Training Days 2013 Presentations

To view the abstracts selected for RMOUG’s Training Days 2013 please click on the topics below. Click here to Register

Application Development	Business Intelligence
Database Administration	Database Tools of the Trade
DBA Deep Dive	Middleware
Professional Development

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Application Development

Testable and Maintainable JQuery Composite Applications Using Oracle Service Bus and PeopleSoft

Jason Armbruster, University of Colorado & Pamela Song, University of Colorado

Modern web and mobile frameworks work best with lightweight services utilizing REST and JSON rather than heavy-weight XML and web services. Unfortunately REST/JSON integrations can be difficult to test and frequent maintenance of our enterprise applications (especially Campus Solutions) requires simple testability. How can we enable usage of these frameworks while still maintaining strongly-typed, well-formed, and therefore easily testable integrations? This presentation will explore one technique utilizing Oracle Service Bus and open source XML/JSON translators and will discuss alternative approaches and opportunities for future enhancement of this approach.

Introduction to Regular Expressions in Oracle

Galo Balda, Texas Health and Human Services Commission

Oracle support for regular expressions has been around since version 10gRelease 1. However it’s common to find developers that aren’t aware of this powerful functionality. Oracle SQL support for regular expressions lets application developers implement complex pattern-matching logic in the database, which is useful for these reasons:

By centralizing pattern-matching logic in the database, you avoid intensive string processing of SQL results sets by middle-tier applications.
By using server-side regular expressions to enforce constraints, you avoid duplicating validation logic on multiple clients. This session will talk about common used operators, pattern matching conditions, and functions provided by Oracle.

Mobile Integration through Oracle Technologies

Jordan Braunstein, Visual Integrator Consulting

This session’s objectives are:

Design approaches for mobile applications
Applying Oracle technologies to meet different user requirements
Overcoming limitations of mobile development environments
How to get started on mobile development
Managing user expectations through best practices.

An outline of this session covers:

Key design characteristics
Features for mobile application development
Limitations and approaches for overcoming
Development tools and approaches
Oracle technologies
Best practices for mobile development

CTO’s Perspective on Adding Geo-spatial and Location-Based Information to Your Data

Bradley Brown, InteliVideo

This presentation will share what geo-spatial data is available, where you can download the data, and what you might use the information for. You can also create your own layers of information and merge this into your queries. All of this can be done using an Oracle database (even the free version of Oracle) – i.e. without a mapping tool like ESRI. You can easily overlay this information onto Google Maps or Google Earth. The presenter will share PL/SQL code that will extract shapes into KML.

APEX Tabular Form Terrors and How to Overcome Them

Karen Cannell, TH Technology

APEX Tabular Forms are handy and quite powerful right out of the box, but when your business rules take you outside of the wizards, implementing certain features can be scary. Complex validations, row-based validations, cascading lists of values, and other-column-dependent data selections can be terrifying. Fear no more – this session will give you an in-depth APEX 4.1+ tabular form anatomy lesson and walk you through examples of the most common outside-the-wizard tabular form business requirements. You’ll leave armed with sufficient knowledge to tackle most tabular form requirements with confidence either via APEX features or build your own custom modules.

Writing Sweet PL/SQL

Bill Coulam, DB Artisans

Learn the secrets of the PL/SQL gurus! Come absorb practices and principles to begin writing PL/SQL solutions you can be proud of with very little extra effort on your part but maximum returns: fast, flexible, easy on the eyes, maintainable, one third as long as sloppy code, etc. The session will explore anti-patterns like Too Many Cooks in the Kitchen, Flying Blind, Dung Beetle Ball, Stonehenge, and Mona Lisa at the Mall, as well as the right way to do things. Attendees will gain access to free templates, a PL/SQL programming guide, a SQL formatter, and a full PL/SQL reusable code library.

Fuzzy String Matching in Oracle

Dominic Delmolino, Agilex Technologies

Many database developers are familiar with the basic SOUNDEX function used to provide basic similarity matching for names. This presentation will go beyond SOUNDEX to examine more advanced approaches for string and name matching, including details about the UTL_MATCH built-in package. The session will also explore implementations of the NYSIIS, MetaPhone, and Caverphone phonetic matching algorithms in SQL and PL/SQL. Finally the session will explore how combinations of these techniques can be used for data cleansing in large scale environments.

Bye-bye CONNECT BY – Using the New Recursive SQL Syntax

Dominic Delmolino, Agilex Technologies

Hierarchical queries in Oracle have always been a challenge, even for advanced SQL practitioners, with Oracle-specific SQL language elements which are not part of the SQL standards. Beyond the SQL-92 standard, the ANSI SQL:1999 standard added the definition of a recursive query which has now been adopted by Oracle. This presentation will talk about how to translate common CONNECT BY statements and use the new construct to solve more esoteric problems. The attendee will benefit by using this new standard, portable construct for hierarchical queries in Oracle and other databases.

Deploying 11g FMW Forms & Reports Servers with Webutil – Lessons Learned

Robert Dow, Boss Software

Oracle WebLogic and 11g Fusion Middleware (FMW) Forms and Reports Server replaces OC4J and 10g OAS. Webutil and the Java COM Bridge tools provide extensions to Oracle Forms enabling robust client interaction with normal desktop interface and functionality. Deploying 11g FMW has become a priority as Oracle has desupported both premier and extended support for 10g OAS and OC4J requiring customers to deploy WebLogic and 11g FMW to support their Forms and Reports environments. Installation and configuration may be problematic as there have been significant changes in the familiar directory structures of 10g OAS.

This presentation will discuss the need for migrating, the critical issues to consider, and provide both a high level as well as detailed look at configuring the Webutil and Jacob components via both manual file editing as well as with Fusion Middleware Control. Other items covered will be a concise path for transition as well as location and interpretation of the various logs and error messages that are provided.

APEX – After the Wizards

Jeff Eberhard, Smith Johnson Group

Many developers new to APEX begin building their applications using the provided application, page, and region wizards. Often their first stumbling block is what to do beyond what the wizards have enabled them to do. A common statement made is in the form of, “I know this is easy, but I don’t know how to do it in APEX.” This session will walk through common issues experienced by new APEX developers and how to solve them.

You Can’t Do That with APEX!

Jeff Eberhard, Smith Johnson Group

Have you been told, “That can’t be done with APEX!”, but later find out it is actually pretty easy? Plugins have enabled the APEX developer a method to power boost their applications. This presentation will review various plugins that have made the developers’ life easier. Also discover a few APEX components that you may never have known existed to help with your everyday APEX development efforts.

All the Leaves Aren’t Brown: Many Ways to Profile Your Application for Performance Improvements

Chuck Ezell, Datavail

Finding improvements in your Client Side JavaScript, Java, or .NET code is often easier said than done. Managing application performance problems due to memory leaks, poor coding habits, superfluous library usage, detecting deadlocks, measuring memory usage, and garbage collection frequency are activities often left to the DBA and system admin. Once the code has left the developer’s desk and has been hastily run through some degree of QA, it’s often pushed to production.

From the perspective of the DBA, many times they do not know the code or even the developer; fixes must be derived in the dark. These tasks don’t have to be stressful and scary if you have the right tools and know how to implement them. Profiling application code goes far beyond measuring response time and working out the bugs. In addition there are different methods and types of profiling application code. Even greater still, the degree of code being deployed in today’s applications and how it varies in implementation is enough to cause anyone to throw their hands up.

Do we concern ourselves with the stability of the JVM on a user’s computer or just the application server? Does it really make a difference what web browser the user chose to use that day? How do we know the difference between a locked thread and a locked database object even though they seem to look the same from the users’ perspective? The session will discuss issues like these digging into the application and client tiers to find some sanity.

Deep Dive into Oracle ADF: Advanced Techniques

Eugene Fedorenko, CS Integra

This presentation takes a journey from the surface of the declarative approach into the deep of real-life hands-on programming. Hear how to create and manipulate Oracle Application Development Framework (Oracle ADF) objects at runtime programmatically. See how to define a complete business components model on-the-fly. Learn the advanced techniques of dynamic creation of objects such as entities, validation rules, view objects, and lists of values. Learn how to create and apply view criteria at runtime, how to create programmatically populated view objects, and how to work with complex database types. See how to manipulate Oracle ADF trains programmatically at runtime.

Web Development Techniques from an Oracle Fusion Applications Developer

Ann Horton, Oracle Corporation

Oracle’s new Fusion Applications are built using the Oracle Fusion technology stack including Oracle’s Application Development Framework (ADF) and JDeveloper. Come take a look at some of the user interface design patterns used in the Fusion Applications and how they were implemented using JDeveloper and ADF. Learn techniques that you can incorporate into your ADF application.

This presentation will look in depth at ADF business components, application module methods, managed beans, Java server faces, source code, and other features of Fusion technology. This session will look at a variety of Fusion features including application tables, multi-select tables, search page with comp-opers and query adapters, select and add popup windows, contextual actions, page navigation, and tree tables.

Introduction to PL/SQL

Dan Hotka, Training Specialist

The attendees of this session will have the opportunity to construct various PL/SQL routines to solve simple and complex business questions. Dan will cover how to code PL/SQL and access data in a variety of methods, error handling, and will touch on debugging PL/SQL. The course utilizes a variety of current tools. Attendees will have the opportunity to learn more about SQL Developer, TOAD, as well as the Oracle tools like SQL*Plus.

Develop Compelling On-Device Mobile Apps – The Simpler Way

Shay Shmeltzer, Oracle Corporation

Mobile devices such as iPhones, iPads, and Android devices are now the preferred (and in many cases the standard) way to access enterprise applications and data while on-the-go. With the popularity of the consumer apps in the App Store, mobile users now fully expect their enterprise apps to be equally compelling. Creating these types of on-device, offline-capable, device-feature rich mobile applications typically requires learning device-native code for multiple platforms.

This session will discuss and demonstrate developing an on-device mobile application using the technologies and tools you are familiar with: JDeveloper, Java, and ADF Mobile, without writing a single line of device-native code. You can deploy this single code base to both iOS and Android-based devices.

High Performance Messaging with Oracle Advanced Queuing

Jeff Jacobs, PayPal

Oracle’s Advanced Queuing (AQ) is a full-featured, robust messaging system which offers numerous uses for application development, including asynchronous processing, inter-database coordination, publish and subscribe, interfacing with other messaging systems such as JMS, and more. This session will cover the features, fundamentals, and performance issues involved with using AQ. Topics will include understanding, creating, and managing the various queue and queue table types, enqueuing and dequeuing techniques, propagation, management, and examples of using AQ. NOTE: this is not an Oracle Streams presentation.

