Flashback Friday: Dimitri Gielis’sThoughts on #Kscope

According to Dimitri Gielis… Kscope is “The Conference to Meet the Developers Around the World!”  Check out our Flashback Friday post: https://odtug.wordpress.com/2011/03/21/the-conference-to-meet-the-developers-around-the-world/

“As I said before, Kscope became *the* conference to meet the developers around the world. Next to that a big portion of the APEX Development team is present too. I always love to talk to these nice people who are working so hard to give us the best product possible.”

Dimitri will be presenting at Kscope12.  While you’re reviewing his presentations don’t forget to register for Kscope by 3/25/12 to save $300!  Take advantage of our Early Bird Pricing!

Dan McGhan: The Kscope Experience

Guest Blogger: Dan McGhan

Every year the Oracle Development Tools User Group (ODTUG) puts on an amazing conference called Kscope. I first attended Kscope in 2008 in New Orleans, when the event was still known as Kaleidoscope. Kscope was my first real conference experience and, while I didn’t know it then, I was being spoiled! During that week I learned more than I could have imagined possible and forged relationships and friendships that continue today—all while having a blast!

There are many factors that make Kscope such a great conference, a lot of which are interrelated. I want to discuss some of these factors and share some of my past experiences in hopes of convincing anyone on the fence about attending, to join us this year in San Antonio.

Great Content

At the core of any great technical conference is great content and Kscope brings plenty of it. Whether you’re attending to get solutions to problems or inspiration and new ideas, you will have lots of great content to choose from. I recommend that attendees carefully plan the sessions they would like to attend in advance. It’s also a good idea to take some notes which can later serve as an actionable roadmap to follow up on. There will be a LOT of knowledge transfer—be open and ready for it.

Great Speakers

Great content is nothing without great speakers.  When you combine both great speakers with great content, you end up with… well, Steve Jobs, or hopefully something close 🙂 Speakers should be passionate about the topics they are presenting, and the vast majority of the speakers I’ve seen at Kscope are incredibly passionate about what they do. I always leave Kscope feeling enlightened and inspired; that is what great speakers are capable of.

Access to Speakers

Speaking of speakers, you may recognize some of their names. Perhaps you’ve exchanged e-mails or participated in an online forum together. However you’ve interacted online, if you are both at Kscope, this is your chance to put a face to a name. To meet the people you’ve been conversing with, learning from, or better yet, inspired by, is a great experience. I was that guy that had to get Steven Feuerstein’s signature—it was awesome!

Insight into the Future

As an Application Express developer, one of my favorite parts of Kscope is the Sunday Symposium for APEX. The APEX development team takes over and speaks about the really exciting stuff they’ve been working on. Depending on the timing, the topics may be on features just released, features right around the corner, or features being considered for the distant future. While the legal disclaimers will discourage you from making plans based on some of what is said, it’s always nice to get a sense of where the product is heading.

Great Memories

During the day, Kscope is all business. But at night things are a little different. The team at ODTUG always does a great job of choosing locations that everyone can enjoy. After a busy day of learning, it’s fun to get out and enjoy the activities each location has to offer. This year the conference will take place at the JW Marriot San Antonio. The location offers all kinds of fun things to do, and there will be many activities and meet-ups as part of the conference. When you throw in the Special Event that’s planned for this year, you will be hard pressed to leave Texas without some great memories.

As I said before, these are just some of the factors that make Kscope such a great conference. Others that have attended would most likely agree with these points and add a few of their own. But the best way to find out what makes Kscope so great is to come and experience it yourself. I hope to see you all in San Antonio.

Oh, one last tip…register soon because the hotel will sell out!

Why Warren Capps Can’t Wait for Kscope12 at the JW Marriott Resort

Guest Blogger: Warren Capps

I’ve been a loyal ODTUG member for many years and have attended the conference the last sixteen years in a row. I’ve been to Florida, California, Washington, D.C., New Orleans, and many places in between over the years. Typically, the conference hotel is very good, but not spectacular. Frequently, due to budget (I’m independently employed), I can’t afford to stay at the conference hotel, and I stay at an outlier hotel and drive in. Well, this year, I am staying every night at the JW Marriott Resort and Spa even though I now live only seventy miles away in Austin. Why, you ask? Well, as a twenty-one year member of the Marriott Rewards program, I knew about the new hotel and had heard wonderful things about it. Since others will tell you about the conference, let me tell you about the resort.

