Category Archives: Blog
Our (not so) personal rumblings about technology that we work with.
21’st Century PL/SQL
I’m fresh from the two day seminar titled 21’st Century PL/SQL, by Steven Feuerstein (pronounced FOYER-STEEN), that was held by Oracle University in Ljubljana. The presentation material is available from here and all the scripts that are mentioned in the material are stored in demo.zip.
All the participants got a copy of his PL/SQL bible, “Oracle PL/SQL Programming”, 4th edition – and of course, most of us (geeks) took the opportunity to get the book signed by Steven.
As I already said, Steven is an excellent technical speaker. Speaking about programming (no matter which computer language is the subject) is not trivial, I believe it’s much harder than speaking about other IT stuff, such as system administration, database performance tuning, or for example about database administration in general. Browsing through code, explaining it, changing it, actually running it, taking the questions from attendees, answering, keeping the audience focused (and awake!), and all this back and forth is not a picnic.
What I can say for the end of this blog, if you have a chance attend Steven Feuersteins seminar, you’ll certainly not regret, no matter how experienced you’re in PL/SQL, you’ll learn something new.
SIOUG 2007 – presentation material
Presentation material from SIOUG 2007 is available in pdf format – or better said, only part of it. I’m a bit disappointed, that three weeks after the conference, I could not refer to a single paper from my favorite guest speakers: James Morle, Cary Millsap, Julian Dyke and Wolfgang Breitling, nor papers from Jože Senegačnik. I hope SIOUG site will be updated with the missing material soon.
In general, I think SIOUG 2007 conference was a success. The Wednesday alone was worth the conference fee (if you ever had a chance to listen to Cary Millsap, then you know what I’m talking about – not that other speakers were bad, it’s just that the Cary presentation style and skills are in it’s own class).
Did I dislike something about SIOUG 2007 conference (apart from missing presentation material)?
You bet (after all, I have to take care about my grumpy-ego trip-attitude;-) :
- a lack of discipline from the speakers to finish with the presentation on time, which resulted in cascading time conflicts with presentations done in other tracks. The guest speakers showed better sense for the time.
- the most boring stuff on conference were “self-promoting” presentations done by conference sponsors. Some of them were so boring that not even a double Turkish coffee could keep me awake. One of the CEO was so eager and so ridiculous in his bragging at the same time, that the audience start laughing at some point – he thought we’re laughing at his gag – so he bragged a bit more …. do you sense Catch 22 here ;-)
- official conference photographer was a real pain in the ass, someone should took those damn batteries from him, or tell him that one or two photos per session are enough, not 10-15 from five different angles. Give us a break, this is a technical conference not some fashion show in Milan.
- venue of the conference really sucks. I know that I’m more or less alone in this opinion :-)
Practical Best Programming with Steven Feuerstein
Today, I attended a free, half day presentation given by Steven Feuerstein. Steven stopped for a day in Slovenia on his way from Zagreb to Bratislava. Event was sponsored by Quest (MRI d.o.o) as part of the promotion of their new tool, called Code Tester for Oracle.
The last time I had a chance to listen to his presentation was 10 years ago, at EOUG in Amsterdam. Back then, he was already a well known for his in-depth PL/SQL knowledge, writing skills and his amusing presentation style. Today, it seems to me, that he is still as enthusiastic about PL/SQL as he was ten years ago, not to mention that he is still one of the best technical speakers that I know of. You simply can’t be bored while listening to him, even if you don’t have a clue about the PL/SQL. Wonderful.
The main topic was test driven development, a trend in software development in the recent years, that we all hear/read about it quite often, but rarely practice it. Why? Because it’s usually hard to do it right. Right? In reality our beloved users test our code. ;-)
Steven mentioned Gartner group reasearch that indicate that for every line of code you have to write ten lines of test code. Ah, yes – don’t forget that test code need testing too ;-), so you really have to add some overhead to that figure. Who has time to do that?
If you’re PL/SQL developer trying to write PL/SQL test code first (personally, I don’t know anyone!) and real code second, you should really give it a try and test out the Code tester for Oracle (Steven himself devoted last two years of his time to this project!). Don’t take this as a cheap marketing plug from my part, it’s just that I have a feeling that Quest has a really unique tool, unmatched on the market and it’s not expensive (580€/developer at present, with 30% discount if ordered before September 25th, 2007)).
If you’re from Slovenia (or nearby), mark the December 3th-4th, 2007 – Steven will be back, with a two day seminar.
Now, I just want to write down some useful links if you wish to read the presentation material, play a game of SET etc.:
- if you’re existing Toad user, bookmark Toad World, even if you’re not, you should at least check Steven Fuerenstein page at ToadWorld
- you can find at ToadWorld.com/SF all his presentation material (including the one I attended today)
- Steven offers his numerous scripts for free at http://oracleplsqlprogramming.com/downloads/demo.zip.
- You can freely use scripts/code and presentation material for your own internal training and application development.
- Steven is suggesting regularly playing a SET game (http://www.setgame.com/set/puzzle_frame.htm), as often as you can, and if at all possible on the company time. If you’re caught, just tell the boss that you’re trying to become a better PL/SQL programmer. And frankly speaking, I have a feeling that I should really play this game 5-10 years ago, extensively :-)
- another recommended game by Steven is Mastermind
- are you trying to systematize error management in PL/SQL? Make sure you check freeware http://www.oracleprogramming.com/downloads/qem.zip
- another freeware, if you wish to hide your tables behind the table API visit http://www.qcgu.net
SIOUG 2007, for the very first time…
…I’m pleasantly surprised by the agenda of SIOUG 2007, twelfth Slovenian Oracle User Group. For the better or worse I was avoiding attending SIOUG conference so far. With the exception of two or (max) three speakers, I simply didn’t find the content that would draw my attention and justify my travel to Portorose.
On top of that, I don’t like the venue of the conference (I’m not sure exactly why I dislike Portorose so much) , so it was always a simple decision for me – no go! :)
This time around it’ll be a much tougher decision, it could well mean I’ll reserve a day or two and attend the SIOUG to listen to the presentations listed below:
Wolfgang Breitling, “Tuning by Cardinality Feedback”
Wolfgang Breitling, “Joins, Skew and Histograms”
James Morle, “Skew and Latency: The Silent Killers”
James Morle, “Brewing Benchmarks”
Julian Dyke, “Investigating Oracle”
Julian Dyke, “Flashback Logging”
Joze Senegacnik, “Kako CBO izvaja transformacije SQL ukazov” (How CBO performs SQL transformations)
Joze Senegacnik, “Automatic Memory Management in Oracle 10g”
Cary Millsap, “Why You Can’t See Your Real Performance Problems”
Cary Millsap, “Profiling Oracle: How it Works”
Stefan Knecht, “Hot new features in 11g”
Alex Gorbachev, “RAC connection management”
Jurij Modic “Kakšen je tvoj načrt, Oracle?” (“What is your plan, Oracle?”)
Hmm…not bad, not bad at all!! (Well done, Joze !! ;-)
Regards,
Ales
About this site…
This portal is maintained by a small group of Oracle database administrators from Slovenia. For now, the membership is limited to invited members only. This means you can’t register to the site, nor post any content (this includes comments)…yeah, I know, it sucks, but we all have better things to do in our lifes than fighting spam bots. This policy might change in the future, until then, please accept our apology.
With best regards,
Ales
dbaportal.eu 