that there are a variety of questions that marketers can potentially answer with big data, so it's imperative to consider all channels, including mobile and social. By analyzing web activity along with transactional data and other factors, companies can determine which campaigns are generating substantial ROI and which efforts need improvement in the future. Further, the source explained that marketers can continue to hyper-target offers and messages based on conclusions gleaned from big data.
Still, many companies struggle to achieve these superior capabilities. CMSWire asserted that marketers need to develop a more strategic methodology to contextualize information, which can help to filter out value from the noise and make real business decisions. First, the source explained, businesses should define specific objectives for analytics projects, such as reaching new segments, gaining competitive insights or achieving enhanced customer knowledge. Then, firms can determine what data is requires and assess how to harness and mine that information effectively. The source stressed that enterprises should seek to standardize metrics over time to establish a benchmark for any drastic changes in data and allow marketers to then adapt strategies for optimized results.
Monitoring results
One of the reasons that next-gen BI tools are so critical for successful campaigns is that according to Research Magazine contributor Hilary Perkins, there are increasing pressures for proof of ROI from all marketing efforts. In today's challenging business environment, Perkins stressed that marketers need to consider more innovative research methods. She explained that enterprises have been rapidly delving into big data for real-time insights that give a more detailed view of marketing successes and failures so that tactics can be altered on the fly.
Superior marketing performance will increasingly depend on an enterprise's ability to mine massive volumes of data for more effective decision-making, targeted messages and tangible ROI.
RDX's business intelligence and big data experts assist customers in leveraging data contained in large data stores. For more information, please visit our Business Intelligence and Predictive Analytics pages or contact us.
Meet Transportation Industry Partner - Stellar Services
Guest Post today by our partner, Stellar Services.
Over the last 20 years, Stellar Services has supported the information management requirements of the transportation industry. As transportation specialists this has meant putting in place and supporting systems used for capital program controls, project portfolio management, real estate process controls, corporate compliance case management, transactional process enablement like vendor invoicing or site inspection, and the list goes on. Combining our knowledge of enterprise content management with our experience in system’s design, operation, and maintenance we’ve been able to use our expertise, experience, and understanding of transportation business processes to assist our customers in the areas of enterprise content management, electronic records management, enterprise record classification schema development, email management, workflow, business process management and automation, system development, integration services, and document capture and scanning solutions.
We’ve found the needs of our transportation clients to be quite diverse. In one sector where we’ve done much work, airports, financial system integration, enabling of financial processes, integration of project portfolio systems, and simple collaborative document management are common themes similar to the examples which follow. But, with the need for constant growth to support the increasing population of fliers and the requirement to continually improve aging infrastructure, the one requirement that all of our airport clients seem to have in common is project controls.
JFK – Database and Document Control
- Project Financial Database System
- Document Control System
ATL - IT Master Plan
- Web-based Enterprise Program Management System
- Online Invoicing System
AUH - Project Controls
- Design Review
- Construction Change Management
- Submittals
- Request for Information (RFI)
- Payment Application Review
- Progress Reports Preparation
- Contractor Schedule Review
IAD – Portfolio Integration
- Archive of documents, video clips, & pictures
- Collaborative document management
- Email management integrated with Outlook
- High-volume document processing
- Integration with a web based Portfolio Management System
Project controls involves the use of collaborative document management and workflow to automate the exchange of documents between owners, managers, designers, and contractors. Something as simple as asking a question like, “Can we dig here?” can result in forms being filled out, auditable records of their receipt being entered, circulation of the question among multiple parties, and then an official response being produced. Without automation, such a process is tedious, prone to stalling out, and requires a significant effort to keep going.
But, with the introduction of enabling technologies like Primavera Enterprise Project Portfolio Management applications integrated with content management, we’ve been able to help one of our municipal rail clients, San Francisco MTA, effectively automate their project portfolio processes.
Through the use of these technologies, the agency which manages San Francisco’s buses, streetcars, light rail, taxi, and its famous cable cars has centralized their access to applications, content, and consolidated reporting. The system is designed to meet the operational requirements for document and process control while adhering to the regulatory requirements to which the municipal agency must comply.
As a results, the SFMTA’s Capital Program Controls System (CPCS) is capable of tracking capital project budgeting, financing, contractor payments, handling complex engineering design and construction scheduling, and contract claims management. This solution provides the most functionality for SFMTA’s current needs while allowing for future growth and is typical of the systems being used by all of our rail and airport clients, today.
