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Archive for the category “User Groups”

28 Apr 2013
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Another First at ODTUG’s #Kscope13

Those crazy kids at ODTUG have done it again!

At this year’s KScope in New Orleans this user group is introducing an evening of crossover sessions. Over the years the event has grown and actually blended the traditional Oracle database development world with the world of EPM, Hyperion, and Essbase.

In fact many folks who have come down the typical Oracle development path, myself included, know very little about the other side. So for these past few years at the conference we found there were not a lot of people crossing the various tracks (after all there are so many options to choose from).

In order to promote better cross pollination and as a way to encourage folks to expand their horizons and start to understand the “other” side, ODTUG has added two evening sessions on Tuesday so that we can gain that knowledge and not have to skip any of our regualr sessions.

The sessions will be presented by seasoned ODTUGers and Oracle ACEs. Check out these sessions:

Oracle Database Tools 101: How Does All This Stuff Get Built Anyway?

John King, King Training Resources

If you’ve been an Essbase/Hyperion, Applications, or BI user you may wonder what all the “hubbub” on the other side of Kscope is all about. Or maybe you’re curious — “I know there’s a database under the covers and lots of developers; what do they do?” If you want to know about the underpinnings of your favorite Oracle software, this session is for you. We’ll talk about how it all fits together: database, SQL, PL/SQL, ADF, Forms, APEX, and more (without too many boring details)! Attending this session will improve your understanding of and ability to communicate with the “bit-twiddlers” in your organization.

Hyperion 101: An Introduction to the Oracle Enterprise Performance Management Suite

Andrew Jorgensen, MindStream Analytics

Have you been hearing all this talk about Oracle Hyperion? Are you wondering what exactly an Essbase is?

This is the session for those who are looking for an introduction into Business Intelligence and Enterprise Performance Management. We’ll start with the core business problems that are addressed with these products. The session will then include an overview of all the products that cover the Oracle Hyperion Suite and what each is best used for. We’ll finish this session covering a variety of reporting options including OBIEE.

Get more details here: ODTUG Kscope13: Expertise + Crossover.

If you have not yet signed up to attend KScope13, it’s not too late. Just get on over to the registration page and get in on the learning!

See you in New Orleans!

Kent

P.S. I will of course be there so be sure to look me up and attend one of my sessions.

 

Posted in ODTUG, Oracle, User Groups and tagged , , , , , , , ,
23 Apr 2013
3 Comments

Oracle Designer Lives!

Amazing as it seems, I picked this article up on Twitter today.

An up to date, current, and NEW article about automating builds of applications from the Oracle Designer repository.

How very agile…

Thanks to all the gang over at AMIS (http://technology.amis.nl/) for keeping the technology alive and for being innovative enough to adapt it for the modern agile development world.

Running Oracle Designer Generation from Ant and Hudson

Introduction

Oracle Designer is a windows client-server development tool that is meant to be manually operated by a developer. Anyone trying to integrate Designer with an automatic build environment will find that it does not provide an API or a commandline version to kick-off any generation automatically.

There is however a hook that can be exploited by generating so-called GBU files directly from the Designer Repository. These GBU files are then fed to an executable called dwzrun61.exe that executes the actual generation of DDL scripts and forms.

This article describes how this can be done using examples from a real world situation. It shows how to generate the GBU files, the different strategies that can be followed and some of the pitfalls you might run into trying to pull this off yourself.

The code of the program we wrote can be found on here and is free to be adjusted to fit any other situation than ours.

via Running Oracle Designer Generation from Ant and Hudson.

If you want to meet some of the guys from AMIS and pick their brains, be sure to sign up for KScope13 and come meet them live in person.

See you there.

Kent

Posted in ODTUG, Oracle and tagged , , , , , , , ,
16 Apr 2013
1 Comment

Get thee to KScope13!

Jeff Smith (@thatjeffsmith) just posted a great little piece about why you can’t afford to miss this year’s ODTUG event in New Orleans: KScope13. As usually I will be speaking there as well and running my now annual Morning Chi Gung classes.

Get thee to KScope13!

See you there.

