Category Archives: User Groups

Swiss pgday 2018


The cool thing about zooming out… is that your world appears to get bigger.
Being personally now no longer bound to Oracle, having the opportunity to work with PostgreSQL, also gives the opportunity to go new places and explore new possibilities. One of the cooler things is: participating in Postgres conferences.

Conference vibe

Where Oracle conferences, although having some deep technical aspects, tend to lean towards the business aspects of technology, especially today with Cloud first / Cloud only… PostgreSQL conferences tend to lean towards engineering. What things are we – that same Postgres community – building in and around Postgres. What do we think about these developments and how can we improve them.
Postgres tends to have anywhere from 5 to 10 different directions in which the product is being developed. Lots of people check, test, improve, criticize and comment on all these developments.
A significant difference, somehow.
The atmosphere at PostgreSQL conferences, though is also simply super cool. New people to meet, new ways to incorporate.

Swiss pgday

I had the opportunity to join and participate in the Swiss pgday (find the program here) in the beautiful town of Rapperswil, at the university of applied science (HSR). Together with my friend and colleague, Postgres founding core team member, Mr. Bruce Momjian, I joined the event.
The Swiss Postgres community booked a nice result with a 30% higher number of participants. In two tracks, over 12 talks were delivered by local and international speakers on many aspects of Postgres, from a more business perspective on Postgres to the new things that come with Postgres 11, and can now be tested by anyone who wants to!

With all these shifting panels, with this second wave of Open Source rolling, that is now happening… More intricate systems, like relational database management systems, are now being offered and adopted.
It makes sense to zoom out as the opportunities increase so rapidly and in ways never foreseen.

I challenge and invite you all; come on board and ride this wave with us.


A week of PostgreSQL

One of the attractive things of my job is this… Just a bit more often than every now and then, you get the opportunity to get out and meet people to talk about Postgres. I don’t mean the kind of talk I do every day, which has more of a commercial touch to it. – Don’t get me wrong, that is very important too! – But I mean, really talk about PostgreSQL, be part of the community and help spread the understanding of what open source database technology can do for companies. Running implementations, either small or large, trivial or mission critical…

This past week was one of those weeks.

I got to travel through Germany together with Mr. Bruce Momjian himself. Bruce is the one of the most established and senior community leaders for Postgres. Bruce is also my colleague and I would like to think I may consider him my friend. My employer, EnterpriseDB, gives us the opportunity to do this. To be an integral part of the PostgreSQL community, contribute, help expand the fame of Postgres, no strings attached. Support the success of the 30 to 40,000 engineers creating this most advanced open source RDBMS.

The week started with travel, and I got to Frankfurt. Frankfurt will be the proving ground for the idea of a pop-up meet-up. Not an EDB-marketing event or somewhere where we sell EnterpriseDB services, but allow anyone just to discuss PostgreSQL.
We will be in a city, in a public place, answering questions, discussion things or just relax with some coffee. Purpose is to show what the PostgreSQL community is all about, to anyone interested!

The first day in Frankfurt, we spent at the 25hrs hotel. We had some very interesting discussions on:

  • Postgres vs. Oracle community
  • Changing role of DBA:
    • The demise of the Oracle DBA
    • RDBMS DBA not so much
  • Risk management
  • “Data scientist”
  • Significance of relational growing again

In the afternoon we took the Train to Munich, which was a quick and smooth experience. Munich would be the staging ground for a breakfast meeting, or a lunch… or just say hi.

Bruce and I spend the day discussing:

  • How to go from using Postgres as replacement of peripheral Oracle to Postgres as replacement for all Oracle
  • Using Postgres as polyglot data platform bringing new opportunities

After the meet-up we headed to Berlin training towards the final two events of this week.We spent Thursday teaching the EDB Postgres Bootcamp, having a lot of fun and absolutely not sticking to the program. With Bruce here, and very interesting questions from the participants, we were able to talk about the past and the future of Postgres and all the awesome stuff that is just around the corner.
Friday morning started with a brisk taxi-drive from Berlin to the Müggelsee Hotel. And, if you happen to talk to Bruce, you simply must ask him about this taxi-trip 😉

pgconf.de ended up being a superb event with a record breaking number of visitors and lost of interesting conversations. You will find loads of impressions here!