SQL “Pagination” Pattern: Designing Efficient Top-N and Pagination Queries

Maxym Kharchenko

“Pagination” (of which Top-N is a special case) is a very common query technique. It deals with extracting a limited number of “most interesting” records from a potentially large qualifying result set. While pagination requests seem simple (and Oracle 12c made them even simpler), executing them efficiently requires some ground work in both schema design and query coding. Come to this presentation and find out how to make pagination queries consistently efficient and how to recognize and avoid potential pitfalls

Oracle 12c and 11gR2 New Features for Developers: What You Need to Know

John King, King Training Resources

New features of the Oracle database geared to developers will be discussed and demonstrated. Attendees will be introduced to the new and improved features of Oracle that directly impact application development. Oracle Database 12c is not in production at the time of this abstract’s submission. If Oracle 12c has not become generally available by the start of the conference, this session will discuss Oracle 11g features exclusively.

Oracle ADF Task Flow Beyond the 10-Minute Demo

John King, King Training Resources

Oracle’s Application Development Framework (ADF) is an excellent tool for creating robust applications. Part of ADF’s strength is the built-in Model-View-Controller (MVC) design inherited from Java Server Faces (JSF). Using a series of XML files (of course) the flow of ADF Faces applications can be managed by the controller properly. The task flow process seems a little unwieldy to experienced UI developers, but the advantages of “not breaking” the Controller are worth it. In this session you will see how ADF’s task flow may be used to quickly and easily manage the flow of an application.

Oracle ADF & JDeveloper for Forms Developers

John King, King Training Resources

Oracle Forms is a strong and viable product with years of future left. However, Oracle has “bet the farm” on the success of Fusion; Oracle’s rewrite of its Application stack using Java EE and Service-Oriented Architecture. A key tool in this development effort has been the JDeveloper tool and the Oracle Application Development Framework (ADF). Forms Developers wanting to “catch the new wave” are interested in adding JDeveloper and ADF to their repertoire. JDeveloper has come a long way from the tool that crashed during every Oracle demo session and has become a robust development tool for Java and more. ADF likewise has become a useful application development tool that is reminiscent of the simplicity of developing with Oracle Forms (reminiscent; still not all the way there, but much closer…). ADF provides graphic and declarative mechanisms used to develop data-based applications where most “grunt work” code is generated by the tools and actual coding is limited compared to normal Java EE development.
This session will illustrate the ease with which Oracle Forms Developers can use JDeveloper and ADF can be used to create Java-based web applications.

WebLogic Server Application Security – Implementing the Superstition With ADF Security

Peter Koletzke, Quovera

Designing user access to specific parts of your application is important for all types of applications, but security plays an even larger role in web applications that are usually open to access from a wider user base. Oracle WebLogic Server, a Java EE runtime container, provides Oracle Platform Security Services, which enables developers to use standard Java security libraries and ADF Security to implement access control in their applications.

This session explains application security concerns and techniques and discusses and demonstrates how to set up ADF Security for ADF web applications. It also discusses how to store test user credentials, tap into existing Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) providers, and declare access for resources such as pages, task flows, and business components. It also describes how to set up declarative properties to hide or disable items based for specific user roles.

The Arrangement of the Screens: Introduction to Layout in ADF Faces

Peter Koletzke, Quovera

This presentation addresses how you can implement a layout design using Application Development Framework Faces Rich Client (ADF Faces RC) components. It explains the different categories of ADF Faces layout components and their properties that allow the developer to work declaratively.

The presentation also discusses the embedded support for visual editing, including some little known features like the “design this container.” It also explains and demonstrates container component techniques such as modifying the standard tab order. The session ends with some advice about how to approach creation of a specific layout including using resources such as cheat sheets, component guides, and component documentation.

Charting Oracle Database Data with JavaFX and Groovy

Dustin Marx, Raytheon Company

JavaFX 2.x makes generation and display of data-powered charts powerful and straightforward. JavaFX’s simple APIs allow data sets to be used to create numerous types of charts including pie charts, bar charts, line charts, area charts, bubble charts, and more. JavaFX also supports dynamic charts that are automatically updated when the underlying data changes. With JavaFX poised to become part of Java SE, it is destined to be a standardized technology that is readily available in many environments.

Groovy is a dynamic scripting language that also runs on the JVM and can be used to write concise but powerful scripts. Groovy makes retrieving data from a database relatively painless and is much easier to use than even JDBC. Groovy’s XML parsing is also similarly easy to use and makes Groovy an ideal language for parsing XML to generate charts. JavaFX and Groovy together make it easy to write simple scripts that easily create visually impressive charting results. JavaFX and Groovy can be used with other Java/JVM-based libraries to generate these charts in various medium from websites to desktop clients to PDFs.

Oracle Text and XML DB, Indexes, and Querying Data

Robert Mason, Regis University

Querying unstructured and semi-structured text is a major challenge for Oracle developers and DBAs. This presentation includes an overview of the topics of Oracle Text and XML DB. The session will include examples of how to create context indexes and then use the contains clause and XMLQUERY/XQUERY to retrieve information from raw text and XML data stored in an Oracle 11g database.

Query results and explain plans are examined. Oracle Text is defined, the indexing architecture is reviewed, different index types are discussed, and examples of creating a content index are provided. The data of the index component tables is reviewed using easy to understand examples. XML DB is defined and the architecture is reviewed. An example of creating an XML DB index is provided with examples of how to query the data using XMLQUERY/XQUERY via FLWORS (aka flowers).

What Is in the Next Generation of Oracle Database Technology for Java Developers?

Kuassi Mensah, Oracle Corporation

The next generation of Oracle database technology brings a wealth of key features. In the first part of the session, Java developers will learn about new enhancements for Java in the database including: the ability to choose Java SE 6 or Java SE 7 at database installation or migration, customizing the default Java security, JNDI, and Java logging.

In the second part of the session, Java developers will learn about new JDBC and Universal Connection Pool enhancements including: support for latest Java/JDBC standards, extreme scalability with support for Database Resident Connection Pooling (DRCP), Application Continuity, and Transaction Guard that mask outages and guarantee maximum availability by minimizing disruption to users in Oracle Real Application Clusters (Oracle RAC) and Oracle Data Guard environments, and improved manageability.

Performance is a Feature: Here is the Specification

Cary Millsap, Method R Corporation

To many software developers, designers, and architects “performance” is a side-effect; an afterthought of designing and building proper features like “book an order” or “look up a book by author.” But great performance at scale doesn’t happen by accident. The first step is to know what performance *is*: it is the answer to the question, “What have people been *experiencing*?” Knowing what people experience when they use your software is possible only if you treat performance as a proper feature, a feature you analyze, design, build, test, and maintain. This session explains the steps that will get you started.

Understanding Optimizer Statistics for Developers: May the Odds Be Ever in Your Favor

Karen Morton, Enkitec

It’s the Hunger Games and you’ve got a 1 in 24 chance to come out alive. What can you do to make sure the odds you survive are in your favor? Making sure your SQL performs well and remains stable over time may not be a life or death situation, but you can stack the odds in your favor by understanding how the optimizer utilizes statistics to formulate execution plans. The calculations the optimizer uses to make plan operation choices are rooted in some very simple statistical formulas. These formulas, if understood, can help you make better choices when writing SQL as well as improve how you performance test your code so that you are confident in how well it will perform over the long haul in production.

In this session, you will learn:

Statistics fundamentals for computing cardinality/selectivity for single and multi-column predicates.
How statistics can help the optimizer understand data distribution patterns (skew).
Reasons why certain ways of writing SQL limit the optimizer’s ability to determine the best plan and how the optimizer uses query transformations to improve the odds.
How to use extended statistics to help the optimizer create more accurate cardinality estimates.
How the optimizer learns and self-corrects plan choices using cardinality feedback as well as a look at Oracle 12c enhancements such as adaptive execution plans and enhanced statistics.

Complimentary Upgrade to First-Class: ADF Development Team Essentials

Lynn Munsinger, Oracle Corporation

ADF is a first-class framework. Come to this session to learn how to build a first-class development team for creating ADF applications. Whether you are a developer, team lead, or development manager, this session will help you understand how to set up your project for success.

From training considerations for your developers to must-have resources, as well as key coding guidelines and reuse considerations, the essential elements of successful ADF application development are explained so that your team will be equipped to create compelling, usable, elegant applications that are performant and easy to maintain.

How to Migrate an Oracle Forms Application to Oracle ADF

Lynn Munsinger, Oracle Corporation

For many, the attraction of Oracle Fusion Applications and its underlying technology, Oracle Application Development Framework (Oracle ADF), may be a compelling reason to look at moving their existing applications to this new technology. But how can you do it? Many of you will have 20+ years’ investment in hundreds of Oracle Forms applications. Do you rewrite? Can you perform automated migration? Should you redevelop from scratch? Can you salvage any of your existing code or skills? This presentation takes you through the decision process of looking at leaving a technology such as Oracle Forms and moving to Oracle ADF. It examines product roadmaps, design decisions, rearchitecture considerations, tools, and methodologies and shares real customer experiences.

GE Appliances Case Study: Automating Supply Chain, Trading Partner Integration, and Corporate Financials Through Oracle Technology

Elaine Nguyen, Visual Integrator Consulting & Paul Ohlmann, GE Appliances

This session will include the following highlights:

Objective 1: Overview of a SOA and B2B-based solution framework for rapid trading partner on-boarding, EDI integration to back-end systems, and E-Business Suite integration.
Objective 2: Overview of BAM Dashboards that are useful for the business to gain transparency into B2B transactions, full control for replaying failed transactions, and analytics of the global supply chain.
Objective 3: Framework for configuration-driven design of trading partners, EDI, Oracle E-Business Suite.
Objective 4: Adherence to Oracle AIA standards, canonical designs, and SOA principles for compliance and preparation of Oracle Fusion Applications Roadmap at a future date.
Objective 5: Integration and mapping from and into EDI standards, GE legacy systems, and E-Business Suite through re-usable approaches.

Bring Your iPads! (Because You’re Gonna Build a Mobile APEX App in One Hour!)

Chris Ostrowski, Avout

Building mobile applications has become a very hot topic in the IT world. Users are increasingly demanding access to corporate applications via their mobile devices. BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) articles have been increasingly featured in technology publications. New languages, development tools, and skill sets along with the decisions of what mobile platforms to support can make the entry into mobile application development very difficult for many organizations. A new technology, however, makes decisions about mobile development much easier: JQuery Mobile.

Oracle Application Express integrates very easily with JQuery Mobile and this combination can be used to create mobile applications that are supported on a wide range of mobile devices relatively simple. This presentation will walk attendees through the steps of building a mobile application using Oracle Application Express. Attendees are encouraged to bring an iPad (or other mobile device) to actively participate and see the final results of their work.