Kent

Posted in Chi Gung, Data Modeling, Data Vault, Data Warehouse, ODTUG, Oracle, SQL Developer Data Modeler, User Groups and tagged , , , , , , ,
13 Feb 2013

RMOUG Training Days 2013 – Day 2

So on this 2nd and final day of the annual RMOUG Training Days event, I started out by attending an excellent session on Exadata for Oracle DBAs.

Even though I am not a DBA these days I thought it would be good for me to get a better understanding of Oracle’s engineered Exadata machine.

I feel very luck to have attended this session given by Oracle Technologist of the Year, and ACE Director, Arup Nanda. He had some of the best graphics and clearest explanations of the basic anatomy of an Oracle database I have ever seen or heard.

Technologist of the Year, Arup Nanda, Database Machine Administrator

Technologist of the Year, Arup Nanda, Database Machine Administrator

He gave some pretty detailed explanations of what he called the “magic” of Exadata and why it works so well. Arup even coined a new job title, which he claims for himself, DMA – Database Machine Administrator. Because Exadata is an engineered system, it contains database, storage, and networking all in one rack. This requires some skills beyond what most dbas have or are expected to have.

He gave us a nice break down based on his experience using Exadata.

Break down of skills needed to be a successful Exadata DMA

Break down of skills needed to be a successful Exadata DMA

After this talk I can see why he was give the awards. He really knows his stuff and how to communicate it. You can follow him on Twitter @ArupNanda and see for yourself.

Next I went to see my friend,and ACE Director, Galo Balda from Austin, Texas. He gave a very informative talk about Regular Expressions.

ACE Director, Galo Balda, doing his very first presentation

ACE Director, Galo Balda, doing his very first presentation

His presentation was very informative with easy to understand examples of how to write and use regular expression and associated metacharacters to do some pretty neat things with SQL. If you attended the conference be sure to download his slides. They will make a great cheat sheet.

You can follow him on Twitter @GaloBalda or go to his blog.

After a nice vegetarian lunch, I went to see Maria Coglan talk about using (or not using) hints in SQL and how it affects the optimizer. Last year at Kscope12, I attended one of her optimizer sessions and felt like my head would explode becuase of all the information she gave. She assured me this talk would not be as bad.

She was right. It was a very informative talk.

A full house to see Maria Coglan discuss Hints and the Optimizer

A full house to see Maria Coglan discuss Hints and the Optimizer

Her main message was to always use caution when using hints. You really need to understand what you are or doing or you could make your application or reports run worse rather than better.

Maria even explained how to work with applications that already have hints embedded in them.

Approach to ignoring hints in an existing application

Approach to ignoring hints in an existing application

Get her slides and follow her on Twitter @SQLMaria

After Maria’s session I did my final session for the event. I talked about my Top 10 favorite cool tools in SQL Developer Data Modeler. There were 30 or so people in attendance. Most of them even stayed through the whole talk!

Which is pretty good since I ran over my time. There was just so many tips and tricks to show.  I will put it up on SlideShare in the next few days.

The final session for the event that I attended was done by RMOUG President, my long time friend, Tim Gorman.

Tim talked about the various options for data compression in the Oracle stack.

Tim Gorman (in the shadows) giving the last talk

Tim Gorman (in the shadows) giving the last talk

Tim gave some pretty detailed explanations and tried to depict how compression works with some nice graphics. He also told us which ones cost additional license fees.

Data Lifecycle when using Compress for OLTP

Data Lifecycle when using Compress for OLTPut how have

For me, the most useful part was his explanation about how having columns at the end of the table allows a default sort of compression to take place. I had heard this a long time ago. It was the reason so many of us were taught to put all mandatory columns at the beginning of the table – it saves space. In recent years I have been told by various DBAs that the rule no longer applies or made sense.

They were wrong! Tim gave us a real world example of how putting populated columns at the end of a table cost a lot of extra space to be used.

I will be taking that tidbit of information back to the office for sure.

You can follow Tim on Twitter @timothyjgorman.