I got to meet a great number of the specialists that make up the Postgres community:
Andreas ‘Ads’ Scherbaum
Devrim Gündüz
Magnus Hagander
Emre Hasegeli
Oleksii Kliukin
Stefanie Stölting
Ilya Kosmodemiansky
Valentine Gogichashvili

I am already looking forward to the next Postgres events I get to attend… pgconf.de 2019 will in any case happen on the 10th of May in Leipzig.
It would be super cool to see you there, please submit your abstracts using the information from this page!

PGConf.EU, Postgres Rocks!!

On a rainy Tuesday morning we set off on a Polish Airlines flight to Warsaw.
Our target: PGConf.EU with some of the biggest crew EnterpriseDB ever sent off.
Our goal: spread the love of EDB within the PostgreSQL community, where EDB is such an intrinsic part of.

The evening before the conference promises to be an interesting one. We have rented off the Hard rock Cafe in Downtown Warsaw for the kickoff of our European Tour. During this tour we will visit Hard rock Cafes throughout Europe to talk about the future of Postgres.
With 80 people present, our space at the Cafe was a full house! With food and drinks it was a perfect place for networking and sharing stories about Postgres. After the drinks, Warsaw city tour-guides took us on a walking sightseeing tour through the city. This inevitably led us to Vodka and Herring, which formed the crown on the day.

For me personally it was the perfect opportunity to submerge myself in the Postgres community, feel the energy and meet some of the leading names like Bruce Momjian, Dave Page, Robert Haas, Andreas Scherbaum, (“Blame”) Magnus Hagander and many, many more.

Second day in Warsaw, first day of PGConf.EU. The EDB crew slept well and is ready to roll!
At the EDB stand we are hosting a quiz where participants can contest to actually win an electric guitar and free access to one year of on-line Postgres training. The challenge: by means of speed and correctness answer 11 questions on PostgreSQL!
In a busy and energetic there are loads of very good sessions going down, making hard to single out the sessions to follow…

The second day of PGConf.EU continues the flow of excellent talks and fierce competition at our Postgres Rocks Quiz. EDB Postgres Experts are sharing their knowledge abundantly at this conference.
Day two also is my presenting debut at a Postgres-conference. Together with friend and partner in crime Daniel Westermann of DBI-services. Our talk was well received and we were able to share some of our experiences of entering the PostgreSQL world, coming from Oracle.
EDB concluded the second day of PGConf.EU with a team-dinner in the heart of Warsaw. A unique opportunity to bring all the facets of EnterpriseDB togehter. This ranges from our community foundation to our strategic business vision, all together in one place to exchange ideas and enjoy good company over a very good meal.

As with all good things, we inevitably reach the closing day, no difference there for PGConf.EU!
More excellent talks on general Postgres development and the influence of various projects on the future of the leading Open Source database project.

We also had a very exciting final to our EDB Postgres Quiz, with a surprise victory for Rafal Hawrylak of TomTom and an excellent runner up Matthijs v/d Vleuten of Hendrikx ITC.

 

On behalf of the entire EnterpriseDB, I would like to thank the PostgreSQL conference board for an excellent experience in Warsaw!

Live free or die!!


If you like to relive pgconfeu, simply review the comprehensive tweet-timeline.

Open Source? We have been here before… right!

Since over half a year I have made an adjustment in my course… nothing too dramatic, but still it has had some impact.

I have chosen the path of the more pure technique again. Not in a sense that I don’t manage anymore, though I don’t, but that’s more of a side effect
I have chosen the path of the more pure technique in a sense that the change from Closed Source software to Open Source software allows you to actually work with and solve things by creating solutions rather than trying to figure out how something, someone created for some issue, can reconfigured so it resembles a solution for your actual problem.

Okay… okay… this of course is exaggerated, but it serves to help think about the issue.