APEX: Building Your First Web Service

Chris Ostrowski, Avout

APEX 4.2 is a major release with a lot of new features. Previous versions of APEX allowed you to consume existing web services. APEX 4.2 is the first release that allows developers to create web services. The presentation will consist of a brief background on web services, a live demonstration of building a web service in APEX 4.2, and how web services can affect your organization’s development strategy.

Forms to Struts 2, Spring, and Hibernate: Value & Gotcha’s

Jigar Parsana, Vgo Software/NEOS & Robert Nocera, Vgo Software/NEOS

This presentation outlines the use of Struts 2, Spring, and Hibernate as a target platform for the conversion of Oracle Forms applications. With the acquisition of Sun and Java by Oracle, the utilization of “pure” Java solutions has become very viable and straightforward for Oracle customers looking for alternatives to Oracle Forms. Unlike Oracle ADF, Struts 2, Spring, and Hibernate provide a more Java-centric approach to application development.

This presentation reviews the in’s and out’s of this Java-based approach using experiences from a real-world example. The session will drill into how to leverage aspects of this architecture coming from a Forms architecture. Specifically, how UI components, transaction architecture, and business logic components map to Forms. Lastly, the session will go through a comparison of Oracle ADF 11g and the Struts/Spring/Hibernate architecture and present a high-level comparison. This information will be helpful to users considering either option as a modern end-state for their Forms application.

Building Mobile Applications with Oracle Application Express

David Peake, Oracle Corporation

Oracle Application Express is a declarative web application development tool for Oracle database. With mobile web use more than doubling every year, building web applications that work well and look good on smartphones and tablets and respond to touch input and gestures becomes even more important. To help its customers develop and extend their web applications for mobile use, Oracle has enhanced Oracle Application Express with mobile development features and integrated the jQuery mobile framework.

This session provides an overview of the basics of jQuery mobile, explains how it is integrated with Oracle Application Express, and discusses how customers can quickly build mobile web applications and extend their existing Oracle Application Express applications with mobile capabilities.

Oracle Database Cloud Service

David Peake, Oracle Corporation

The Oracle Database Cloud Service has provided a new way to use powerful Oracle technologies. This session will provide an overview of the Database Cloud Service, and some insights into why the Database Cloud Service will be an important part of the computing landscape going into the future.

What’s New for Oracle and .NET

Christian Shay, Oracle Corporation

This session discusses upcoming new Oracle database features for .NET and Visual Studio. One of the major new features is the 100 percent fully managed Oracle Data Provider for .NET (ODP.NET), which greatly eases ODP.NET deployment and management. A second major feature is Oracle schema comparison tools within Visual Studio for simplifying database schema evolution.

The session also explores new features in ODP.NET that enable you to leverage the latest .NET features, such as new Entity Framework functionality, and Oracle Database 12c, such as high availability, performance, and ease of development.

Oracle ADF – The No Slides Overview

Shay Shmeltzer, Oracle Corporation

Oracle ADF is Oracle’s strategic development framework used to develop Oracle’s Fusion Applications, various products, and custom applications. This “no slides” session provides an overview of Oracle ADF’s capabilities by showing you actual live development and the results. See how far you can get with Oracle ADF in one hour of building web and mobile applications.

Building Commercial Applications with APEX

Scott Spendolini, Enkitec

Oracle Application Express has proven itself as a powerful development platform for internal development needs in countless organizations worldwide. One of the new frontiers it is starting to conquer is building commercial applications.

This session covers what it takes to use Oracle Application Express as a platform for building commercial applications. It looks at all facets of the software development lifecycle and discusses different infrastructures, deployments, processes, and tools used to make development with Oracle Application Express as streamlined and cost-effective as possible.

Real-world examples are given throughout the session. Much of what is discussed in this session can also be applied to medium to large Oracle Application Express projects.

High Quality PDF Printing with APEX & PL/PDF

Scott Spendolini, Enkitec

Since its introduction, Oracle APEX has evolved from a basic toolkit for small applications to an enterprise-ready platform for applications of almost any size. However, one area has been at almost a standstill since its inception: printing. This session will discuss how to integrate PL/PDF—a third party PL/SQL-based printing solution—with Oracle APEX, so that you can provide your end users with beautiful PDF reports in almost no time. It will use real-world examples and discuss not only basic reports, but also charts, templates, and bar codes.

Fun Things to Do with BI/XML-Publisher

Arian Stijf, Arven

The BI-Publisher (formerly XML-Publisher) is the default reporting tool in the E-Business Suite. This presentation takes a look at things you can do with the templates. You can probably put the fields in the correct place. But the template also allows for very complex validations, calculations, and presentations. The session will look first at how to enhance your data within the report template and then look at how to present your data in other ways with conditional formatting and grouping of data.

Optimizing Oracle Service Bus Developer Tools and Workflow: A University of Colorado Case Study

Anthony Stonaker, University of Colorado

The main objectives covered in this presentation are: optimizing developer efficiency with Eclipse plugins and scripting tools; automatic deployment and testing of Oracle Service Bus projects; and continuous integration and controlled migration of Oracle Service Bus projects.

Business Intelligence

Reporting against Transactional Schemas with OBIEE 11g

Stewart Bryson, Rittman Mead

A common hurdle for new OBIEE environments is the seeming lack of support for transactional schemas as physical sources. Data structures are presented to analysis developers as dimensions and facts, so a common misunderstanding is that the physical model must be a star schema.

This presentation will examine common techniques for modeling transactional schemas as logical facts and logical dimensions in the OBIEE Business Model and Mapping Layer. Some of the common techniques that will be introduced include: presenting a physical table as both a logical fact and a logical dimension, controlling the BI Server’s behavior using table aliases and logical table sources, and integrating multiple source systems entities into the same logical table.

Aggregation: The BI Server versus the Oracle Optimizer

Stewart Bryson, Rittman Mead

Aggregate navigation describes the functionality that BI systems have to use summary level data instead of detail level data for faster data access and report performance. When using Oracle Business Intelligence 11g and Oracle Database 11g, we can choose which “engine” we want to handle summary management and the navigation between different levels of granularity: the BI Server or the Oracle Optimizer.

Both methods support full summary management functionality, and either one is robust enough for an enterprise data warehouse. So which one should we choose? This presentation will walk the participants through both options, and investigate the different design paradigms that may favor one implementation over the other.

How Mature is Your Organization?

Faun deHenry, FMT Systems of Texas

Is fact-based decision making embedded in your organization? How can the Business Intelligence maturity level of an organization be determined? This presentation examines models for assessing BI maturity.

Incremental Statistics for Partitioned Tables: What, Why, and How

Jim Egan, Mantis Technology Group

For very large partitioned tables there often isn’t enough time in the ETL window to gather statistics on the entire table. Queries that are unable to use partition pruning to focus on a single partition will use the statistics at the table level. When statistics at the table level are unavailable or inaccurate the Oracle Optimizer can make rather inefficient guesses. The incremental statistics feature in Oracle 11g makes it possible to gather statistics for a specific partition and have those statistics “bubble up” to the table level with minimal additional execution time and overhead.

Throughout the session a client case study will be used to:

Explain how it was determined that the lack of statistics at the table level were a problem.
Show how the table was configured to allow incremental statistics to bubble up to the table level.
Show the right way to efficiently gather statistics at the partition level to utilize the incremental statistics feature.
Explain the effect partition exchange has on incremental statistics.
Show how to make the table level statistics “stick.” Code examples will be included at each step.

Scaling to Infinity: Making Star Transformations Sing

Tim Gorman, Evergreen Database Technologies

Dimensional data models (a.k.a. star schemas) are a crucial component of the presentation layer of data warehouses and data marts because that is the format in which business intelligence analysts expect to find their data. Yet, so many decision-support environments based on Oracle attempt to live with star schemas without using star transformations. The reasons vary from lack of understanding to practical impediments related to ETL processing. This presentation will explain the justification for the star transformation mechanism, including comparisons to other execution plans, how to implement, how to optimize, and how to troubleshoot.

Using OBIEE and Data Vault to Virtualize Your BI Environment: An Agile Approach

Kent Graziano, Data Warrior & Stewart Bryson, Rittman Mead

First we interview the users, we design a reporting model, we follow up with mounds of ETL development, keeping the user community in the dark during that development. Familiar? This presentation will demonstrate an alternative approach using the Data Vault Data Modeling technique to build a “Foundation” layer in our data warehouse with an Agile methodology.

Using the Business Model and Mapping (BMM) functionality of OBIEE, we can virtualize a dimensional model using the Data Vault Foundation layer to decrease the time it takes to get BI content in front of users. Attendees will see a sample Data Vault model designed iteratively and deployed to the semantic model of OBIEE.

A Boost of Confidence with Financial Data Quality Management: Leveraging FDM to Enhance a Planning Application

Craig Halle, The Bean Consulting Group

Looking to improve a new or existing Hyperion Planning application or streamline the data mapping process from any source system? Or concerned about the integrity of your organization’s financial data as it is collected and shared across departments? This presentation will explore how Hyperion Financial Data Quality Management (FDM) can provide transaction-level detail to a Planning application while simplifying certain complexities of data integration.

The session will discuss the benefits of using FDM as opposed to traditional Essbase data load rules and cover several basic to intermediate administrative topics. Simple tasks such as creating locations, import formats, and control tables will be reviewed while more intricate functionalities like setting up lights-out batch processes, leveraging VB script to handle complex mappings, and establishing a direct SQL load will be discussed in detail. Come learn if FDM can solve your data quality woes and enhance your Planning application while learning from an experienced professional.

Implementing OBIEE the Hacker Way: Facebook’s Approach to Implementing Oracle Business Intelligence

John Kohnke, BI Acuity

Facebook’s internal culture is highly dynamic, loosely structured, empowered, and moves ferociously fast. End users place an enormous amount of value on modern web aesthetics and expect immediate turnaround on all requests. Oracle’s Business Intelligence Analytics Applications have been traditionally believed to be best implemented in a methodical, structured, and controlled manner. The look and feel is more classic than modern and conventional deployment practices are structured to ensure quality and reliability over speed.

Successfully merging these two apparent polar opposites required breaking tradition and developing a new approach that allowed the project to fit within Facebook’s cultural demands while retaining only the truly critical pieces of the historical process. This session will address Facebook’s culture, the project implementation approach, details on how look and feel demands were addressed, and lessons learned. Additionally it will touch on the experiences with Exadata and the system’s eminent need to integrate with Facebook’s big data solutions.

How to Use Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database for Real-Time Business Intelligence

Simon Law, Oracle Corporation

The ability to perform data analysis in real time is critical to the success of enterprise companies in a competitive market. This session discusses the latest release functionality in Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database that supports in-memory analytics requirements.

Besides having a proven record of accomplishments for accelerating the performance of online transaction processing (OLTP) database applications, Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database is used for real-time fraud detection, portfolio risk analysis in financial services, performance-critical queries in data marts, and real-time interactive dashboards and visualization with Oracle Business Intelligence and Oracle Exalytics. The session shares selected real-life customer use cases.

