OraNA :: Oracle News Aggregator

After being on the road for 8 days, I am finally almost home - at my parents in Connecticut for a weekend visit.

OOW was in a word, hectic.  I was afraid that it would actually be a bit worse, as it's hard to fit 43,000 people into a city and not have a suite of the obvious logistical issues.  Oracle did a fairly decent job, given the fixed issues of the sheer size of the conference.  Most of the presentations that I wanted to see were in Moscone West or the Marriott, which were just across from one another, which did make things easier.

The registration system was a little bit less than I expected.  I would have liked to have had an interface that would let me know which presentations were coming up next and/or have an easy search to show me not only that but which presentations were in a specific venue.  Often, I found myself walking out of a meeting and would have liked to sit in on something close, but had no way of knowing aside from walking the halls and hoping to stumble upon something interesting.  Pre-registering was a nice idea, but I did change my mind on a number of things.  It would also have been nice to not have gotten evaluation e-mails for presentations that I did not attend. 

As for the big announcement, ehh...  I guess that I'm tainted by the excitement that companies like Apple create with their announcements, as I can go out and buy (or at least afford) most of the products that are announced.  With the "Database Machine", I just can't see sleeping outside of Redwood Shores so that I could be the first one to have one.  It is an intersting announcement, as Oracle has done this in the past with limited to no success.  Perhaps the second time is a charm...

In the morning I had to do some work for our customers, so I missed the Benelux event at San Francisco. I guess I can go to Oracle HQ and do some sailing next time too. Client is king ;-)

I didn't go to that many sessions, instead I went to the demo grounds to talk to the APEX and SQL Developer developers. I was particular interested in seeing more new features of the upcoming APEX 4.0 release. I saw the dynamic components, which allow to declarative hide or show an item for ex. It means you don't need to write that much javascript anymore in APEX 4.0. Another nice upcoming feature is the APEX listener. I'll do a dedicated blog post about it once I'm back as it's something really new. The screenshot shows you the new login screen. You'll see the possibility to login to the Websheets part.


Another area I was interested in was the new SQL Developer Modeling tool. Apparently the tool will also be released as a seperate product. Basically Oracle bought Ikan's software, CWD4ALL. I know some people at Ikan as it's a Belgian company. It was always nice to see them on events, so now some of them work for Oracle was a nice surprise. The romours are that the modeling tool will be a paid option for SQL Developer or you can buy it as a seperate product. The demo I saw was quite impressive. Thanks Rene!


In the afternoon I saw a presentation of Patrick Wolf, The Power of the Oracle Application Express Repository. I really liked this presentation as he touched different areas of the APEX repository. Patrick compared the APEX repository with the Garden of Eden and played some nice relaxing music with that thought.


Tuesday evening was fairly busy as I had two parties at the same time. I first went to the Benelux evening, had some drinks, food and nice chats with people from Belgium and the Netherlands.

Then I had to run to the next event, the APEX Meetup. Around 30 people joined us during the evening and we had talks about APEX and other things. It's nice to also know more about their situation at home, family, region they live in etc.

Tough night, but worth it...

After some nice breakfast with John I went to my first session of the day.


Mark Drake talked about "Oracle Application Express and Oracle XML Database: A Match Made in the Database". I really enjoyed the session as I think the possibilities of both technologies can work very nicely together. Mark and Carl made a document management system in APEX based on the XMLDB technology. I found it an awesome product. They will make it available in the next days/weeks. I'm using some of the functionalities of XMLDB in Apexblogs.info.


Afterwards I had some lunch and prepared to go to the Keynote with Larry Ellison and Mark Hurd of HP. The queues were enormous! I already blogged about the keynote, so I'm not going to do that again.


This OOW is strange. Normally I bump up to the people I know and attend the other big Oracle conferences, but this time it didn't happen. Maybe because now there were sessions in a lot of different buildings (Marriott, Moscone South, West and North).

When I went to the OTN lounge I finally saw some people of the hard-core Oracle world ;-)
Tim Hall, Eddy Awad, Lewis Cunningham, Doug Burns etc.

Then it was time to fresh up for the Appreciation Event! Heading of to Treasure Island...
I'm still waiting for some pictures that John took as for once I left my camera in the hotel. The party was really nice and there were some fun things to do next to the concerts.