Last week, my wife, Lynne, and I decided to check the place out. The opportunity was Texas Independence Day, the event, a “Beer Dinner” at the High Velocity Sports Bar. Think of a wine dinner, but with a different beer (instead of wine) served with each course (well, not every course, still waiting to find out what is the right beer for dessert). St. Arnold’s Brewery supplied the beer; the hotel supplied the chef who planned a four course meal.  Well, it was a fantastic evening. Good company and a great meal. If the beer dinner was any indication, you’d better plan on attending Kent Graziano’s exercise sessions in order to lose some of those pounds.

While there, we decided to stroll around the buildings and grounds. What a beautiful place! The hotel is on 30,000 acres set in the middle of what used to be a hunting camp. My usual job at the conference is conference photographer, but I had not brought anything, but my iPhone 4s to take pictures. It was sunset and I managed to get a few shots of the interior and exterior. The interior space is wonderful. Calling it a lobby doesn’t do it justice. It was built for conferences like ours. Dozens of seating areas scattered throughout two floors.

Since it was March and late in the day, the Water Park was not doing much business. But it looks like a lot of fun! There are six acres of pools, including a lazy river with tubes, slides, etc. to cavort in all day. And did I mention that the hotel is surrounded by not one, but two PGA championship courses? Bring your clubs. My wife is eagerly awaiting her chance at the Lantana Spa – 26,000 square feet, thirty treatment rooms, and you still have to get a reservation to get a treatment.

You’ll see one of the more beautiful attractions as you descend escalators into the conference center. The ceiling is filled with gorgeous glass-blown flowers. It’s called the inverted flower garden and was made by Garcia Art Glass of San Antonio. By chance, Lynne and I visited their studio a couple of years ago (and have the glass-blown chili pepper to prove it). If you or your family gets a chance, go visit the studio. They appear to enjoy having visitors and you’ll be able to see the making of their art up close.

But hurry and get your reservation. ODTUG owns the hotel for five days, but there are only (only?) 1,000 rooms. And if you miss out, it will definitely be a shuttle bus or car ride to get to the resort. For more information, go to http://www.marriott.com/hotels/hotel-information/travel/satjw-jw-marriott-san-antonio-hill-country-resort-and-spa/.

(Editor’s note: Don’t take the chance, register today! – The resort is filling up quickly!)

About Warren:

Warren Capps is a computer professional with over twenty-five years of experience in the management and development of integrated Oracle computer applications. He is a well-known presenter at user group conferences and has written numerous articles and book reviews for a variety of publications. He has written a regular book review column for the Oracle Development Tools Users Group (ODTUG) Technical Journal. Additionally, he has been the official conference photographer for ODTUG since 2000.

Flashback Friday – #Kscope 11 Interview: Eddie Awad

Today’s Flashback Friday post is an interview that ODTUGger David Schleis conducted with Oracle Ace Director Eddie Awad.  Eddie discusses his use of social media as a way to stay connected to the Oracle Community.

To stay connected to ODTUG throughout the year you can follow us on Twitter, Like us on Facebook,  and join our group on LinkedIn.

Top 5 Tools a Developer Can’t Live Without

Guest Blogger: Jeff Smith

I am a tools freak. Wait, that didn’t sound quite right. I’m extremely passionate about tools in the database space. After a short stint in the real world, I decided to make a career of it. I’ve been an advocate for database tools since 2001 and recently became the Product Manager for Oracle in the database tools group.

So why am I so obsessed by tools? Like any good IT professional I am extremely lazy. If I can do the job just as well but in fewer steps using a tool, I’ll jump on that with both feet. So when ODTUG asked me to share my favorite tools, I was like a pig in slop. Hmm, I’m not sure how that translates outside the US, so let’s just say that ‘I was very happy.’