Social Network Analysis with Oracle Tools

Jordan Meyer, Rittman Mead

Interested in what to do with the vast, unstructured social data on sites like Twitter and Facebook? This presentation will help you discover how to combine social network data, advanced analytics, and visualization to find important patterns in the social web.

Demonstrations will use Oracle R and Oracle Business Intelligence with real-world data sets to perform tasks including: acquiring social network data, identifying important members of a network, detecting communities, monitoring sentiment, and sharing your analysis through OBIEE dashboards.

Data Science for OBI Professionals

Jordan Meyer, Rittman Mead

The past decade has seen an explosion in data from sources as varied as web server logs, social networks, sensors, and mobile devices. Organizations are now challenged with trying to capture and analyze it all. Combining elements of business intelligence, statistical analysis, computer science, and even art, the new discipline of data science has emerged in response to the big data problem.

This presentation offers a basic introduction to data science with a focus on Oracle technologies, and will walk through the full data analysis lifecycle: from acquiring and organizing data, to analyzing and visualizing it. Demonstrations using Oracle R and Oracle Business Intelligence will include examples of data mining, natural language processing, social network analysis, data visualization, and statistical modeling techniques.

Rapid Fire BI from Oracle with Tableau 8

George Peck, ABLAZE Group

One of the decisions Oracle shops face is the choice of a Business Intelligence toolset. While Oracle offers a rich set of choices, third-party options abound. One option that absolutely demands consideration is Tableau. This leading-edge BI tool works seamlessly with Oracle relational databases and Essbase cubes, to provide interactive, best-practice visualization and analysis.

See a live demo of the latest version of this exciting product, Tableau 8, directly connected to an Oracle database. Hear an honest comparison of Tableau to Oracle tools to help you make a good BI choice.

GoldenGate and ODI – A Perfect Match for Real-Time Data Warehousing

Michael Rainey, Rittman Mead

Oracle Data Integrator and Oracle GoldenGate excel are standalone products, but paired together they are the perfect match for real-time data warehousing. Following Oracle’s Next Generation Reference Data Warehouse Architecture, this discussion will provide best practices on how to configure, implement, and process data in real-time using ODI and GoldenGate. Attendees will see common real-time challenges solved, including parent-child relationships within micro-batch ETL.

Extending Oracle’s Data Warehouse Reference Architecture for a Real Time and Big Data World

Peter Scott, Rittman Mead

Oracle first published its Data Warehouse Reference Architecture some years ago. Since then there have been major changes in the variety of data that organizations expect to be stored and searchable within Business Intelligence systems. This talk sets out to update Oracle’s original architecture to cope with the challenges of real time data feeds and big data.

Interspersed with real world examples gleaned from implementations, the presentation will also cover new database features that can be significant in defining our database design model.

Tuning “Real Time” Data Warehouses – A Guide from the Field

Peter Scott, Rittman Mead

Conventional wisdom separates OLTP style databases from data warehouses; the tuning requirements were so different and conflicting. But now with real time feeds we must expect both types of data to sit within our data warehouse. This talk builds on several years of real time data warehouse experience and discusses the challenges and strategies to overcome. Performance is designed in and not added post implementation; thus this talk is as valuable to designers and ETL developers as it is for DBAs and others responsible for operation.

Using Maps and Geo Spatial Analytics in Oracle Business Intelligence 11g

Tim Vlamis, Vlamis Software Solutions & Dan Vlamis, Vlamis Software Solutions

Maps communicate data faster and more intuitively than any other data visualization method. Map views are built-in in OBI 11g, but aren’t often used because some additional configuration work is needed. You’ll see how to leverage OBI’s native map views in BI dashboards, add geo spatial calculations to OBI analyses and queries, and determine which analytical layers to add to your map presentations. The experts at Vlamis have been working with Nokia and Oracle for the past four years to acquire the tips, insights, and best practices you need.

Database Administration

RMAN: Legacy Technology / Emerging Technology

Michael Abbey, Pythian

This session will cover RMAN setup basics like controlfile autobackup, persistent configuration, using a recovery catalog (or not), and pesky NLS considerations; new features of RMAN in 12c in the areas such as parallelization, table-based recovery, and enhanced active database duplicate; the benefits of using a recovery catalog database and the role it can play in recovery from loss of everything; and suggestions about recovery catalog database placement and how to protect the RMAN repository from a disaster.

Hardware 301: Diving Deeper into Database Hardware

Glenn Berry, SQLskills

Microsoft made some sweeping changes to their software licensing model for SQL Server 2012 Enterprise Edition, moving from socket-based licensing to core-based licensing. This alters much of the conventional criteria for hardware selection for database servers that will be running SQL Server 2012. This also caused a significant amount of angst in some quarters, with fears of huge increases in SQL Server 2012 licensing costs compared to older versions of the product.

This session will cut through the uncertainty and hype to show you how to properly evaluate and choose your database hardware for usage with SQL Server 2012. You will learn how to choose hardware for different types of workloads and how to get the best performance and scalability for the lowest licensing cost.

Are You Getting the Best Out of Your MySQL Indexes?

Sheeri Cabral, Mozilla

MySQL indexes are often used to make performance better. However, they can make performance suffer if you are not using them properly. Oracle ACE Director Sheeri Cabral explains the pitfalls to avoid with indexes and how to utilize compound indexes to maximize index availability with the least amount of write overhead.

Backing Up MySQL

Sheeri Cabral, Mozilla

This session will explore the eight different types of backups, what they are used for, and what tools to use to perform those backups. Even if you think your backups are running smoothly, this session will give you information on the tools out there to make backups and restores easy, no matter what type of restore you need to perform!

RMAN New Features in Oracle Database 12c

Andy Colvin, Enkitec

Oracle’s recovery manager is one of the most critical utilities provided with the Oracle database. Oracle Database 12c introduced many new features into RMAN. Topics of this presentation will include table-level restoration, backup and recovery of pluggable databases, cross-platform backup/restore, and enhancements to the active duplication procedure. These improvements can help DBAs manage their Oracle database environments.

Managing Exadata with OEM 12c

Andy Colvin, Enkitec

One of the most dramatic changes to Oracle Enterprise Manager in 12c was the introduction of “Exadata as a target.” This enhancement greatly improved the way that customers manage their Exadata systems on a daily basis. While previous versions of OEM included plugins for providing simple reports and up/down status on Exadata, OEM 12c allows for full management of the Exadata platform, including management of the storage servers and infiniband fabric.

This session will discuss how Exadata customers can utilize OEM Cloud Control to monitor database performance, provision new databases, and ensure the health of the system as a whole in ways that they previously could not under OEM 11g.

Architecting High Availability for Success

Randy Cunningham, SageLogix

All too often, there is a perception that simply implementing a RAC database is all that is required to achieve high-availability for a database-centric application. While Oracle’s Real Application Cluster Database is an important ingredient for a high-availability architecture, simply installing it is insufficient, by itself, for achieving genuine HA.

This presentation will explore some of the additional requirements for high availability beyond installing RAC, including the system architecture, storage architecture, network architecture, and application design. Some of the configuration requirements for a high-availability RAC environment will be explored. Case studies of outages in high-availability environments will provide participants with insight into some of the details and thought processes required to minimize outages.

Using Edition-Based Redefinition

John Darrah, DBAK

This presentation will explore Oracle’s Edition-Based Redefinition feature. Edition-Based Redefinition (EBR) was introduced in Oracle 11.1 and enhanced in 11.2. Environments that effectively utilize this feature can reduce planned and unplanned production downtime. This presentation will explain what EBR is and isn’t, demonstrate how it works, and show some common and not so common use cases for the feature.

Database Cloning Options in 11g

John Darrah, DBAK

Database clones are integral to IT operations and are essential for most development projects, reporting environments, and QA. However, the expense in labor and infrastructure means that many companies compromise on the number and frequency of cloned environments.

This session explores some of the newer database cloning technologies available in Oracle 11g, reviews features, takes a look at where and where not to use the particular technology, points out licensing implications, and looks at sample use cases.

All About Oracle Auditing – Everything You Need to Know

Mike Dean, Database Specialists

Many organizations keep their most sensitive and valuable information in an Oracle database. Properly implemented auditing, as part of a defense-in-depth approach, will help keep it secure. This presentation will give you everything you need to know in order to successfully implement Oracle Auditing; from basic configuration to advanced techniques using Fine-Grained Auditing (FGA). The session will also show you some auditing changes in 11g that, if not addressed, can cause serious issues.

Some of the topics include: What is Oracle Auditing? What should you be auditing? What is the performance impact of auditing? What should you look for in the audit trail to detect security threats? Standard vs. Fine-Grained Auditing – what is the difference? Managing the size, location, and security of the audit trail; integrating the database audit trail with the Unix syslog; troubleshooting application problems using the audit trail; real-life examples of audit trail use; and 11g new auditing features.

Tuning Untouchable SQL Using Profiles

Daniel Fink, TZOD Consultancy

One of the greatest challenges with Oracle performance is the optimization of SQL plans, especially when faced with ‘untouchable’ application code. SQL Profiles, introduced as part of the SQL Tuning Advisor in 10g, offer the ability to influence the optimizer without changing the SQL or application code. This session will present an overview of SQL profiles, how to implement them both manually and using supplied tools, and how to monitor them for usage.

Indexing, the Good, the Bad, the Too Many, the Wrong Type

John Garmany, ProxITec

This presentation will discuss supercharging your database using the proper indexing. Indexes are the easiest way to get great performance gains, however, over indexing or incorrect indexing is plaguing many Oracle databases. This presentation will cover indexes in the Oracle 9i thru 11g database. It will discuss available index types and when to use them. It will also cover common indexing errors found in many database configurations.

It includes a discussion of tools that will allow you to determine if your database contains too many or too few indexes, and how to balance performance of selects vs. insert, updates, and deletes when trade offs are required. Lastly it will demonstrate using the Oracle 10g Automatic Workload Repository to monitor and diagnose indexing problems.

How to Build a Personal DBA Lab to Keep Up with Ever-Changing Demands

Patrick Gates, Datavail & Peter Schroeder, Datavail

It is important for DBAs to keep up with the new features of every release as well as have a playground to perform functionality testing. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to install RAC, upgrade databases, upgrade RAC clusters, add a node to a RAC cluster, delete a node from a RAC cluster, test failing over a primary to the standby, test implementing fast start failover for a standby, test out RMAN new features, or perform database recoveries without having to acquire new hardware or use your existing environments?

