Summer Conference 2010

Hosted by Chevron

August 19, 2010

at Chevron, San Ramon, CA

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

Being an Oracle server process is no easy thing. While typically doing a whole lot of nothing, when asked to do something expectations are extremely high. And all this happens while its being subjected to all sorts of infuriating roadblocks. If you think teenage drama is exhausting, that's nothing compared to what an Oracle server process endures.

This technical and entertaining keynote will bring to light some of the key performance and configuration issues we face today. With the aid of audience participation, impromptu demonstrations, and even a quick buffer and library cache dump, you'll come to respect an Oracle server process and the code that breathes life into it like never before.

Balancing high database performance and serialization control can be a daunting challenge with increasing complexity, transaction rates, and concurrency requirements. This presentation focuses on how Oracle meets this challenge by exploring the various internal serialization control schemes, such as the lock, the latch, and the mutex. This is a very practical yet deep internal presentation, filled with amazing discoveries about how Oracle works.

Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g has introduced industry leading capabilities for managing the entire Oracle stack from packaged applications to Fusion Middleware, Database and the underlying Sun systems. It also introduces groundbreaking innovations in end-to-end application performance management; configuration management and compliance; application quality management; and provisioning and patching. Join us for this unique opportunity to learn about the new Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g.

Once upon a time the data warehouse was a peaceful land far, far away from the operational system craze. Alas, those times are long gone and you as a data warehouse professional now need to manage very diverse workloads on your data warehouse. You deal with batch processes (both reading from and writing to your data warehouse), with continuous data loading and with many different end user workloads. In this session we will discuss how Oracle Database 11g Release 2 can address a mixed workload management problem. Rather than discussing a set of features, we will introduce a comprehensive solution that you can look at, understand and implement at home to manage your data warehouse workload. You will see this all managed from Enterprise Manager, you will see how you can handle exceptions, create policies and make it all work in a real live scenario that even includes parallel statement queuing. If you manage an operational warehouse, you should attend this session.

The most important tool in performance tuning is charts. As the old saying goes, one picture is worth ten thousand words. Oracle Database is richly instrumented but charts are surprisingly hard to come by. With the help of 52 charts covering 52 weeks in the life of a database, we demonstrate how to plot performance data in effective ways that allow us to visualize database performance. No special tools or licenses are necessary; the data can be obtained from Statspack while Microsoft Excel can be used to produce stunning charts of database performance.

Though many types of SQL injection can be prevented by secure coding practices, one can limit and even stop SQL injection attacks by deploying the correct tools to protect applications and databases. Certain classes of SQL injection, including those exploiting zero-day vulnerabilities, can be entirely blocked by deploying deep inspection tools, which will be demonstrated in the presentation.

Takeaway:

• This course will present a new angle on a popular attack vector on the database layer of applications: SQL Injection.
• We will describe types and techniques of SQL Injection attacks on both web applications and built-in database stored program units.
• We will show how simple SQL Injection can be used to own the database server through the means of privilege escalation.
• We will also list ways of preventing SQL Injection attacks - ranging from secure coding practices to various external tools that will alert and prevent SQL Injection attempts, and demonstrate how hacker techniques of evasion can be used to subvert them.
• Finally, we will introduce new deep inspection tools that can prevent SQL injection, even in zero-day scenarios.

• The characteristics of SQL injection attacks
• Secure coding practices
• Existing tools for SQL Injection prevention and techniques to evade them
• New resilient technologies used to solve entirely SQL injections, even those exploiting zero-day vulnerabilities

Large, mission-critical applications built on Oracle Database are often unavailable for tens of hours while the application's database objects are patched or upgraded. Oracle Database 11g Release 2 introduces revolutionary new capabilities that allow online application upgrade with uninterrupted availability of the application. Existing sessions can continue to use the pre-upgrade application until their users decide to finish; and, at the same time, new sessions can use the post-upgrade application. When no sessions are any longer using the pre-upgrade application, it can be retired. The application as a whole therefore enjoys hot rollover from the pre-upgrade version to the post-upgrade version.

The capability depends on these new kinds of object: the edition, the editioning view, and the crossedition trigger. Code changes are installed in the privacy of a new edition. Data changes are made safely by writing only to new columns or new tables not seen by the old edition. An editioning view exposes a different projection of a table into each edition to allow each to see just its own columns. A crossedition trigger propagates data changes made by the old edition into the new edition's columns, or (in hot-rollover) vice-versa. The capability as a whole is called edition-based redefinition - EBR for short.