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Clustering Factor Calculation Improvement Part III (Too Much Rope)
TROUG 2013 DW/BI SIG
ROWID
Here’s a suggestion to help you avoid wasting time. If you ever include the rowid in a query – not that that should happen very commonly – make sure you give it an alias, especially if you’re using ANSI SQL. If you don’t, you may find yourself struggling to work out why you’re getting an irrational error message. Here’s an example that appeared recently on the OTN forum, with the output cut-n-pasted from a system running 11.1.0.7:
select '1' from dual a left join ( select c.dummy, b.rowid from dual b join dual c on b.dummy = c.dummy ) d on a.dummy = d.dummy ; select * ERROR at line 1: ORA-01445: cannot select ROWID from, or sample, a join view without a key-preserved table
The error doesn’t really seem to fit the query, does it?
If you want to bypass the problem all you have to do is give b.rowid (line 7) an alias like rid.
As far as I can tell, the problem arises from a defect in the code that Oracle uses to transform the query before optimising it. Given the nature of the transformation it’s possible that you’re only going to see the problem manifest like this if the SQL uses ANSI forms; in this particular case changing from the ANSI left outer join syntax to Oracle’s standard (+) syntax also bypasses the problem. To narrow down the cause, I simply enabled event 10053 (the optimizer trace) and got lucky. The trace file showed an interesting “unparsed SQL” statement which, stripped of double-quote marks and re-formatted, was as follows (in 11.1.0.7 – this may vary with version of Oracle):
SELECT A.DUMMY QCSJ_C000000000600000, from$_subquery$_007.DUMMY_0 QCSJ_C000000000600001, from$_subquery$_007.ROWID_1 ROWID FROM SYS.DUAL A, LATERAL( ( SELECT D.DUMMY DUMMY_0, D.ROWID ROWID_1 FROM ( SELECT from$_subquery$_005.QCSJ_C000000000500001_1 DUMMY, from$_subquery$_005.QCSJ_C000000000500003_2 ROWID FROM ( SELECT B.DUMMY QCSJ_C000000000500000, C.DUMMY QCSJ_C000000000500001_1, B.ROWID QCSJ_C000000000500003_2 FROM SYS.DUAL B, SYS.DUAL C WHERE B.DUMMY=C.DUMMY ) from$_subquery$_005 ) D WHERE A.DUMMY=D.DUMMY ) )(+) from$_subquery$_007
Note the alias of ROWID appearing in lines 4 and 15. If you tried to run this SQL from the command line (after fiddling the event to enable lateral() views), or even just the simple select running from lines 13 to 26, you would get error ORA-00923: FROM keyword not found where expected. My guess is that the context in which the optimisation takes place means that this error is re-raised as the error ORA-01445 that we ultimately see.
A Cloudy Webcast on the Horizon for Application Developers
Just got wind of this from the Oracle Cloud Solutions blog and thought it might be of interest to the Oracle Technology Network Members. Gene Eun wrote "I'm sure many of you who follow this blog have heard a lot about Oracle Cloud and may have even been able to attend one of our recent Oracle CloudWorld events. Chances are that you’ve heard a great deal about Oracle Cloud’s application services (SaaS) and the different lines of business (LOBs) that leverage them. Let’s not forget that Oracle Cloud also offers platform as a service (PaaS) that enable developers to quickly and easily build new applications or custom extensions to Oracle Cloud’s SaaS applications. Oracle Cloud platform services are based on the world’s leading platform, open standards to prevent lock-in, and offer simple subscription pricing.
In our continuing efforts to spread the word to application developers that are keen to move their projects to the cloud, the Oracle Cloud team will be hosting a webcast series called Developing Applications in Oracle's Public Cloud. These LIVE webcasts will begin with quick overviews of our PaaS offerings, then spend most of the time on hands-on demonstrations of common tasks like building a simple app, loading data, and using the integrated tools. The first of two 2-part webcasts will focus on the Oracle Database Cloud Service and will be particularly interesting to developers familiar with Oracle Application Express. The second 2-part webcast is targeted at Java developers and will focus on the Oracle Java Cloud Service. I've listed the webcast series schedule below.
Each webcast will have LIVE Q&A so you’ll have an opportunity to ask the Oracle Cloud Product Managers any questions you have about these services.
Click here to register for the webcasts today!"