Everyone loves a good Top 10 list, but remember that I am lazy, so let’s do a Top 5 instead (in no particular order).

1.  The Internet, 2.0

Message boards, Yahoo! Groups, Stack Overflow, and the Oracle Technology Networkforums are all great examples of what I would call Internet 1.0 resources. You should find a group that speaks to you and take advantage of it. Many of you are already there or else you wouldn’t be reading this ODTUG blog post. So I am going to challenge you to join…wait for it…Twitter!

Twitter is social network that works for me. It’s instant access to the smartest and most helpful database professionals in the world. Folks like Cary Millsap and Mike Riley are there – you know those guys, right? Find tuning a challenge? Follow people like Maria Colgan. All she does is manage the database optimizer and answer tough tuning questions in her spare time.

Want to get to know the folks hanging out at Kscope12 before you show up? Most of the presenters are on Twitter. ( Follow @ODTUG and use #Kscope for conference updates.) We love meeting our followers in person, so don’t be shy at the user group conferences!

Ready for that next step in your career? The best jobs are never posted. They get leaked and filled on Twitter. Want to stand out in a crowd? I asked for a show of hands at my last presentation of those who were on Twitter. About 5 hands out of 100 were raised. That’s only 5 percent. Be a “five-percenter” and help us take over the database world! Oh, and how do you think I got asked to write this blog post?

If I’ve convinced you and you’re ready to give Twitter a try, I recommend you read this free Twitter book. Then you’ll want to follow me and check out my OraclePeeps list of interesting folks to follow.

2.  Regular Expressions (RegEx)

Sometimes the data doesn’t look the way you need it to. But you know there’s a pattern there. Regular Expressions are what might be holding you back from taking your code to the next level. Don’t be afraid of RegEx. I was first exposed to RegEx when I started writing some Perl scripts. And then of course I noticed how much easier UNIX scripting got when I understood RegEx. But here’s my dirty secret – I don’t have RegEx memorized. Instead I know enough to know when I need them, then cheat and jump onto Google for the rest. How many times have you noticed a table that just has a big junk VARCHAR or CLOB column? A lazy architect decided to let you parse out what you need instead of breaking it up. This would be a nightmare without RegEx!

And of course you already know about Oracle’s functions for RegEx, right?

3.  DBMS_ Support Packages

There’s something like 500 of these packages. No one expects you to know all of them. I once was asked to help review a tools book that had an entire set of chapters dedicated to all the SYS.DBMS_ packages. It was not an exciting read, but it did open my eyes to some really helpful tools I had overlooked. Now when I need to tackle a new task, the first thing I ask is ‘Maybe there is a package out there that already does what I need?’ There are a few overlooked packages that I think any developer should be not only aware of, but should be using on a regular basis:

•  DBMS_PROFILER – shows lines executed in your stored procedures, with number of executions per line and amount of time spent per line and execution. The #1 tuning tool for a stored procedure?

• DBMS_MONITOR – trace a session. You know how to trace, right? I should probably split this out as its own tool, but I’m greedy and promised to stick to only 5. If you don’t have the ability to trace your own sessions in your development environments and access the resulting trace files, go talk to your DBA RIGHT NOW.

• DBMS_SCHEDULER – DBMS_JOBS is so yesterday. Scheduling tasks in the database can get complicated. If you’re on an 11g database but still using an 8i package to handle it, you’re really missing out. I could say the same thing about continuing to use EXP instead of EXPDP!

4. A Great Offline Text Editor

Notepad is a popular utility for many reasons. It doesn’t do anything you don’t ask for. Have you ever tried to author an HTML document in Word? Now some of you are going to laugh and shake your head in amazement that I am wasting an entire entry in this list to ask people to stop using Notepad. But how many of you notice your co-workers still using it when there are awesome free utilities like Notepad++ out there? If you’re a *NIX person, I don’t even have to mention vi, right?