This session will detail how to build a DBA lab for personal and professional growth. The session will show you how to build an initial virtual machine and then add to it to build numerous configurations. Once you have these base VMs built, your testing possibilities are only going to be limited to the amount of free time you have. You will be able to test and script a silent install of a 11gR2 RAC install, script the silent database upgrade of a 10gR2 to 11gR2, or get more familiar with how to configure fast start failover for your primary and standby database.

Oracle RAC on VMware – Getting the Best of Both Worlds

Kathy Gibbs, Confio Software

Learn how to leverage RAC and vSphere capabilities to further enhance and stabilize the RAC failover and load balancing capabilities. This session will show you how easy it is to create RAC on VMware. The session will show how easy it is to scale a RAC environment by cloning an existing RAC VM in vSphere and quickly adding to the virtual environment. The session will also show you how to monitor RAC on VMware so you’ll be confident that there are no performance problems running RAC on VM versus a physical host.

Compression and Oracle Database

Tim Gorman, Evergreen Database Technologies

Partitioning and compression are technologies that have been in the Oracle database for a long time. The EXCHANGE PARTITION command is the key to large-scale and scalable data loading in a data warehouse, and a key pre-requisite for the effective use of compression. But now there are many different types of compression available in the Oracle database, and which are most appropriate for which purpose?

This presentation will discuss all the different types of compression in the Oracle database (i.e. basic/advanced de-duplication compression and hybrid-columnar compression), as well as some older techniques for fitting more data into less space. The presentation will also discuss the ways to take advantage of each type of compression most effectively.

Instant Database Cloning with Thin Provisioning and Virtual Databases

Kyle Hailey, Delphix & Tim Coats, Delphix

Database virtualization has come of age with first the introduction of CloneDB in Oracle 11 and now full-fledged database virtualization technologies. What is database virtualization? Database virtualization is to the data tier what VMware is to the compute tier. On the compute tier VMware allows the same hardware to be shared by multiple machines. On the data tier virtualization allows the same datafiles to be shared by multiple clones allowing almost instantaneous creation of new copies of databases with almost no disk footprint. This presentation will compare and contrast different types of database virtualization from Oracle 11 CloneDB, Oracle 12c database virtualization, Oracle ZFS Appliance, Delphix Appliance, VMware Data Director, NetApp Snap Manager for Oracle and EMC. How does database virtualization work? What are the advantages and disadvantages of different approaches?

Exadata and OLTP

Frits Hoogland, VX Company

Exadata is targeted by Oracle at both data warehousing and OLTP. But what can you expect from Exadata in an OLTP environment? What are the strengths and weaknesses? This session focuses on the different layers for data storage with Exadata, how to use them, and what performance to expect.

Database Maintenance Essentials

Steve Jones, SQLServerCentral

If you are new to managing SQL Server databases, this one-hour session will cover the basic maintenance items that you should be performing regularly on your systems. The session will cover managing files on disk, backups, indexing, statistics, and more.

The Answer to Free Memory Swap Oracle and Everything

Christo Kutrovsky, Pythian

Do I have enough memory? Why is my free memory so low? Am I swapping to disk? Can I increase my SGA (db cache) size? Can I add another instance to this server? Are my system resources used optimally? These are all questions that often haunt DBAs. This presentation is The Answer. It covers in detail the different types of memory, how to monitor memory, and how to optimally use it with Oracle.

Multiple examples in the presentation demonstrate how certain actions on the database side cause different memory areas to be allocated and used on the OS side. Key underlying differences in operating systems approaches to managing memory will be highlighted, with special attention given to Linux, Solaris, and Windows. Using Linux as an example throughout, this presentation explains how to effectively use tools such as “top”, “vmstat”, and “/proc/meminfo” to look into into a system’s allocation and use of memory.

Measuring Performance in Oracle Solaris and Oracle Linux

Christo Kutrovsky, Pythian

You can’t improve what you can’t measure. If you want to get the most value from your database, you need to start with the basics. Are you using your hardware and operating systems efficiently? Attend this session to learn how to measure system utilization in the Linux and Oracle Solaris operating systems and how to use this information for tuning and capacity planning.

MySQL Replication

David Stokes, Oracle Corporation

MySQL Replication is a native feature of MySQL. This session will give a broad overview of replication within MySQL as well as a simple real world configuration example to get you started. The session will then continue with a more in-depth investigation of the MySQL Replication features in MySQL 5.6 including: MySQL Replication Overview, Replication Configuration—Examples of a Real World Setup, and MySQL 5.6 Replication Features and Replication Monitoring.

Application-Tier High-Performance OLTP and BI with Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database

Simon Law, Oracle Corporation

This session covers the latest generation of product features in Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database. Customers use it in a wide variety of cross-industry applications ranging from high-volume transactions to in-memory analytics for business intelligence.

Learn about the key features in Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database for achieving extreme transaction performance, high availability, disaster recovery, and in-memory analytics in the application tier. Learn how to leverage Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database as an in-memory cache database to accelerate online transaction processing (OLTP) and BI workloads. Learn how best to determine the data set for caching and choose the best caching options for performance and scalability. The session also shares selected real-life customer use cases.

What’s Next for Oracle Database?

Daniel Liu, Oracle Corporation

In this session, attendees will learn the latest innovations from Oracle Database Server Technologies that can help accelerate IT projects, protect enterprise data, lower IT costs, and add value to the business. It covers topics including: the pluggable database, data optimization, security, manageability, performance, enterprise manager, and more.

In-Database MapReduce: When Hadoop Meets Exadata

Kuassi Mensah, Oracle Corporation

There is a growing need to apply MapReduce analytics techniques to business data stored in RDBMS, however, data shipping from RDBMS to a Hadoop cluster is generally a bad idea with lots of issues. How about bringing MapReduce/Hadoop to the RDBMS instead? There are many initiatives and projects in this area. The next release of Oracle database plans to furnish In-Database MapReduce.

This session describes the implementation of a database resident Hadoop container, built in the Oracle database RDBMS engine, which lets you drop-in and run Hadoop Mappers and Reducers directly against RDBMS tables. The major benefits of this implementation are: source compatibility with Hadoop, minimal dependency on Hadoop infrastructure, Java, and SQL interfaces.

The seamless integration of Hadoop MapReduce steps in SQL statements and OLTP, ease of development, deployment, and administration (any DBA can deploy MapReduce/Hadoop jobs). Furthermore MapReduce and Hadoop jobs running in the database get all the quality of services of the Oracle RDBMS and Exadata such as enterprise class security, data compression, and many more.

Partitioning and Compression for Performance and Manageability

Michael Messina, ROLTA

Using 11g partitioning features and advanced compression we can maximize cost savings as well as performance while not sacrificing ease of management. New partitioning features can help us improve performance by combining with Advanced Compression to reduce disk storage costs and inch out some further performance improvements all while making sure it is still easily managed. This session will show examples and demonstrate cost savings and performance gains and management ease.

Help! Oracle Flashback to the Rescue

Timothy Mishek, Exelis

It has happened to all of us at one time or another. A frantic call is made from one of our database users or application developers with a panic in their voice. “I just deleted 1000 rows by mistake when I only intended to delete 10.” The DBA’s response is one of emotion knowing that once the transaction is committed, the transaction is final!

With Oracle Flashback, this is no longer the case. The Oracle database has many options available to database administrators for retrieving a “before” image of what the data looked like at some time in the past. As a matter of fact, Oracle Flashback has the flexibility to flashback a single record in a table all the way up to an entire database. Before this technology was made available, the DBA had no choice but to do a database restore and try to recreate what actually happened to the data before the mishap occurred.

During this session, all the flashback technologies will be looked at in detail. The targeted audience is mainly geared towards database administrators who want to learn more about how flashback technologies are able to improve their overall database support. Starting with the smallest table transaction mishap and slowly working up to an entire database disaster, Oracle Flashback will come to the rescue!

Integrating ODAs with ZFS to Create a Secure Scalable High Availability Environment

Daniel Morgan, Morgan’s Library

High availability, scalability, and security are not negotiable in the data center. More and more they are the basic foundation upon which all other work must happen. This presentation, based on working with Oracle’s largest ODA customer and deploying ODA, ZFS, and Exadata, will cover the reasons, both technical and financial, for embracing the ODA as a primary database system. This presentation will be targeted to experienced DBAs and system administrators.

New Features in Database 12c You Won’t Hear about from Oracle

Daniel Morgan, Morgan’s Library

Release after release Oracle adds new features, the majority of which will not be topics covered by Oracle sales nor will they often appear in the new features guide. This presentation will be targeted at mid-level to expert developers and DBAs who want to get a full sense of the deltas between database version 11.2.0.3 and the newly released 12.1. The topics covered will include changes to SQL, PL/SQL, objects, and built-in packages. Topics not covered will be anything Oracle is already talking about.

Beginning Performance Tuning

Arup Nanda, Starwood Hotels

Even if you are a newbie to the Oracle DBA profession, you know one thing is guaranteed—there will be an issue with performance at some point. How do you plan your activity? In this session for beginners, you will learn a methodical approach to troubleshooting performance issues in Oracle—making you more effective by executing some precise steps rather than unplanned haphazard approaches with tangential directions.

The use of v$session, v$session_event, v$sesstat, v$active_session_history, and dbms_monitor will be the foundations of the analysis. All concepts will be presented with live demos.

RAC for Beginners

Arup Nanda, Starwood Hotels

You definitely heard about it, maybe saw some demos and, perhaps even dabbled a little and you definitely want to know more about it. This session explains what RAC is to the uninitiated starting with the multi-instance model. It goes on to explain what is actually meant by terms like cache fusion, interconnect, Virtual IP, public IP, LMS process, Global Resource Directory and so on. It explains how to design RAC to accomplish goals. And finally, it answers that question – can *any* application be ported to a RAC database? Learn a lot of practical tips and techniques in this session.

Stats with Confidence

Arup Nanda, Starwood Hotels

Collecting new optimizer stats is a double-edged sword—it might improve the performance, or equally likely, break it. In this session, learn how to:

Confirm that the stats will produce accurate plans *before* the optimizer sees them. Publish the stats after this check to prevent unnecessary risk.
Use with SQL Plan Management (SPM) to create multiple baselines and choose the best plan among them, especially useful in case of canned applications.
Use pending stats with SQL Performance Analyzer (SPA) to see the impact of the new stats on the entire application, not just a few queries.
Roll back stats to a previous set and export the pending stats to another database for testing. All these will be shown with live demos.

Mysteries of Oracle Blocks and Locks Revealed

Gary Propeck, Hotsos Enterprises

The presentation first examines both the block header and the table data using Oracle formatted block dumps. Changes to the data are tracked via the block dumps to show how Oracle locks a row through the commit of transaction and cleans up later.

Oracle Access Control – Beyond Database Privileges

Nicholas Ratanasin, Oracle Corporation

There’s no question that today’s database professionals must be able to design and deliver increasingly more secure databases to comply with stricter regulation standards, ensure data privacy, and protect against internal threats. Oracle’s defense-in-depth security architecture is a comprehensive portfolio of security solutions which enables the database professional to provide these assurances, without compromising the usability or performance of the database.