No one ever got fired for buying Oracle” is one of the phrases I have heard numerous times over the past period.
Well, no… but it’s also no free pass to –sorry for the phrase– waste money on technology you either never going to use.

Over 80% of the installed base uses less than
20% of the technology they are paying for!

I have followed a number of the brightest mind in the industry (our industry, the database industry) for many years investing vast amounts of time in reverse-engineering pieces of technology that have been built, in order to explain certain behavior.
Of course, very necessary, no argument there, but wouldn’t it be so much more cool if this overwhelming amount of brain-power could be used to actually create stuff??

Open Source in stead of Closed Source…
The answer, I think!

Sure, I am raised with vendor created solutions, that was the default MO when I got trained. VMS, MS-DOS, HP-UX… (are you _that_ old, yes, I am _that_ old) and a number of applications that did the work.
Well, those days are gone… operating systems in data centers have (nearly) all been replaced by Linux distribution installs. And I mean like, as good as all of them.

Sufficiently stable, cost effective and they get the job done.

Next wave?
Databases!

With the current explosive growth of Open Source databases, brace yourselves. Or rather, embrace!

All the exact same arguments that are there for Operating Systems apply. There is no difference, and you, the industry, chose! And you will choose this again. Simply because “it is good enough”, it is much more cost effective and it gets the job done.
The extensibility, the agility of Open Source database software gives you the ability to let your database, be it OLTP, OLAP, Big Data, Polyglot, or whatever we come up with, do what needs to be done.
The current leader of the Open Source relational database systems is PostgreSQL. A platform developed in over 30 years to become an absolutely stable data processing engine for a fraction of the costs of the Closed Source players in this market.

Conclusion:

  1. We have seen wave 1 of Open Source where we all choose to replace the operating system standard with Linux.
  2. We will now see wave 2 of Open Source where we will choose to replace the database management system standard with… PostgreSQL (or in specific cases one of the other, more specialized systems, depending on the need).
Hope this helps!

Birth of a user group conference…

Or, how post-conference blues hit.

Seeding

You don’t actually get to witness these kinds of things to often. Yes, there was the birth of POUG conference, the passionate work of Kamil Stawiarski and the people he gathered around him. He did an awesome job and pulled it off.
Why then is this so special? Well, first of all because it is my native conference. People that have contributed for many years, working closely together with new members to create something new. I think it is kinda special.
Richard Olrichs, Ise Douwes, Luc Bors and Bart van de Laar formed the team that pulled it of! Kudos to them.

Work started already end of 2016… on the notion that this conference was being organized, there was a small Twitter bombardment to recruit as many of the interesting international speakers to come and join us. This helped create a fabulous agenda, covering 81 (!!) sessions and 3 keynotes over 2 days in the spectacular setting of “De Rijtuigenloods” in Amersfoort.

Importance for NL

We have (finally) done it! The Netherlands have experienced their very first Full Stack Oracle Conference ever! I have said this many times before, and I will say this probably many times again, this is so very important for the spread of knowledge, the exchange of experiences and cross-pollination between countries!
We have never done this before… We have APEX World, which is, of course, super important! And we have SIGs, which are very important for people working within a specialization. All good, all very important! But our business is way to specialized already. If you never take the time to look over your boundaries to what your colleague is doing (for which you don’t have time on a day-to-day basis) you’ll get isolated and miss out on possible great idea’s, changes and inspiration. For this alone, events like these are so important. For a country / region (as we span Benelux) that is so active in IT, it is a nuisance to have to go to either the UK or to Germany to experience a conference like this.

It is _that_ important…

One personal thing… nl.OUG (this is the brand new name for OGh, which also symbolizes a new start to me) focus on talks on (end-) user experience, in effect, partners with end-users coming to share project briefs… Good in itself, but not what I would applaud as main focus. These conferences – to me – are about learning and the best learning comes from professionals sharing either best practices or telling about technical implementations of technique. These stories are obviously always very welcome, but are no main focus…

My personal experiences

— International scene

As an active member of the Oracle community, I tend to know a number of people, spread out over this globe. One of the joys of a general conference is the fact that many of these people also participate. This leads to many happy encounters. With Oren Nakdimon from Israel, to Sandra Flores from Mexico, with Tim Hall, aka. Oracle Base, Maria Colgan & Brendan Tierney and therefor with Chris Saxon, more than 2rds of the Ask TOM-team!! And even many more famous speakers from home and abroad. It was a very special feeling to meet all these beautiful people on my home turf!