5.  A Database IDE That Works for You

You saw this coming a million miles away, right? Of course you know what my favorite IDE is, but I really just want to make sure that the tool you ARE using does what you need it to do. Here’s what I look for when evaluating a database tool:

• Platform support – does it run on Windows, OSX, and *NIX? Windows is still the  dominate desktop OS, but most techies lean towards Apple. You shouldn’t have to compromise your choice of tools based on your OS. And you shouldn’t have to license     Windows and spin up a VM on your MAC just so you can work with your database.

• Ease of use – the tool is there to help you, not make you feel stupid. You’re debugging a stored procedure, not practicing your Flight Simulator skills, right?

• Extensibility – no tool can give you everything, so it should allow you to extend its capabilities. Love Cary’s Method-R tools? Run them right inside my favorite IDE!

• Cost  – if you don’t have to pay any extra money to use the tool, then why would  you want to? I’ll break down and buy a tool from time to time – SnagIt comes to mind –but only after I exhaust what comes out-of-the-box for free.

• Platform Support – How soon can the tool support the latest and greatest database features and products? While I might not need to use version.  Next in production environments, I am constantly evaluating and building the ‘next best thing.’ As an example, SQL Developer will support Oracle’s new Database Public Cloud offering on Day1.

Again, tools are here to help us. If you are using a tool and it is not saving you time and effort, then you are probably using it incorrectly, or it is just not the right tool for you.

I’ll be at ODTUG’s Kscope12 event with two presentations featuring my favorite database tool and IDE:

• SQL Developer Tips and Tricks
• Debugging PL/SQL With SQL Developer

Can’t wait? Head on over to my blog and catch up on my favorite tutorials, tips, and did-you-know posts dedicated to Oracle SQL Developer.

ORACLENERD’s (a.k.a. Chet Justice) Take on Kscope12’s Database Track

Guest Blogger: Chet Justice

I will be your host today. My name is Chet Justice, also known as ORACLENERD (note the all caps, I’m particular). You can find my musings on my blog, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Google (even better, UNTAPPD).
In 2010, I was asked to join the Kscope Database Committee by the track lead, Lewis Cunningham. I also got to put together the Kscope Sunday Symposium; Tools. Tools. Tools. Guess what it was about? That was a great experience. It was a lot of work getting all those people to speak, but it was well worth it.

Around that time, Cary Millsap shared with me a great presentation by Dominic Delmolino. The essence of this presentation was related to DevOps. If you don’t know what DevOps is, I’ll save you some time:

In computing, “DevOps” is an emerging set of principles, methods and practices for communication, collaboration and integration between software development (application/software engineering) and IT operations (systems administration/infrastructure) professionals.^[1] It has developed in response to the emerging understanding of the interdependence and importance of both the development and operations disciplines in meeting an organization’s goal of rapidly producing software products and services.^{[2][3][4][5][6]}

This is a concept I had been talking about (arguing?) for years…I didn’t know it had a name. I was hooked. Let’s be clear, I’m not a fan of the movement, I am a fan of the principles behind it. Mr. Cunningham had to reel me back in; after all, this was a Tools conference.

Back to this year. I was asked to lead the Kscope12 (June 24-28 in San Antonio, TX) Database track. Known for my…humor, I wasn’t the first choice as ODTUG people are incredibly serious. No one else would take the job though so they were stuck with me. OK, I jest…

As the Database Committee lead, guess what one of my goals is? Get DevOps, or just devops, into the stream. While Operations was the official sub-track, our committee reached out to people in the community to help support the devops theme, and that they did.

With moral support from Jonathan Lewis and Tom Kyte (who may both provide more assistance at the actual event) we got some very cool devops-themed presentations including:

• Ron Crisco of Method R – Data Design for Developers: An Agile Approach
• Dominic Delmolino – From Administration to Collaboration, Transforming DBAs Through the Concept of DevOps
• Susan Duncan of Oracle – Continuous Integration: Put It at the Heart of Your Development
• Bryn Llewellyn of Oracle – Oracle E-Business Suite’s Use of Edition-based Redefinition for Online Patching
• Martin Buechi of Avaloq – Tools & Processes for Efficient Development of High Quality PL/SQL in a Large Environment
• Cary Millsap of Method R – Instrumentation: Why You Should Care

The Database Sunday Symposium, led by Kris Rice of Oracle, will have a DevOps theme as well. Very cool stuff.