Access control is an important component of this strategy and focuses on the technologies used to classify data and objects, authorize access, and securely mediate access in order to protect application data. The well-known approach of implementing database privileges has certain limitations and can only provide a basic level of access control. Oracle’s comprehensive security suite also includes built-in components like Virtual Private Database, as well as optional packages like Oracle Label Security and Oracle Database Vault. Come learn about these products and how they can complement your existing architecture and improve your database’s security posture.

Highly Available and Disaster Recoverable with SQL Server

Christopher Shaw, Xtivia

All too often costly mistakes are made when a company tells the DBA that the SQL Server is critical to the operations of the company and a highly available, disaster recoverable solution needs to be created for it. All too often these solutions are developed without understanding the full impact of the technology choices and problems arise when the solutions are being tested, or even worse when the solution is needed.

This session will look at the HA/DR options with SQL Server version 2005 – 2012. The session will look at features of the solutions and discuss why one solution is better than others. By the end of the session attendees will review the options presented with each solution, the benefits and potential obstacles with each solution, and the version and edition of SQL Server required to support a solution. Rather than learning from books and manuals, this session will use real life examples and experiences to navigate this often confusing topic.

What’s New for Oracle Database on Windows

Christian Shay, Oracle Corporation

Learn about the newest features in the latest generation of Oracle database technology that most directly benefit Windows administrators and developers. This session details support for the latest operating systems—Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012—and new database features for Windows security, Oracle Real Application Clusters (Oracle RAC), Oracle Database’s Automatic Storage Management feature, and installation. For .NET developers, the session introduces new support for the 100 percent .NET managed-code Oracle client and schema comparison tools in Visual Studio.

MySQL Basics

David Stokes, Oracle Corporation

Have you ‘inherited’ some MySQL instances or need to move some data to a lighter footprint database? Then this is the session for you. Learn how to install, run, stop, backup, add users, change user privileges, and more in this information-packed session.

Better Availability with MySQL Online Operations

Calvin Sun, Oracle Corporation

MySQL 5.6 offers users the flexibility to perform schema changes while allowing users full access to the database. Those new features provide better responsiveness and availability in busy production environments. In this session, you will learn how MySQL online DDL operations work and what to consider when performing those operations.

Demystifying MySQL for Oracle DBAs and Developers

George Trujillo, Hortonworks

MySQL continues to be the world’s most popular database management system for the Internet. This session provides a fast-paced introduction to the MySQL architecture, core features, best practices, and core performance areas. A MySQL version of OFA will be shown as a best practice. MySQL features will be taught from a perspective that is easy for attendees familiar with Oracle to understand.

Agenda: A. MySQL Architecture B. MySQL and Oracle comparison C. Best practices for installation D. Top ten things to configure E. Key performance parameters F. The MySQL value proposition.

The First Five Things to Know About Exadata

Martin Widlake, ORA600 Ltd.

Most talks about Exadata are of two types: Oracle sales pitches at ten thousand feet with a few impressive numbers thrown in and the promise of solving all your problems or technicians talking about the details of some specific aspect of Exadata, like hybrid columnar compression.

This presentation is somewhere between the two, but may fill in the blanks for the database administrator who is investing for the first time in an Exadata environment. The session will explain the wide variance in expertise required of an informed Oracle technician encountering Exadata for the first time and the demands to re-educate themselves as they become familiar with the specialized features and learn how known techniques can backfire. This session will cover the benefits, issues, and gotchas the presenter encountered in his own experience as a new owner of an Exadata environment.

Demystifying the Cloud: Choosing between Amazon RDS and EC2 for Your Oracle Database Service

Jeremiah Wilton, Blue Gecko / Datavail

Amazon’s Relational Database Service (RDS) provides a fully configured, running, managed Oracle or MySQL database as a service for less than 50¢/hour. Given the simplicity and low cost, why would anyone run Oracle or MySQL on the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), where it is necessary to install, configure, and manage the database yourself?

As it turns out, RDS provides a level of service that meets the needs of many, but not all applications. This session will discuss the current capabilities of RDS, and which requirements and use cases would require a customer to build and manage an Oracle database on EC2 instead.

Database Death Match: Oracle vs. SQL Server

Jeremiah Wilton, Blue Gecko / Datavail

This live demonstration will run the latest Enterprise Editions of Oracle and SQL Server together on the same enterprise-class Windows server. Under heavy workload, the databases undergo several identical crises, including an I/O failure, a data file corruption, and a logical data corruption. Finally, the session turns up the workload until these titans of data processing compete directly for memory and I/O. May the database with the best uptime and ability to continue business through failures win!

Using Oracle Fusion Middleware for TNSnames Resolution

Ken Wolff, Lockheed Martin

Tired of keeping multiple tnsnames.ora files up-to-date? Oracle’s Licensing Guide includes a restricted-use license allowing you to use Oracle Fusion Middleware (OFM) to perform TNSnames resolution for all Oracle databases. In this way, you can use OFM to resolve TNS entries just like we all use DNS to resolve host names. This presentation will describe how to install Oracle Fusion Middleware version 11.1.1.6 and configure it to be used for TNSnames resolution.

Empowering Your Data Sharing Architecture for Continuous Availability

Susan Wong, Dell

The amount of data captured and accessed by your organization is growing every day. And everyone needs the most current information from their servers for operational decision-making, billing, inventory control, purchasing, and more. This up-to-the-minute information is vital to the business, but access to this transactional data may come at a cost: slow system performance.

In this session, you’ll see how database replication offers the most effective way to provide real-time access to relevant data in production databases. The presenter will show you an approach that actually improves system performance and ensures end users remain productive.

MySQL for 11g Shops – How and Why

Benjamin Wood, Oracle Corporation

From Facebook to Ticketmaster, MySQL powers high-volume applications and high-growth companies. Learn how MySQL, now owned by Oracle, is utilized in enterprise level stand-alone deployments and teamed up with 11g in other cases. Covered in this session will be similarities and differences between MySQL and 11g, a demonstration of MySQL Enterprise Monitor, and best steps for getting started with this amazingly capable database.

Database Tools of the Trade

An Introduction to Oracle XML DB in the Latest Generation of Oracle Database Technology

Mark Drake, Oracle Corporation

This presentation will provide an overview of Oracle XML DB and focus on the exciting new XML capabilities provided by the latest generation of Oracle database technology. Attendees will be provided with an overview of how to store, index, and query XML in an Oracle database, and learn about support for the latest XML standards including XQUERY-Update and XQUERY-Fulltext.

Five Ways to Make Data Modeling Fun

Kent Graziano, Data Warrior

Most people think data modeling booooorrring, right? While data architects the world over all agree that data modeling is a critical success factor to any well-engineered database or data warehouse, many struggle with how to get their organizations to support their efforts. What if you could make data modeling sessions more engaging for the business folks? The end result would be better data models. Using some common games and concepts, this session will show you how to make data modeling fun. This will be a very interactive session complete with audience participation and maybe some prizes!

Top 10 Cool Features in Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler

Kent Graziano, Data Warrior

Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler (SDDM) has been around for a few years now and is up to version 3.x. It really is an industrial strength data modeling tool that can be used for any data modeling task you need to tackle. Over the years Kent has found quite a few features and utilities in the tool that he relies on to make him more efficient (and agile) in developing his models. This presentation will demonstrate at least ten of these features, tips, and tricks for you. Kent will walk through things like installing the reporting repository, building a custom report on the repository using Oracle SQL Developer, modifying the delivered reporting templates, how (and when) to use the abbreviations utility, how to create and apply object naming templates, how to use a table template and transformation script to add audit columns to every table, how to add custom design rules for model quality checks (heck how to use the built in quality checks), and several other cool things you might not know are there. Since there will likely be patches and new releases before the conference, there is a good chance there will be some new things for to show you as well. This might be a bit of a whirlwind demo, so get SDDM installed on your device and bring it to the session so you can follow along.

How to Improve SQL Performance with New SQL Health Check Tool

Carlos Sierra, Oracle Corporation

When you report a SQL with poor performance to Oracle, most likely you will be asked to provide a SQLTXPLAIN (SQLT) report. This SQLT tool is used by Oracle to diagnose SQL statements that are performing poorly. The problem that you may face is that SQLT is required to be installed before being used. In some production systems this means scheduling an activity for a future maintenance window.

As a workaround to this potential delay, you can benefit from the new SQL Health-Check (SQLHC) tool. SQLHC does not require the creation of any objects into the database, so it can be used easily on a production environment. It performs dozens of health checks around the SQL statement being analyzed. It is not uncommon that acting upon the health checks actually fixes the poor performance of your SQL.

During this session you will learn how to use SQLHC and what type of health checks it performs. As SQLHC matures it has gone through several extensions. It does not compete with the value provided by SQLT, but the gap between the two is closing. SQLHC now provides a lot more diagnostic details than when the tool was first released. It still keeps its fundamental difference with SQLT: SQLHC does not require anything to be installed on the database!

How to Create in 5 Minutes a SQL Tuning Test Case Using SQLTXTPLAIN

Carlos Sierra, Oracle Corporation

To diagnose a Query performing poorly we normally review the Execution Plan, Statistics, and Access Paths. But to actually “tune” a Query we need a SQL Tuning Test Case (TC), so we can try “what-if” scenarios.

SQLTXPLAIN (SQLT) provides an easy way to create a SQL Tuning TC. This session presents the SQLT TC and how it can help to rapidly create a SQL Tuning TC. A live demo will demonstrate these capabilities.

What’s New in Oracle SQL Developer and SQL Developer Data Modeler

Jeff Smith, Oracle Corporation

It’s hard to stay up-to-date with your favorite software tools and services. Upgrading is one thing, but getting a handle on all the new and updated features can be a challenge. Why read the release notes when you can watch the movie? And why watch the movie when you can just watch the product manager talk it and show it? Whether you are new or a veteran user of Oracle SQL Developer and SQL Developer Data Modeler, you will want to learn about all the latest new features.

MySQL Workbench – An Introduction

David Stokes, Oracle Corporation

MySQL Workbench is a free tool—or three tools in one—that can make your life easier. First it is a query tool. It produces entity relationship mapping than can help you see how tables in a strange schema interrelate. You will also see that you can print these out or use them as a design tool. Finally it is an admin tool to configure servers and perform user administration tasks (no more CLI “UPDATE User set Select_priv=’Y’. Update_priv=’Y',….” fat fingering). Plus you can use it to clone servers, set up replication, and replication fail over. And did I mention it is free!??!

Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Metrics Monitoring and Management Repository Views: Tips and Tricks

Suzanne Strasser, Return Path

Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c provides a rich set of metrics for monitoring database health and alerting when problems are encountered. This presentation will demonstrate the steps needed to set up and customize metrics monitoring in OEM to meet the needs of your business. The session will also cover the use of management repository views to access historical metrics data for performing additional analyses and graphics presentation outside of OEM. Specific examples and scripts will be provided during the demonstration.

At the end of the session, participants will be able to:

Identify and describe the steps needed to implement administration groups / template collection associations in order to customize monitoring requirements for various targets based on the needs of the business
Build queries using the OEM management repository views to extract metric data for historical analysis, trending, and graphing
Identify how OEM uses rollup tables to summarize metric data on an hourly and daily basis.

DBA Deep Dive

Where Did My CPU Go? – Monitoring & Capacity Planning Adventures on a Consolidated Environment

Karl Arao, Enkitec

This session will focus on CPU monitoring and capacity planning. The session will highlight scenarios that are typically encountered on a massively consolidated environment, where, let’s say you have over thirty databases and you want to know how much CPU cores they are using at a particular time interval. Before touching on the cool tricks, a deep dive into important CPU metrics is a MUST.

In Oracle world the CPU is not just the “Green Thing” in the Enterprise Manager. It’s actually much more than that. This session will discuss the usual CPU monitoring tools in OEM, visualization enhancements that can be made by AWR analytics, and how these can be applied to critical capacity planning scenarios.

A Consolidation Success Story

Karl Arao, Enkitec

In today’s competitive business climate companies are under constant pressure to reduce costs without sacrificing quality. Many companies see database and server consolidation as the key to meeting this goal. Since its introduction, Exadata has become the obvious choice for database and server consolidation projects. It is the next step in the evolutionary process. But managing highly consolidated environments is difficult, especially for mixed workload environments. If not done properly the quality of service suffers.

This session will tell the tale of a large real estate investment company that successfully consolidated their global operations onto a Maximum Availability Architecture Exadata platform. Applications sharing this environment include PeopleSoft Financials, PeopleSoft HR, Portal, and OBIEE. Accurate provisioning and management of system resources was absolutely essential to their success. This session shares lessons learned and the tools you’ll need to ensure that your consolidation story has a happy ending.

Exadata Storage Indexes, Inside and Out

John Clarke, Centroid

This presentation will provide an overall architecture review of Exadata storage indexes, discuss workload cases in which storage indexes will be used and will shine a light on, as well as talk about situations in which they may be unreliable as an optimization method. The session will also go into a deeper dive and show examples of storage index behavior and results for various query predicate conditions, data ordering, column usage, and DML impact. The presentation will show how to measure the performance impact of storage indexes as well as demonstrate how to trace storage index behavior.

Oracle Optimizer: Harnessing the Power of Optimizer Hints

Maria Colgan, Oracle Corporation

The most powerful way to alter an execution plan is via hints. But knowing when and how to use hints correctly is somewhat of a dark art. This session explains in detail how Optimizer hints are interpreted, when they should be used, and why they sometimes appear to be ignored. By attending this session you will arm yourself with the knowledge of how to apply the right hints, at the right time.

An Alternative to Star Transformations: Spiny Starfish

Mark Farnham, Rightsizing

For a variety of reasons an automatic star transformation plan may be unavailable when you are assembling a selection from a fact table and its associated dimensions and perhaps some additional ornamentation. Before bitmap indexes and star transformations existed in Oracle, the presenter found that you could routinely get a less costly result by assembling a rowid spine filtered according to tables and lists and then using that spine to drive the assemblage efficiently. Come see how this strategy can produce extreme performance for report sets on the same dimensional selections and filters of a fact table. You will be amazed.

Real World Experience Running GoldenGate on Exadata

Alex Fatkulin, Enkitec

This presentation will cover insights into multiple years of real-world experience leveraging GoldenGate to provide zero downtime migrations and real-time data feeds on the Exadata platform. The session will show an in-depth overview of GoldenGate configuration and data flow to archive the best performance and availability by leveraging technical knowledge of how GoldenGate interacts with Oracle databases.

Exadata Storage Indexes

David Fitzjarrell, Wipro/Infocrossing

This presentation will discuss the various aspects of Exadata storage indexes including how they are generated, what they do, what they don’t do, and how they compare to standard B-tree indexes. Also discussed will be techniques on how the performance benefits of storage indexes can be measured in the Exadata environment.

Fine Tune Oracle Execution Plans for Performance Gains

Janis Griffin, Confio Software

Reviewing execution plans is a common task for most DBAs, SQL developers, and performance experts. Each execution plan details the steps and operators necessary to execute a SQL statement. A solid understanding of the operators and their order of execution makes a big difference in deciding the best execution plan — and ultimately how it effects the performance of your Oracle database.

The attendee will understand many of the different operators found in an execution plan and how they consume resources. They will learn the best methods for collecting execution plans, and get tips on tuning for the best execution plan.

Looney Tuner? No, There IS a Method to My Madness!

Janis Griffin, Confio Software

Query tuning is often more art than science and it can quickly eat up a lot of DBA and/or developer time. This presentation will outline a method for determining the best approach for tuning queries by utilizing response time analysis and SQL Diagramming techniques. Regardless of the complexity of the statement, this quick, systematic approach will lead you down the correct tuning path with no guessing. If you are a beginner or an expert, this approach will save you countless hours tuning a query.

About Multiblock Read

Frits Hoogland, VX Company

Multiblock reads have been untouched for years. With Oracle version 11, however, this has changed. Sadly, the documentation does not outline the differences. This session introduces the new features inside multiblock reads on Linux.

Advanced Profiling of Oracle Using Function Calls—A Hacking Session

Frits Hoogland, VX Company

This session is a full on hacking session that complements Frits’ other session, About Multiblock Reads. It will cover the intricate task of how to perform advanced profiling of Oracle using function calls.

Come learn how to research the Oracle database using function names on Linux X86_64. You will leave the session with valuable knowledge of the inner workings of not just the Oracle database, but any C program. This session will introduce you to how to setup and use your Linux environment for profiling. As there are no slides, you will find great value in the notes your take—so bring paper and pen!

Oracle 11g Strategies for the Tuning Warrior!

Ken Johnston, American Database Consulting and William Ndolo, American Database Consulting

Fourteen years of practical experience has allowed me to develop the “ADC Pyramid Tuning Algorithm.” Supporting documentation from the book, “Oracle Database 11g Release 2 Performance Tuning Tips & Techniques, Best Practices for Optimizing Database Performance,” by Richard Niemiec was used in developing the algorithm. A system review, a database review, and an application review build the ADC Pyramid principles.

Identifying the “Top Five Tuning Tools” and the “Top Ten Tuning Points” are vital Tuning Warrior techniques. Understanding how and when to use the tools empowers the DBA with information. The tuning points focus the DBA’s attention to the most common tuning issues to review. Clear and concise measurement indicators are provided to the DBA so that the tuning points can be understood and acted upon. Discovering empirical information and powerful tools transforms the DBA to an effective, fearless, and brave warrior indeed!

A DBA that understands the how, what, and when of Oracle database tuning is vitally important to any organization. The DBA that has the tools and tuning points has the initial weapons necessary to identify and fix the poorly performing database. With time and experience the DBA will surely become a TUNING WARRIOR!

OMG! Identifying and Refactoring Common SQL Performance Anti-Patterns

Jeff Jacobs, PayPal

Most presentations on SQL performance assume that the query developer is highly experienced in SQL and Oracle and focus on tracing and other technique. Sadly, in today’s world, knowledge of SQL and Oracle are not highly valued, and many SQL performance problems are the result of inexperience, misguidance, “heard it/read it somewhere” and various source of mis-information. This presentation will address common “anti-patterns” in database design and SQL query writing that I’ve encountered over the years and how to fix them without tracing, changing init.ora parameters or techniques requiring DBA level privileges. It is focused on techniques that are typically available to developers.

SQL Server Maintenance Plans

Kat Meadows, Xtivia

Most DBAs know you need to be doing some form of maintenance on your databases: backups, index rebuilding, reorganization, update statistics, integrity checks, and system cleanup. SQL Server offers some basic tasks to complete this needed maintenance. The session will cover setting up a maintenance plan including the tasks, schedules, and logging. From there, the session will dive deeper into the basic task, find out what is going on behind the scene, and discuss when it is ok to use them and when you should create your own. At the end of the session you will know how to create a maintenance plan, how to log results and keep a history of success or failures, when you should use what SQL Server has provided, and when you should create your own plan.

Tuning SQL for Oracle Exadata: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

Karen Morton, Enkitec

Tuning SQL for the Oracle Exadata Database Machine presents unique challenges that require a shift in both thinking and the approach used to achieve optimal performance. Strategies that work for a non-Exadata platform may not work when moving to Exadata. During this session, hear how a long-time performance consultant adapts tried and true tuning methods to work more effectively on Exadata.

Examples of how old, reliable strategies failed (or produced little to no performance improvements) and how new strategies had to be learned in order to successfully tune SQL running on Exadata will be presented. The session will give you very simple to very complex samples of queries with “before” and “after” elapsed time and resource consumption comparisons to show that you can meet and extend the 10x-plus performance improvements that Oracle says are possible with Exadata.

Achieving Peak Performance on Exadata

Tyler Muth, Oracle Corporation

Exadata delivers extreme performance under the proper conditions. As with many technologies, there are ten ways to do something…and one of them is fast. This presentation will explore the different methods for loading data, processing data in batch, tuning high throughput queries, and tuning low latency queries.

Hadoop Meets Exadata – Take II

Kerry Osborne, Enkitec

Big data has become the buzzword of 2012. The explosion of machine-generated data is a big driver of the new technologies. And the deluge is just beginning. The Hadoop framework provides the ability to deal with extreme data volumes but has limitations. In many cases, the combination of Hadoop and RDBMS software can work better than either approach alone.

Exadata provides a hybrid architecture that sits somewhere between the two by combining a traditional RDBMS approach with distributed storage nodes capable of independent data processing. Making good decisions on where to use each technology appropriately will be key. This presentation will compare and contrast the architectures and show how to use them together.

Exadata for Oracle DBAs

Arup Nanda,Starwood Hotels

Exadata is fast, superfast—that is not a secret anymore. But what really makes it fast? This session will explore the various building blocks of Exadata—Storage Indexes, Cell Offloading, Smart Scan, smart Flash, and more—all the components that make the database machine faster. You will learn what these concepts are and how they are used and how you can jumpstart your transition from an Oracle DBA to a DMA.

EM CLI, How to Make Your Job Easier with the Enterprise Manager Command Line Interface

Kellyn Pot’Vin, Enkitec

For the database specialist working in an EM12c environment, having knowledge of EM CLI commands is essential, but how much do you know about this valuable feature? This session will go over the architecture, design, and installation of the Enterprise Manager Command Line Interface, along with commands, scripting, and how to automate deployment in large database environments.