The keynote just finished. Larry Ellison announced Oracle is also providing hardware together with HP. If you want the worlds fastest machine for the Oracle database you should buy Exadata!

If you think about it... some say that APEX can't scale (which is absolute rubbish), if you get Exadata, how fast will that be then? Every APEX page in less then 0.01 second ;-)

I got up to the stage and talked about it to Larry and he gave me one of these nice machines as a present! Thanks Larry!

For the people believing I got such a machine, it was a joke ;-)

I'm currently in the keynote session at Oracle Open World. 30 minutes to go before Larry Ellison will come and do a big announcement ;-)


This time I've a good seat... people are still coming in...

Didn't have the time yet to finish the blog posts of the other days, but hope to finish that later today.

On Monday at 11.30 I gave my presentation about Charting in Oracle Application Express.
I tried to build things up, so beginner and more advanced users would learn something. The room was pretty full, around 70 people I think. I talked why you would like to use charts, how to create and adapt them and how they work under the hood. Paulo already blogged about my presentation.

At the end of my presentation I talked about other charting possibilities if APEX doesn't fit all your needs. I was very proud to publicly announce the partnership between Apex Evangelists and Anychart. I'll do a proper blog post about it, once I'm back from OOW, but it comes down that we'll provide you with an upgrade for your APEX environment. It will allow you to profit from the nicer look and feel and more possibilities in Anychart 5.0. Next to that we'll provide consultancy to guide you to create even nicer charts like Interactive Dashboards, Gauges etc. More information about that will follow next week.

At lunch I had a meeting to discuss more things we could do for the APEX community and the upcoming events like Kaleidoscope.

In the afternoon I went to David Peake's session about converting Oracle Forms to APEX. The room was very full, lots of interest in this... Earlier I created a video about the migrations tool, but in the meanwhile the look and feel has changed. It's even easier to see and search how the migration went. The tool is not intended to give you a silver bullet to do a complete 100% migration from Forms to Application Express. Instead it's a conversion tool that allows you to give you a headstart and guide you through the complete process of the Forms convertion.


I got a lot of comments on my previous blog post about the tool, but I still believe it will a killer feature and the logic migration path if you're looking into something to replace your Oracle Forms because your business require it. If your Forms still fit your need, you don't need to convert of course, as the process you need to handle as a real project and it's not something you'll do in a day.

At the end of the day I went to Carl Backstrom's session about Web 2.0 Development with Oracle Application Express. Carl is the guy behind a lot of the ajax functionalities in APEX. He talked about $x, $s, $v, a lot of the javascript libraries that are in APEX and he told that jquery will be using in further releases of APEX. He also stressed you need to develop in Firefox and use Firebug, which I absolutely agree with.


In the evening I went to the Partner Executive Dinner organized by Oracle Benelux. It was nice to meet other people from Belgium, but even nicer was the ride to the restaurant. I was waiting for a cab together with some people of Oracle Belgium, but as it was rush hour, we had to wait a long time. After 45 minutes queuing we were tired of waiting and finally took a limo! That was awesome! Just like in the movies...

The first session of the day was schedule to 11:30 AM. I had some free time that I used to get around and see what was happening. I went to Moscone North and after blogging a bit on the couches, went to the Unconference section and then the bookstore. I couldn’t find John Scott’s Pro Oracle APEX book, but later at night he told me that the book was there, so maybe I’ll go to the bookstore

If you want to use the features of the UTL_TCP package you need to publish it to your APEX application user. (I tested it under APEX 3.1.2)

How to:

-- sqlplus
GRANT EXECUTE ON "SYS"."UTL_TCP" TO "APEX_USER"

-- sqlplus
create or replace synonym UTL_TCP for SYS.UTL_TCP;

-- an APEX process procedur
-- apex_mail procedure call
apex_mail.send(
p_to => 'user@company.com',
p_from => 'info@company.com',
p_body => 'New message cerated from ' || :p1_user || '.' || utl_tcp.crlf ||
'Description: ' || utl_tcp.crlf || :p1_description,
p_subj => 'New message! ' utl_tcp.crlf);

-- push the e-mail queue for immediate delivery
wwv_flow_mail.push_queue(
P_SMTP_HOSTNAME => 'ip',
P_SMTP_PORTNO => 'port');

As promised I've put up the export of my demo application from Oracle World , for people who were at ODTUG in New Orleans it's pretty much the same application I showed there.