Oracle Database 11gR2 contains new functionality, as well as substantive enhancements to existing functionality, such as Advanced Compression, PL/SQL Warnings, and even new ways to create tables and indexes. This presentation, by Oracle ACE Director Daniel Morgan, will include live demonstrations in SQL*Plus that will show use of the most valuable of these new features.

The Oracle ACE Program is designed to recognize and reward Oracle experts for advocating Oracle Technology and Applications. Oracle ACE recipients are chosen based on their significant contributions to, and activity in, their respective community. The program currently has two levels: Oracle ACE and Oracle ACE Director. This presentation will highlight the Oracle ACEs at the NoCOUG conference and explain the ACE program.

Note: This presentation does not have a formal abstract but has been very well received at numerous conferences including CLOUG (Chile), OUGF (Finland), NZOUG (New Zealand), and EMEA Harmony (Estonia). While I personally lead the presentation we always invite all Oracle ACEs attending the conference, for example Chen Shapira, to join in talking about their experiences in the program.

A lot has been blogged about MapReduce or its Hadoop implementation or Cascading and sometimes it feels like this is the solution for everything from parallel processing to the common cold and beyond. In this session we will explain what MapReduce, Cascading and Hadoop actually are, how you can apply the same rules and processes in Oracle and what a good strategy for leveraging the best of both worlds could look like.

This is not just a session with hundreds of buzz words, we will actually show you an example of programming MapReduce within the database and discuss both pros and cons of this solution. We will also show you how to potentially leverage both processing models and explain what works in which situation.

Business Process Management services are core providers of real-time data in a Service Oriented Architecture implementation. A Process Instance is created as a result of a new transaction sent to BPM services. The dynamic changes in the business state of such transaction may be persisted in distributed databases. These databases include several instances, one of which persists BPM processes data. Another instance may store BPM business partners' related data. A separate database instance is utilized to persist global information about the transaction for reports generation. An application of such BPM database instances is to monitor the real-time changes in an in-flight transaction business states. This presentation demonstrates how BPM services are architected to provide real-time business state data in a SOA implementation context. Enterprise Context Services scopes such SOA database applications at BPM layer.

Enterprise 2.0 technologies such as portals, content management, social networks, and micro-blogs are transforming how people work and interact with users, content, business processes and applications. With these technologies, users are empowered to find more relevant information when they need it, connect and collaborate with others in a business process context, and share knowledge more effectively with employees, customers and partners. Join us in this session as we discuss how your organization can adopt and scale Enterprise 2.0 capabilities to address key business challenges such as improving employee productivity, increasing customer satisfaction and accelerating time to market for new products and services. Learn how you can enhance your business operations by injecting Enterprise 2.0 into existing processes and systems and empower your knowledge workers with greater findability and shareability of enterprise information and expertise. We'll also highlight real customer use cases so you can see first hand how leading companies are gaining a competitive advantage with Oracle's Enterprise 2.0 solutions.

Many companies have millions of dollars invested in existing Oracle application systems, with most of these proven systems that run their business. Application software and the associated databases are valuable corporate assets. Companies now want to leverage their current investment in data, products and applications with new Web-enabled applications. It is generally not practical to spend countless dollars replacing existing, functional systems with new technology or a new programming paradigm. It makes far more business sense to implement new technology (such as Java) where the impact will be the greatest (such as in the front-end of the application) and the relative cost will be the most reasonable. The goal is to leverage existing application systems and data while providing new Web based functionality. Thus, any technical decision that maximizes the business impact and minimizes the cost and risk of failure is always a good business decision.

As Oracle continues to introduce more capabilities with their Web Services environment, many organizations are contemplating utilizing the new capabilities that are being provided. While past versions of Oracle Forms have enabled companies to access the Web, 11g is providing one of the most robust environments thus far. However, the move to the Web is not always as easy as it seems. As in the past, we see many companies moving to Java because it seems the wave of the future. It is important that these organizations understand the business reasons to move their applications and determine if the effort and dollars spent will justify the migration costs. While migration to Java can provide many alternatives, it is not always the best solution for every organization. Understanding the risks of migration, the options available and the benefits of Java is imperative to ensure an organization is not spending precious IT dollars on an alternative that does not make business sense.

What you will learn:

• Technical aspects and challenges of moving from Oracle Forms into Java
• Migration options available and pros and cons of these
• Benefits of migrating to different environments including APEX, Forms 11g and Java
• Business reasons for moving to Java
• Challenges associated with modernizing applications
• If the effort and dollars spent will justify the migration costs