— Followed sessions

I didn’t get to follow many sessions, partly because of the many people I met and wanted to catch up with and partly because of, well, other responsibilities…
And perhaps a bit because of the fact that the ratio between serial sessions and parallel sessions was a bit off.
I did get to see:
The keynote by Maria Colgan highlighting the many things you can do with an Oracle database
Investigating the performance of a statement via the SQL Monitor report by Toon Koppelaars, which is always insightful!
Moving Oracle data in real-time – The 3 fundamental principles of Oracle replication by Jakub Sjeba from Dbvisit, which proved to be an excellent basis for my own session, later that day
Blockchain on the Oracle Cloud, the next big thing by Robert van Mölken, who helped me understand the technical side of the Blockchain technology.
It’s a wrap by Lucas Jellema, who did a great job at really zooming out and looking at the bigger picture.

— My sessions

I had the lucky opportunity to present even 2 sessions in Amersfoort.
Migrating your Oracle database with almost zero downtime
and
Comparing PostgreSQL to Oracle

Both sessions were well attended and interactive. I enjoyed it very much and, judging from the reactions and interactions, I guess the attendees too. Thank you for attending!!
Obviously I am happy to see the uptake of PostgreSQL and EDB Postgres in the Benelux. As said with “horses for courses”, Oracle has it’s playing-field, but so does PostgreSQL, and probably bigger than it is today 🙂

And now, the future…

This was 2017, this was the kick-off, the very first one.
With the buzz and with the post-conference blues…

It now is time to look to 2018, start preparing. Gathering lessons learned, inventorise feedback and make plans.
Whatever the outcome, there can only be 1 plan! “nl.OUGTech18″ or “Tech Experience 2018” we need to make sure the messages reaches further and wider.
With over 250 attendees for a first event, we aim for over 500 for the next event. There are more than enough potential participants in our region to pull this of.
The basic structure is there, the first succes is there, let’s do this!!

See you all next year!!
(or hopefully sooner)

Riga Dev Days 2017, new experiences in many ways.

Riga Dev Days 2017

General

It has been a while since my last blog-post.
One of the reasons is my shift from closed to open source software, databases more specifically. More on that in a later blog-post.

The reason for already mentioning this is this strange hybrid (what a popular word, these days) situation that I am in at the moment.
Thanks to the super enthusiastic, flexible and tenacious organization-team of the Riga Dev Days, I was able to participate.
Happily boarded the Air Baltic flight, I went on my way to Riga!!

Being new at the broader conference scene, I enjoyed being at a mixed source developer conference. Besides the usual suspects – some of which are my best friends – I got to meet many interesting new people.
One of the key phrases of the day is: “the more you learn, the more you realize you know nothing – John Snow…” and it’s true! You never stand to think about it, but the wealth of subjects is just tremendous and the combined knowledge at events like these is down right “Yuge, it’s awesome, tremendous!”

Day one

With a day like this, time flies. Between session (and during sessions) there are discussions, a bit of work and catching up to do.
Still I managed to catch a few sessions, like the one from Michael Hüttermann who made a clear and well rounded case regarding CI/CD in a DevOps world. A nice insight into the effort that goes into what’s behind the proverbial “push of a button”.
Another example was that by Marcos Placona about the many (and very basic) things that you have to keep in mind wen building apps. There is no silver bullet and the best you can achieve is to discourage the hacker so much, they move on. Much like securing your house, do to speak.

The day ended in the medieval basements of Riga, where we had some really good medieval food. Life is good…, well…, it has it’s moments!