Sherlock Holmes for the DBA

Kellyn Pot’Vin, Enkitec

The DBA has numerous tools, some requiring additional licenses, some standard to any environment. When problems arise, often the administrator is expected to, not only identify, but also correct the problem without impact and in short order. This presentation goes over a number of common Oracle errors and performance issues, showing what tools to use, tracing to AWR reports, along with how to utilize these to quickly assess a strategy to address problems, when they develop, to lessen the challenge to managing these types of environments.

Attendees will leave the session with a better understanding of trouble-shooting techniques and when to use what features, tools, and reports.

NoSQL and ACID Transactions – A Peaceful Coexistence

Dave Rubin, Oracle Corporation

In recent years, a number of applications have exploited the notion of eventual consistency to utilize horizontally distributed NoSQL databases for high-velocity/low-latency workloads. This session will introduce NoSQL architectures, explain what parts of the solution space they are meant to address, and explore the ACID properties of Oracle’s NoSQL database from an architectural perspective. The session will discuss how ACID transactions fit into the overall landscape of high-velocity/low-latency workloads and how the Oracle NoSQL database can scale even while offering classic ACID transactions.

Oracle SQL Statement Tuning Using DBMS_XPLAN

David Ryll, DLR Consulting

Back in the early, ancient cavemen days of Oracle (in other words, the 1990s), extensive SQL statement tuning was absolutely required to make a database application work with any degree of responsiveness and reliability. As the Oracle SQL statement optimizer has become more intelligent (no chuckles or snide comments allowed here) and hardware has become more powerful, the development focus has turned away from hand tuning SQL statements to relying on the default capabilities of the Oracle optimizer.

While this is often a valid approach, there are times when reliance on the default capabilities of the Oracle optimizer does not provide the desired results (i.e. querying and extracting data from tables containing billions of rows of data). When this occurs, an understanding of how the Oracle optimizer works, how it approaches your data, and what you can do using hints to make it work the way that you require is absolutely necessary. To this end this session will investigate real world SQL statement tuning examples and walk through the tuning of them using the undocumented ‘ADVANCED’ option in the DBMS_XPLAN investigative tool (i.e. SELECT * FROM TABLE(DBMS_XPLAN.DISPLAY_CURSOR(format => ‘ADVANCED’)).

Optimizing and Simplifying Complex SQL with Advanced Grouping

Jared Still, Pythian

No doubt you are aware of the advanced grouping features found in Oracle SQL, operators such as GROUPING(), CUBE(), GROUPING_ID(), and GROUPING_SETS(). Like many though you may not be sure how to take advantage of these operators. What do they do, and why should you use them?

This presentation will show how these features can be used to simplify SQL that was previously quite complex by reducing the amount of code needed and improving readability, and perhaps most importantly, greatly optimizing the performance of SQL statements.

Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Database Tuning for Packaged Applications

Mike Swing, TruTek

Packaged applications such as E-Business Suite and Demantra may require significant hardware and performance tuning resources. Large investments in hardware will benefit from periodic tuning of the application and underlying database. Tuning the database for these packaged applications can utilize similar techniques; however, the hardware resources required may be vastly different. We are faced with the constraint that we can’t tune the sql in these packaged applications, but we can make the database run faster and thereby, “fix” the offending sql. In addition to the generally used techniques of reorg-ing tables or gathering better statistics, there are six more tuning techniques that can be used to help improve the performance of your packaged application.

This is a practical presentation for those packaged application users that need better performance but without the purist’s focus on tuning sql.

Demystifying Physical and Virtual Hadoop

George Trujillo, Hortonworks

Big Data is the fastest growing area of IT and it’s important DBAs begin understanding how Big Data platforms are going to impact existing infrastructures. This presentation will explain a Hadoop architecture and discuss physical and virtual Hadoop platforms from an Oracle DBA perspective. Attendees will learn what makes up a Hadoop distribution using HDP and the role of the key frameworks in a distribution.

Middleware

How to Avoid a Spaghetti Architecture with Oracle Fusion

Jordan Braunstein, Visual Integrator Consulting

This session highlights the following:

Typical challenges with BPM, Middleware, and SOA implementations
Anti-Patterns to avoid when designing middleware solutions.
Five best practice patterns to follow for risk-free Middleware, proven at customer implementations
Sample code, designs, and implementation examples of best practice patterns
How to implement SOA best practice patterns.

Architecting Big Data and Private Cloud Solutions Through Oracle Coherence

Eric Greenfeder, Visual Integrator Consulting

This session’s highlights include:

Objective 1: Performance optimization and enablement of lethargic and slow applications through Oracle Coherence
Objective 2: Creating a grid architecture for scalability across the enterprise through Oracle Coherence
Objective 3: Using in-memory and caching of big data for private cloud applications
Objective 4: Learn and leverage the secret capabilities of Oracle Exalogic without having to buy new hardware
Objective 5: Slash your web application response times through caching technology and approaches.

Using the Pentaho Data Integration (PDI) Tool with Oracle EBS – AR Interface Programs

Nabil Juwale, DBAK

This presentation will demonstrate the use of PDI as an Open Source tool. The idea is to show how PDI jobs and transformations can pull in data from virtually any source, connect to several databases concurrently and perform manipulations on data. Furthermore, we will highlight certain features of PDI such as writing to spreadsheets, emailing, populating interface tables in Oracle EBS, and calling Concurrent Programs all from within the tool. We will also show how jobs can be scheduled to run automatically at certain times.

Extending Fusion Applications: What, Who, Why, When, and HOW

Debra Lilley, Fujitsu

In Fusion Applications all the focus is on the user experience and extending what is delivered needs to follow those principles. But more importantly Fusion Applications are the shop window of Fusion Middleware so it is important that all developers understand what is happening here.

This presentation looks to answer those five simple questions. What can you extend? The building blocks of Fusion Applications allow so much flexibility so what components of FMW delivers this? Who does it? Much of what you can extend is user or business expert domain, so does this mean there is no need for a developer? Why would you extend? It is all about the user experience and people and organizations work differently.

Also, the gem for this presenter, is in the co-existence model that Fusion Applications allows, using multiple applications in a seamless way. If your user is working mainly in the new apps then you can bring other applications into it and deliver a single solution. When would you do this? Traditionally in an ERP project so much time would be spent in design and development before you go live. The agility in Fusion Applications allows a much more flexible approach with the ability to make many changes in a sandbox in production allowing real-world testing. And best of all, HOW do you do this? There are a set of composers available for extending Fusion Applications, all of course delivered from Fusion Middleware.

The Cloud: Separating Myth From Reality

Bryan Stroble, DBAK

This session will be an overview of essential characteristics of the cloud including on-demand self-service, resource pooling, rapid elasticity, measured service, and broad network access. The session will look at distinctions between service models (private cloud, public cloud, community cloud, hybrid cloud) and deployment modes (PaaS, IaaS, SaaS). The session will explore the top five reasons to transition to the cloud, take a look at Gartner’s hype cycle, separate myth from reality, and look at use cases of successful transitions to a cloud environment.

Automate Your Processes with Oracle Business Process Management Suite and SOA Suite

Gregory Opie, ECS Team

Business processes surround us. We participate in hundreds of processes every day at work, and every company we interact with is driven by business processes to ensure smooth operations. Business processes that can be managed and automated. However, these real-world business processes span organizations, systems, and applications and often suffer from lack of visibility and difficulty in adapting to changing business conditions.

Business Process Management (BPM) aims to solve these problems and Oracle Business Process Management Suite 11g offers new capabilities to model, manage, automate, and integrate processes in ways that were previously impractical or impossible. It is built on and integrates seamlessly with Oracle SOA Suite 11g, enabling human-centric processes and back-office automated processes to work together and share common business rules in an integrated fashion.

This introductory session will provide an end-to-end example to communicate the full BPM lifecycle: from the problem that needs to be solved, to solution techniques, to a specific implementation. Specifically:

Introduce BPM, an approach for improving, automating, and optimizing business processes
Describe Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN), the executable, graphical standard for modeling business process.
Introduce Oracle BPM Suite 11g.
Demonstrate how to build a sample business process, simulate it, and deploy it using Oracle BPM Suite. The process will include interaction with services built in Oracle SOA Suite to demonstrate the seamless nature of these two powerful products.

Applying SOA to the Cloud

Brian Statkevicus, ECS Team

In order to realize the benefits of the cloud, your organization needs an architecture that is agile. Your organization must be able to successfully migrate from an in-house environment to a hosted or cloud environment without negative impact to your customers. In other words, more than ever, you need an SOA.

This session will review SOA concepts, identify the business problems that require an SOA, present best practices on adopting an SOA to a cloud environment, including real-world case studies, and conclude with a demo.

Provision, Deploy, and Clone Oracle Fusion Middleware and Database in a Highly Virtualized Environment

Sunil Wadhwa, Trymaran

Virtualization and private cloud technologies have revolutionized the speed and ease by which Oracle administrators can provision, deploy, and clone Oracle software. Increasingly, IT organizations are using these technologies to vastly enhance their development to test to production lifecycle migration experience. Creating a new SOA Suite environment, for example, can almost be reduced to cloning an existing install and modifying the configuration files in the new environment. The key to success, however, is to understand which configuration files to modify and what utilities to use with each Oracle product.

This presentation will describe the methodologies and best practices used to clone Oracle SOA Suite, Oracle Service Bus, and Oracle database technologies in a highly-virtualized environment. With each product, a number of lessons learned will be shared with the audience. The presentation will leverage and build upon some of the utilities provided by Oracle. Both 10g (based on OC4J) and 11g (based on WebLogic) versions of Oracle Fusion Middleware will be covered.

The presentation will also illustrate a cloning and provisioning project in which the presenter used VMware’s vCloud Director to provision a new environment consisting of Oracle databases, Oracle SOA Suite, Oracle Service Bus, and Oracle Identity Management. Subsequently, they configured and integrated the various components together using VMware’s vFabric Application Director. A review of the virtualization technologies relevant to this project will be presented.

Professional Development

Women in Technology Panel

Maria Colgan, Oracle Corporation Dominic Delmolino, Agilex Technologies

Debra Lilley, Fujitsu Karen Morton, Enkitec

Kellyn Pot’Vin, Enkitec

Come join a panel discussion on women in technology led by Kellyn Pot’Vin. Due to cultural differences between men and women, the percentage of females who participate in networking opportunities such as user group meetings, blogs, etc. is much lower in comparison to their male colleagues.

Topics of discussion will include the following: How do we get more women to join local user groups, blog, or even present at their local user groups’ quarterly or annual events? How do we get more young women interested in careers in the technical fields? This session is open to both men and women.

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