Thanks, for everybody who showed up I had a great time and hopefully was able to give people some ideas. I'll see what the rules are for me putting my slides on slideshare or something like that , but at some point Oracle will putting up the slides and a recording of the session.

Download the Application

On Sunday I started with the APEX - Ask the Experts panel.

Considering the time (Sunday morning) we got quiet some interest, over 100 people attended. I talked a bit about the APEX SIGs and started with one question to every member of the Panel. After that the people in the room could ask questions. The hour and a half flew bye. There were questions about the forms conversion to apex tool, printing, scalability etc. A very broad range of questions! I would like to thank Denes Kubicek, John Scott, Anton Nielsen, Scott Spendolini and David Peake to be in the panel and for nicely answering the questions. (picture taken 10 mins before)


Ohh and... David said that APEX 3.2 will come out "soon" and an Early adopter "sooner" ;-) APEX 4.0 is planned for somewhere in 2009.

I went to Tom Kyte's session about Schema Design and learned I should also look more into clustered tables. He didn't talk about ERD design, but more about which choices you have in Oracle design and why you should do certain things. I had the feeling he could talk a lot more about the topic and I also wanted to hear more about it, but time is limited at OOW.

In the afternoon I had another session together with Rich Mutell, one of our customers to talk about an APEX case study. I just had to introduce Rich. He did most of the talking, which was great for me ;-) It was a very different presentation from others as he talked about his experience with APEX, but he's not really a developer, but a business user.


Next there was a keynote session with Safra Catz, mayor of San Francisco, Gavin Newson and an interesting talk from Washington's best-loved political couple Mary Matalin and James Carville. They entertain the crowd with a bitingly humorous look at the world of politics. Although I didn't get all the jokes and didn't understand everything it was quite nice to listen to them.


At the end of the day I had two parties: the Welcome Party and the Blogger Meetup. As I didn't sleep for over 30 hours the previous day I didn't get to them. I just took some food and went straight to bed...

Today I have changed my agenda and attended two sessions that weren’t initially in my schedule. The first was the one presented by Dimitri Gielis about working charts in APEX and the second one was about mashups and integration with APEX by Simon Boorsma. Before that I went to Moscone North to watch a bit of the keynote. You can’t believe the number of people that were there! The following

Today I had the chance to attend 4 sessions. Two of them were Hands on Labs from Oracle Develop. Also, it was nice to put some faces in the names I’m used meet on the net. I met Carl Backstrong, Joel Kallman, David Peake, Dimitri Gielis, Francis Minault, John Scott and Patrick Wolf. Session 1: Hands-on Lab: Extending the Oracle Application Express Framework with Web 2.0 - APEX Development Team

On the other side it's not very hard to guess. I'm there where most of the Oracle blogging and Oracle APEX community currently is. I'm at Oracle Open World in San Francisco.

I'm not sure how often I will blog, because I have a tight time schedule. But if you want to get hold of me, I will try to visit most of the Oracle APEX sessions.

On Tuesday, between 14:30 and 15:30 I'm doing my own presentation titled The Power of the Oracle APEX Repository (Session Id: 300210). It's currently booked out, but you might get a chance to still get in.

Enough for now, I have to listen to Tom Kyte's "Efficient Schema Design" now.

Yes, that is right. This blog is one year old. I thank all of you out there for coming around, reading what I want to say about APEX. Thanks a ton. I hope you will stick with me for the next year too. Top 10 of most visited posts: Check all checkboxes Javascript Calendar Integration Colorful web forms Javascript Tooltip Integration Substitution string and SQL Developer Populate date field

The weather on Saturday was good, not very warm, but not too cold either. I went down to Moscone to register. It was still quiet, which will be very different from the next days ;-)

As John didn't arrive yet (he drove from LA to San Francisco, a 10h drive!) I went for a small walk and recognized almost everything. It looks like I came too many times to the States (and San Francisco) now. At 7.30 PM I had a dinner with the people of the ODTUG Symposium. Scott Spendolini, John Scott and Mike Riley were also there.