Are you looking for a point to this article? Kscope is an excellent event. Make plans to attend—now and volunteer with ODTUG. You’ll get to rub elbows with some of the best and the brightest in the Oracle community.

You know what to do now…go register for Kscope12. I might buy you a beer.

Flashback Friday – Cary Millsap Kscope 11 Interviews

Last year Mike Riley posted a phenomenal interview he conducted with one of Kscope11’s database guru’s and Kscope12’s Monday night keynote, Cary Millsap.  In Millsap’s keyonote: Learning about Life through Business and Software he will share his thoughts about raising a family, running his own business (Method R Corporation) and more.  At Kscope12 Millsap will also be presenting Instrumentation: Why You Should Care.

To find out what Cary had to say about Kscope11 and why “Kscope is just the right place for me to be,” check out this post: https://odtug.wordpress.com/2011/04/27/carymillsap-kscope-is-just-the-right-place-for-me-to-be/

David Schleis also conducted an onscreen interview with Millsap at Kscope11.  Here is part one of their two part video.  Part 2 link: http://youtu.be/qeW5auImWww

Kscope 12 Early Bird Registration Ends March 25!  Register today and save!

#Kscope 12 Fun Factor

Check out the Kscope12 Fun Factor page on the Kscope12 website.  What is the Fun Factor? In the Fun Factor blog, Dianne Latiolais and several guest columnists are posting about fun things to do during your downtime at the conference in and around the San Antonio Hill Country. These could be activities for the attendees, or perhaps just as importantly, for the families that decide to make a vacation out of the conference experience in 2012. Check out the Fun Factor, and stay tuned for more updates as the conference draws closer.

Latest Fun Factor posts:

Kent Graziano: Kscope12 Health and Fitness

Dianne Latiolais: Get a Taste of San Antonio Before the Conference, Rodeo Style!

Dianne Latiolais: Texas Guide of Fun Kid Activities

Register now for ODTUG Kscope12, June 24-28, at the gorgeous JW Marriott in the Hill Country of San Antonio, TX. Early Bird registration will be ending soon; don’t miss your chance to save some serious cash!

Reserve your room now! The hotel is filling up quickly; don’t miss out on the opportunity to stay on site at the JW Marriott Hill Country!

Kscope12 – How the Sausage is Made

Guest Blogger: Jake Turrell

I’ve often wondered how the abstracts I submit to Kscope make their way into a particular track….or don’t make it in at all.  Why are some selected while others get rejected?  Who is making the decisions?  Last year, Natalie Delemar, who is responsible for Oracle BI & EPM content, called me and asked if I’d like to lead the selection process for Hyperion Planning and HFM.  Based on that experience, here’s a peek behind the curtains at Kscope.

Breaking out the Rolodex

Natalie’s final instructions to me were, “think about the topics you want covered and put together a team.”  I figured I really needed two teams, because my knowledge of HFM is limited.  So my first call went to Chris Barbieri, to whom I passed the proverbial HFM “buck.”  Next, I set about convincing some of the best Hyperion Application resources available to spend several late nights pouring over hundreds of abstracts . . . in their spare time . . . for free.  While most jumped at the opportunity to help, these resources tend to be over allocated by their employers.  They’re busy running large projects, blogging, writing books . . . you get the idea.  In the end, our content selection team was a great mix of folks from industry and consulting.  Each had strengths that rounded out the team and ensured that each toolset was well covered.

Fair and Balanced

One thing you can be assured of is that the content selection process for Kscope is fair. The initial selection process is “blind.” It isn’t until the second round of selections that the author’s name is associated with a particular abstract. Why not keep it blind throughout the entire process? It comes down to balance. The content teams need to ensure that a wide spectrum of presenters and companies are represented. Each presenter and each abstract gets graded from 0-5. Presentations are grouped into the various topics we wanted to be covered, and then based on the grades (and a whole lot of debate), the selection process begins.

