FALL CONFERENCE 2005

was held November 10, 2005

at The Computer History Museum, Mountain View, CA

See directions to the conference location near the bottom of this page.

This short keynote presentation will present Tom's view on why "why" is probably the right initial answer to give to most technical questions. Why just answering the question as asked can likely cause more harm than good.

We'll briefly go over why using bind variables is extremely important with regards to performance, scalability, and even security, but quickly move into topics such as: Do I always want to bind? (Surprisingly, the answer is no.) What is bind variable peeking? Is it good or evil in disguise or a bit of both? So the developers don't bind; is cursor_sharing=force/similar appropriate system-wide? (Emphasis will be on the reasons why setting cursor sharing at the instance level is not such a good idea.) What is the real difference between cursor_sharing=force/similar and which should we use under what circumstances? The presentation will be practical, with many examples and hard numbers you can use in your day-to-day work.

Not quite ready for a data warehouse, but still want a high performance reporting environment that doesn't impact your on-line transaction (OLTP) users? New in Oracle 9i, the Data Guard logical standby database is one answer. One or more core schemas are automatically synchronized with your live database, as frequently as you wish, without creating any load on the source database. Once updated, the core data is protected from any alteration, yet any other tables and schemas can be created in the same database to extend your data model and provide reporting performance. Materialized views, query re-write, and other typical data warehouse techniques are all available.

These are fast and efficient methods of moving large amounts of data between databases and across platforms. The Transportable Tablespace feature literally allows you to unplug tablespaces from one database and plug them into another (some restrictions apply). Data Pump, the new generation of Import/Export, expands this functionality by bridging the gap across platforms. This presentation includes a live demo of moving relational tables and indexes from a Linux database to Windows, with many of the caveats and gotchas exposed.

Traditional table-based triggers allow implementation of complex business rules inside the database, creation of custom security rules and detailed auditing, among other things. System and DDL triggers expand this functionality to system events such as startup/shutdown, login/logout, and individual DDL statements. This session explores how to make your database more secure and flexible, track or prevent DDL changes, implement rules based on data, user or time values, special rules for data loading, debugging triggers, and more.

There is no session in this room at this time.

Portal (from version 3 to 10g) contains an Oracle Reports Portlet that allows you to easily present a parameter form. This form calls standard Oracle Reports RDF (and REP) files. As with most of the development tools in Portal, the Reports portlet is completely functional but the interface it offers is very basic and you will probably want to customize it. This presentation offers tips and techniques you can use to tweak the functionality and user interface of these Reports modules. After a short review of the basics, it describes undocumented or little known techniques such as: customizing the template; defaulting fields to specific values; removing defaults from a previous session; hiding the schedule tab; changing the DESFORMAT prompt; creating a multi-select control; coding a shuttle (left-to-right) select control; changing the button labels; modifying the font; conditionally displaying fields based on other fields; customizing the error page; and adding separator lines. Although this presentation offers intermediate-level techniques, a short review of the Reports portlet will allow beginners to assimilate the topics.

HTML DB is a web development environment with the power to build and deploy full-featured web applications. Key features include wizard-driven application building, graphical query building, and built-in transaction concurrency management – really! For those of you who find information on asktom.oracle.com; did you know it is built using HTML DB? This session will be primarily a demo with a discussion of features – including new features in version 2.0. The live demo will include building a non-trivial application in less than 10 minutes using the built-in wizards. Can’t believe it? Come and see.

The core of any J2EE application is its business services layer--how it interacts with the database. This interaction is not as trivial as it might seem: databases and J2EE applications live in entirely different worlds—one relational, the other object-oriented; one SQL-based, the other Java-based; one where manipulating terabytes of data is standard, one where a few hundred megabytes can bring a system to its knees. Oracle JDeveloper 10g and its Application Development Framework (ADF) provide a number of options for bridging the object/relational divide, but the easiest to learn and most productive to use is ADF Business Components (ADF BC) technology. After a brief discussion of the general architecture of Oracle ADF, this presentation focuses on ADF BC. It explains the various component types, demonstrates how they fit into the framework, and shows how you can use this knowledge to maximize your application's data processing efficiency and flexibility. Finally, audience members will see a demonstration of the tools JDeveloper provides to help develop business components and integrate them into applications. This presentation is appropriate both for those who have never used ADF and those who have had some hands-on experience but would like to learn more about the Business Components portion of the framework.

Drawing on ten years of experience at Oracle Corporation in database development and within the recovery/high availability group, this presentation provides a way to view High Availability and Disaster Recovery needs, common approaches, and evaluation of available IT solutions. Attendees will be presented with various systematic views and availability concerns for high availability (no outage scenarios), unplanned outages, and planned outages. They will learn how to better understand and categorize database failures. Finally, there will be discussion about differentiating and evaluating existing HA/DR technologies, including conventional backup, RAID, block-level replication, mirroring, transactional data management, among others.

Managing space in a data warehouse environment is one of the challenging tasks for data warehouse DBAs. Not only are there many data files and tablespaces to manage, but also the size of individual segments and partitions tends to be very large. This presentation addresses best practices in effectively managing very large databases and data warehouse environments with the goals of efficiently using the existing disk space by reducing waste and managing data growth while enhancing query performance.

What is a data vault and why should I use it? The answer is that a data vault is a concept that has been pioneered by Dan Linstedt. In this presentation, you will learn what a data vault is and how a data vault allows data warehouses to move to the next level of scalability and ease of use.

There is no session in this room at this time.