Later that night I bumped up to Marc Sewtz, Joel Kallman, Ashish, Raj and Denes Kubicek and had one last drink with them.

Thanks guys for the nice evening.

I’m in San Francisco for the Oracle OpenWorld 2008 where I’ll be participating in one of the official sessions under the title “Building Commercial Software-as-a-Service Applications with Oracle Application Express”. I’ve arrived yesterday around 6:30 PM after a tiring 18 hours long trip. I’ve started at Oporto Airport where I took a plain to Lisbon, then Philadelphia and finally San Francisco.

Been awhile since I've posted. That whole work thing will get in the way of that on occasion.

Anyway for people heading to Oracle World .

I'll be helping run the APEX hands on lab.

S298611, 10:30 - 11:30 at Golden Gate A2, Marriott
Hands-on Lab: Extending the Oracle Application Express Framework with Web 2.0

and also will have my very own session

S298613, 17:30 - 18:30 at Salon 14/15, Marriott
Web 2.0 Development with Oracle Application Express


Past that I will be ducking in and out of sessions and unconference events as well as working the APEX booth (by far my favorite part of Oracle World).

I'm pretty excited about this years Oracle World as APEX seems to be , is ;) , huge this year.

I'll be posting updates here on http://twitter.com/carlback and on http://friendfeed.com/carlback so feel free to follow along I'll do my best to keep everyone in loop.

If your at Oracle World please stop by the APEX booth and say hello, and if your not feel free to send me questions through the above service , or http://mix.oracle.com and I'll do my best to answer them or corner someone that can.

P.S. You know it's going to be a long week when Raj calls me up because he heard a rumor I'm already in SF ;) watch that guy he's trouble, but his session will be awesome!!!!

I've made it to San Francisco, safe and sound and only a couple minutes delayed.  Tomorrow will be a hectic day, as I am participating in the APEX Experts Panel then presenting/hosting the ODTUG APEX mini-conferece.  We have a great line-up this time, so even if you were at ODTUG this year, definitely stop by to hear what the US Army & Vista (the company, not the OS), WaMu, BAE Systems and Wachovia are doing with APEX.

I was also greeted with a nice, heavy box of books - not just any book, but the one that I helped John Scott author.  It was just weird to see the words that I wrote appear in an actual book!

I did, however, find the 1st typo:  in my Biography, they erronously listed ODTUG as the Oregon Developer Tools User Group.  Oops!  At least the Foreword is not the Forward...

In any case, please feel free to stop by to either session tomorrow.  You may even walk out with a new copy of the book...

I just arrived in San Francisco.

The flights weren't that bad after all. Actually the local flight from LA to San Francisco was really good! There was a steward called Tim and he was really funny. With the safety procedure he put humor into it and with success! For the first time I saw people actually listening to the whole explanation. He got a nice applause at the end too. Flying with Southwest airlines was a bit special, as you can pick your seat. I had position 5, meaning I could get into the plane as one of the first and had plenty of choice. Next to that I got a drink of the house.

And for the first time I managed to pass customs in less than 30 minutes! But then I had to wait for my luggage for 15 minutes ;-)

I'm currently in my hotel room, same place as last year, the King George hotel. I didn't get that much sleep yet and am awake for over 20h. In the plane I saw some good movies, one called "in Bruges", which I was surprised to see on the list, as it's a town in Belgium.

Now I'm quickly freshing up and going to have something to eat and drink...

I'm currently in the UK waiting for my next flight.

It will be a long day as my first flight was at 7.25 AM from Brussels to London. My next flight is in 2 hours to LA. I first thought to drive together with John Scott from LA to San Francisco to see the nice scenery (coast drive). But at the last moment we buried that idea as people told us it would be a very long drive, especially at the time we would take off in LA.

I called BA to change my ticket, but it would cost more to change the ticket from London to LA then the whole ticket (BRU-LHR-LAX + SFO-LHR-BRU) had cost! So I now end up to fly to LA and take a local plane to San Francisco. I'll normally arrive in San Francisco around 6 PM (SF time).

Let's hope I don't get stuck in LA... especially when I read what happened to Tim!