Day two

The keynote address by Edson Yanaga, which kicked off day two of the Riga Dev Days, was quite interesting.
Shortening development and deployment cycles and shrinking feature release sets actually helps improving software and deployment quality by creating faster and more accurate feedback loops. By looking at these concept in this way, buzzez like DevOps and Agile actually get some hands and feet. One of the lessons, though, is that doing things this way do not eliminate work or automagically solve various issues for you! It will help in getting predictability and continuity into your software development processes.
A nice eye-opening remark finally, was… “no, I don’t pay you to make something work on your computer, I pay you to make something work on my computer(s)!!”

Another talk I was able to attend was around Blockchains. Something I knew nothing of and was actually quite interested in. Nick Zeeb took us through a very lively and very animated tour of what actually a Blockchain is and what the awesome potential of this technology can be. I was impressed.

With this, the second day draw to and end and therewith also my turn “in the pit”. As this event is held in a movie-theater, every room had a sloped tribune, which was often packed with enthusiastic participants. I had the opportunity to share my thoughts on the comparison between PostgreSQL and Oracle.
The session was very well attended with a lot of questions regarding the possibilities of using these other technologies in scales that were not really considered before. You can find a recording of the actual presentation here as soon as it comes available.

Riga Dev Days was a good conference. I would recommend everyone to either attend or submit an abstract for their event in 2018!!

#Oracle cutting in inspiration and new business?

Over the many years Oracle has been leading the database world, I guess they are now taking something of a wrong turn.
Let me briefly fill you in on my thoughts.

Basically I see two “minor” shifts that are significantly indicative of this:

  1. Oracle Standard Edition 2
  2. Oracle ACE Program

Okay, so you might think I am crazy, but let me try to explain.

Oracle Standard Edition 2

Sometime last year, the long expected, anticipated…, dreaded perhaps even, change to the Oracle database licensing strategy was there.

Oracle Standard Edition (SE) and Oracle Standard Edition One (SE1) licenses were addressed.
There was A LOT of debate on this, I mean, A LOT. Discussions which ran all the way back to HQ, and were driven by passionate people inside and outside of Oracle, inside and outside of the Oracle community… To no avail.

It had been very clear for quite a long time that the SE / SE1 strategy was nothing short of unsustainable inside the Oracle licensing realm. Even though, Oracle SE and SE1 enabled many projects and customers to adopt the phenomenal Oracle technology for their projects. It has some limitations, but with smart thinking and smart planning, a lot of projects could be run with Oracle SE(1). “I am such a good DBA, I can even do it with Oracle Standard Edition!”
Alas, we now have Oracle Standard Edition 2 (SE2) with a new and upgraded price of US 17k (!!) making this solution rather out of the question for many of the projects meant in the above. Please note that SE1 already was a significant investment for some of the projects I have learned to know over the years in regions as the Baltics and Africa.
Yes, of course, I know you can do all of this “In the cloud”. But with the limitation that there are hardly any CSPs (Cloud Service Providers 😉 that enable you to make use of the “cheaper” Oracle license. If you want to leverage your local cloud vendor (mind my word-choice here) it’s BYOL (Bring Your Own License) and, voila, you’re done in for anyway.

Hence, the first significant “shift” in Oracle’s span of attention for new business, creativity and growth…

Oracle ACE Program

More recently there was also a change in the Oracle ACE Program. Which has also led to much debate. But… that bit of the change I am not referring too, I am referring to the bit that does not affect me directly…

Oracle has a small number of very highly appreciated and “industry leading” community advocates called “Oracle ACE Directors”. These people not only have a deep knowledge of everything that is happening in this corner “of the industry”, but are also very passionate about sharing this knowledge. Sharing with Oracle Users, sharing with stakeholders within the Oracle organization, basically, with everyone with a hunger for knowledge around the technology.

For this, these Directors had a few privileges. When the invested their time and their energy in traveling this globe to share, Oracle would support them in some of their travel expenses. This always had the air of “wow, they are paid”. Believe me, it was bare minimal support, just a flying ticket and a hotel-bed to a previously approved conference, when they actually were accepted to do a talk. Nothing shiny, nothing business-classy…

Until now. With the changes to the system, also these modest privileges for the Directors have seized to be.

