Day 1 was a packed affair. I went to 6 hours of presentations and my brain hurt by the end of it.
First up was Dimitri Gielis presenting “APEX 4.1 Charts Inside Out”. The talk included a whole bunch of ways to do charting in APEX, from the simple and declarative all the way to the custom and complex. There’s some really cool eye candy!
Second was Dimitri again, this time presenting “Oracle Application Express and Locator/Spatial Features: A Success Story”. The title gives away most of the technical content, but add in some maps and buses as well and you know the score. 🙂 Once again, some nice functionality on display in this talk.
Next was Julian Dontcheff presenting “Tuning Toolkits for advanced DBAs: Oracle Cloud Management with OEM 12c”. I’ve known Julian a long time and I know he has worked in companies that deal with thousands of instances, so his approach is very much, “What gives me the best result for the least effort?” I am a fan of this approach. 🙂 Most of your time should be spent on the few systems that people really care about, not obsessing about every detail on systems hardly anybody uses.
Toon Koppelaars came next with “”Triggers Considered Harmful”, Considered Harmful”. The premise of this talk was, just because people abuse triggers, that’s no reason to develop an irrational hatred of them. He gave a good balance of why triggers are bad, but then moved on to cases where they are really useful. I must admit to being stung by dodgy triggers so many times in my life that I would rather avoid them. That’s not to say I never use them, but they give me a nervous tick. 🙂 Technically I am completely with him. In practice I’m still cautious.
Toon followed up with “Fat Databases, a Layered Approach”. This was based on The Helsinki Declaration. I think Toon and I share almost exactly the same opinions on many things in this respect, but then we are both PL/SQL guys (amongst other things), so I guess we would. Definitely read his blog from start to finish.
The final presentation of the day was Doug Burns with “Statistics on Partitioned Objects”. This was cool because it wasn’t just syntax and obsessive analysis of statistics, but more of the process he went through and lessons learned when dealing with large partitioned tables. It was like a theoretical vs practical comparison.
From there it was off to the evening dinner. Lots of food and lots of dancing and lots of talking about Oracle towards the end of the evening. It was a very late night… 🙂
Cheers
Tim…