Making the Cut

One of the downsides to this process is that some really good abstracts are inevitably cut. For example, this year there were a lot of great submissions covering Public Sector Planning, Workforce Planning, and Smart View. Our team could only allocate a certain number of slots for each topic. We picked the best of the best, but inevitably still had to cut some great abstracts. For certain brand-new products, we didn’t have any submissions, so we went to Oracle and asked them to cover the topic. The end goal was to ensure broad and deep coverage of the Hyperion Apps, with plenty of new content and great speakers.

Assembling the Jigsaw Puzzle

Luckily, Natalie took on the job of slotting our selections into the overall schedule and various sized presentation rooms. It’s tricky to make sure that no one is giving back-to-back presentations, that presentations are slotted for the appropriate spaces, and that presentations from the same company aren’t overlapping. Think of it as a big 3D puzzle that, in the end, results in some of the best technical Oracle content available anywhere.

Who are These People?

ODTUG is made up of people like me and you. As an organization, it brings together great content from developers, administrators, architects, and business users, and it provides a vehicle for sharing that content. I belong to ODTUG because I want to get better at what I do, and because I want to help others get better along the way.

See you in San Antonio!

– Jake Turrell

Kscope12 Content Lead – EPM Apps

Kscope 12 Presentations:Hyperion Planning Approvals and Data Validation & Running Hyperion Planning on Your Laptop

Behind the Scenes of a Webinar

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Guest Blogger: Martin D’Souza

As you may already know, ODTUG offers a wide variety of free Webinars. Paid members can download recorded copies of the Webinars via the Members Only section of odtug.com. Besides offering great training to everyone, these Webinars present the opportunity to give a presentation to a large global audience.

ODTUG is always looking for people to give Webinars to help share their knowledge with others in the community. I think a lot of people may get intimidated when they first think about giving a Webinar as they may not know what’s involved. Here are the simple steps for what it takes to do a Webinar presentation:

The Idea

The most important thing that you’ll need is a topic. Pretty simple eh? Well for some this can be very intimidating. Common questions that go through people’s minds are: Has someone else already given a talk on this? Will others find it interesting? Isn’t this just common knowledge?While you may find a given subject trivial, others may find it new and exciting. Sure, there’s a possibility that someone else in the past has given a talk on a given subject, but have they given it recently? Always take into consideration that not everyone has seen what you’ve seen.

 

Planning

Before setting up the Webinar I think it’s important to take a few minutes to plan out what you’re going to talk about. I usually start with the following template:

• Title:
• Intro:
• Point 1:
• Point 2:
• Point 3:
• Conclusion:

I fill in each section with some simple bullet point notes and sub notes. You’d be surprised how quickly this fills up. The main goal of this exercise is to ensure that you’ll have enough content to talk about. Eventually you’ll find that you actually need to remove things from this list! Regardless, these points will provide the outline for you when you’re preparing your presentation.

As an example, if I were to give a talk about this blog article my template would start as follows:

• Title: Behind the Scenes of a Webinar
• Intro:
  •  Quick intro about Webinars and ODTUG

• Point 1:
  • Come up with an idea

*It doesn’t always need to be new or cutting edge

• Point 2:
  • Plan things out a high level
  • Ensure you have enough content

• Point 3:
  • How to actually schedule a Webinar with ODTUG and present!

Scheduling & Prepwork

Now that you have an idea and sketched out an outline, it’s time to schedule your Webinar with ODTUG. E-mail Lauren Prezby at Lauren@odtug.com with your idea. Lauren will take care of the rest including marketing, scheduling, and setting up all the Webinar presentation tools. If you’re giving your first online presentation, Lauren will set up a practice presentation so you can familiarize yourself with the tools.

All that you need to do now is convert your ideas into a full presentation. Take ample time to prepare and practice your presentation. Good presentations don’t happen by accident.

The Presentation

Each person has their own style and technique to giving presentations. I don’t have too many tips on this other then to have fun and be yourself.

I hope that this article encourages you to think about giving a Webinar and sign up to do one soon! I look forward to seeing it.