There was my second significant “shift” in Oracle’s span of attention for new business, creativity and growth…

It has me worried… I should not worry, as it does not affect my day-to-day business… yet.

Albeit we have this cool tech, with PL/SQL, with APEX, with all the features, options and what not, to create solutions that could really better the word (I also firmly believe this).

Oracle is just closing this door, and my toes were still in the doorway, so that hurts.

This was my rant, hope it helps.

#DOAG2016, definitely a crazy week.

#DOAG2016, the largest Oracle Community gathering in Europe. Taking place in Nuremberg, at the Nuremberg Convention Center NCC, one of the more impressive places to hold such a conference, towering 4 stories high, with a big central atrium!!
It is a huge effort to get all of this together!

In this blog-post I want to highlight some of the crazy things I experienced this week… And… I did try to follow my own schedule, but I wasn’t overly successful.

Young talent

One of the things that was somehow quite clear this week, is that we have a lot of young talent out there, eager to learn and share experiences. It is not just the #NextGen “movement” of DOAG, of which Carolin Hagemann made me aware, but just young people on the conference itself.

Discussing “Young PL/SQL” at the unconference session made us all aware that our part of the IT trade is no very sexy and popular with the youngsters. This all despite what was mentioned above. In universities we train SQL, but we don’t train to create real-life business applications, leveraging the power of the one language that keeps SQL close to the data it feasts on, PL/SQL. But, more on that below (Thick Database Paradigm).
To promote PL/SQL, basically two ground requirements were defined:

  1. Create a free ‘PDB as a Service’ for schools;
  2. Inspire teachers to talk about data centric computing

By finding somebody to be regionally or globally owner of this quest, it should be possible to get young professionals as familiar using PL/SQL for creating performant and business-ready applications as they were familiar using Microsoft Excel to do their accounting “back in the days”

ACE program

“There is a disturbance in the force!”

For everybody not acquainted with the Oracle ACE Program by the Oracle Technology Network… You should be!! Please read up, as it is an incredible cool initiative.

The disturbance, you ask?
Well, to retain your “status”, Oracle expects you to do “stuff” and this “stuff” is then evaluated on a yearly basis. Basically the initiative, the disturbance, is to get some transparency in “the stuff”. And, as always, everybody wants change, but few actually are good at “change”. There are rimples and things that change, but in the end; everything will be fine, unless, obviously, when it will not be fine.

Talks

I was honored to (co)host to talks at #DOAG2016:

Bad Boys of Replication – Changing everything…
With Oracle ACED and good friend Björn Rost, about an intense migration project we did some time ago. We were even offered to host our talk in Tokio, the biggest hall at DOAG!

Saving lives at sea at an industrial scale using Oracle Cloud Technology
An insightful (at least I like to think so) talk with my colleague Oliver Limberg. The talk is about the rapid development of a global portal for the maritime logistics branch.

I had a blast, and I hope you did too!

Community spirit

Oracle User Group conferences are about sharing and are about fun. Mr. Martin Widlake wrote a good post about that.

Apart from all the “more formal” things that happened, there were quite a few extracurricular activities, mostly involving an Irish Pub or a restaurant.

This all may sound quite funny and exciting, and, yes, it is alto talk with your co-workers: “Oh, hey, you are going to have fun and party all week!” Of course it is not a drag and a bore, but it has very profound function!
Whenever you run into trouble, these are the exact same people that are not only able, but probably also inclined to help you out, as you would help them out, as friends do among each other. In the end, they, you, your boss and your clients benefit. This is not to be underestimated too much.

The extra, special bit, that DOAG offers are the so called “unconference sessions”.
Not scheduled, no slides, nothing official, just getting together and discussing subjects of interest. Our “Young PL/SQL” was one of these “unconference session”, which turned out to be a great (and valuable) success!