A side note about RMOUG: At lunch, Tim shared with the attendees an agenda from 1991 for the 2nd RMOUG Training Days. We now realize that we started this event in 1990 and next year will be the 25th anniversary! (I say “we” because I was part of the planning committee back then and one of the early speakers too).

Another interesting notes was that 2/3 of the speakers came form out of town. Many, including me, paid there own way. Several speakers and attendees I know even had to take vacation time from their jobs to attend.

It is that important and that good an event!

So put it on your calendar to attend what is probably the most successful and longest running regional Oracle user conferences in the country. It will be in early February 2014. Watch www.rmoug.org for details.

And of ocurse count on me to post it here too.

Ciao for now! I am off to ski with some RMOUGers tomorrow.

Kent

Posted in Data Warehouse, Oracle, SQL Developer Data Modeler, User Groups and tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment
12 Feb 2013
1 Comment

RMOUG Training Days 2013 – Day 1

Unlike many conferences, today started off not with the keynote but with an actual session (probably some advanced psychology at work here). 🙂

I started off with John King’s session on Oracle 11g features that developers should know about. (He was going to talk about 12c but since it has not been released yet, he could not speak about it)

John King giving Session 1 at RMOUG 2013

John King giving Session 1 at RMOUG 2013

John is a great speaker and gave us some very detailed information.

One very interesting piece to me, as a data modeler and data warehouse designer, was the addition of Virtual Columns. With this you can declare a virtual, calculated/derived column to be part of a table definition. With this you can define a calculation once and have it appear when querying the table without actually physically adding a column to the table. Looks promising.

John told us about lots of new things like Pivot, Unpivot, Results Cache, PL/SQL Results cache and Nth Value functions. Some of them are shown in the following pictures.

SQL PIVOT Example

SQL PIVOT Example

Example of UNPIVOT

Example of UNPIVOT

Another cool SQL Function: Nth Value

Another cool SQL Function: Nth Value

All neat options I did not really know about.

Next up was the keynote speech by Mogens Norgaard from Denmark. Mogens is an ACE Director, CEO of his own consulting firm, and a brew master. Interesting guy.

He showed up in his bathrobe to talk to us all about how the smartphone is taking over  the world and all the cool apps you could build (and some he has built).

Mogens Norgaard in his keynote best.

Mogens Norgaard in his keynote best.

Next was my turn – my first session of the conference – 5 Ways to Make Data Modeling Fun (based on a blog post).

I was pleasantly surprised that I had 40-50 people attend and most stayed for the whole talk. It was a good, interactive session. My good buddy Jon Arnold assisted me in administering some of the activities. It was great fun getting the attendees to actually collaborate on activities during a session.

Great participant collaboration during my talk

Great participant collaboration during my talk

As promised, I did give out prizes for some of the activities (all branded Data Warrior LLC stuff).

Next was the ACE Director networking lunch where they put our names on tables so people could sit with us to ask questions (if they wanted too).

Networking Lunch

Networking Lunch

After lunch we some vendor sessions (which I skipped) and several panel discussions. These included the Women in Technology Panel and an Oracle Career Roundtable.

Women in Technology Panel

Women in Technology Panel

Oracle Careers Roundtable

Oracle Careers Roundtable

Anyone notice that the Women in Tech had one male on the panel but the Oracle Career panel had no women? Just sayin’ folks…

Next I sat in for part of a session on Oralce TimesTem database for real-time BI. It turned out to be the same stuff I heard at Oracle Open World so I did not stay.

Last for my day at RMOUG was my joint session with Stewart Bryson on Data Vault and OBIEE. Unfortunately due to the late slot (5:15 PM) we had a very low turn out. 😦 But is was a good session as I discovered all the things Stewart learned trying to use the data vault model for virtualizing the data mart layer (in OBIEE). It was all very good and reinforced my belief that Data Vault is a great way to model an EDW and that non-data vault people could understand it and apply it to dimensional modeling (or that Stewart is really exceptional).

Adios for now.

Kent

P.S. Forgot to mention again that I will be conducting another morning Chi Gung class at & AM above the registration area. Please join!

Posted in Data Modeling, Data Vault, Data Warehouse, ODTUG, Oracle, User Groups and tagged , , , , , ,

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