Meeting people

Just to name a few, heroes of long and of yet to come for #DOAG2016:

Dietmar Neugebauer
Frank Dernoncourt
Joel Kallman
Johannes Ahrends
Kamil Stawiarski
Laurent Leturgez
Maja Veselica
Marcel Hofstetter
Piet de Visser
Sabine Heimsath
Stefan Kinnen
Stew Ashton
Uwe Hesse
Zoran Pavlovic
And alle the ones I forget to mention here!!

Thick Database Paradigm

Noting new in IT…

Well, no.

The Thick Database Paradigm (opposed to the “No PL/SQL Paradigm”) is nothing new. We have actually all been doing this since the eighties. Program your business rules, your constraints, everything that makes sure that your data is all that you want it to be, close to that data.
There are so many reasons that speak in favor of this approach that it is nearly overwhelming and deserves at least a book in itself. But, let me make a small attempt to highlighting a few here:

  • spare yourself network bandwidth, by not sending data all over your network to be processed
  • safeguard your data inside the (Oracle) database, so it can be protected by all that has been invented to do so
  • Transact data where it lives and combine and aggregate it there, you will be amazed by the efficiency
  • Remind yourself why you used to think “business logic in middle teer” was a good idea

If you leave possibile religious believes aside, there is no other conclusion possible then that the reinvention of “Thick Database” is the (re)discovery of 2016, right from the time when IT still made sense.

Yes, there are cases where an “Enterprise Service Bus” makes sense, but, as with every technology withing IT, it has a very specific area where it actually adds value or even makes sense. At best, a lot less than all the places where it is used currently!
Not to get carried away in this joyful blog-post, I will leave this topic at this.

The end

I hope to see you at the next Oracle User Group conference, somewhere… Please watch for the asterisk at his page for the conferences that I will attend.

OTN Appreciation Day: PL/SQL

We are posting these blog posts today as part of the OTN Appreciation Day, a celebration for the Oracle Technology Network as suggested by Tim Hall, inspired by Debra Lilley.

The mission was not too hard: write about your favorite bit of Oracle Technology.

As a developer and a core-tech DBA and APEX enthusiast… the choice was easy! PL/SQL (apart from how it is pronounced or even written ;-)!

Why? Easy!

Not just because PL/SQL is easy to learn, for a language that is basically so extremely powerfull! But foremost because it is an easy choice.
If you have a database like the Oracle database and you have your valuable data living inside that database, you want to maximize the potential value of that data. Use and manipulate it quickly, keep it safe, make it available in a sensible way. For that you use PL/SQL.
You create a safe haven for the data, making sure it can only be manipulated in a safe and pre-defined way by exposing data retrieval and manipulation through PL/SQL packages and business logic, creating an API-interface, controlling the access to one of your most valuable assets.

One of the master showmanship features of PL/SQL is Oracle Application Express! Based entirely on PL/SQL, showing how powerful it is to incorporate modern web-technology on top of data-centric, data-driven application development.
With this technology, I see very little need to create utterly complex multi layered (mind you, I explicitly did not say multi tiered!) software stack approach, to create agile and modern applications. Add Edition Based Redifinition, and you have the perfect CI/CD* Agile Rapid Web Application Development environment everybody dreams of! Please, for once accept this simple truth 😉

So, my choice for this celebration: Please embrace PL/SQL and make your world a better place.

Long live the Oracle Technology Network!! Hurray!!

* Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery

#OOW16, San Francisco, looking back

In this post I just wanted to highlight a few things that have lingered with me since the 2016 Oracle Open World Experience.

Persistent DRAM
Now, here, being at home, I must admit that I cannot find very much documentation about this, but it got me thinking… A little paradigm-shift, where computers actually wouldn’t need moving parts anymore (ie. disks of any kind). Create devices that use these memory structures, quite possibly combined with flash-disks, to run entirely on RAM. The 3D XPoint Technology could be a nice example of this. I think I would applaud such machines.
I know, not a real export point I am making here, but if anyone has a better angle, I would love to read your comments.

Thick Database
This is a much better documented topic, much more tangible too.
Toon Koppelaars started this “new” approach with his talk at OTW16. You can review his presentation here and see the video’s of the presentation here and here.
I guess some really good points there. The creation of an application is a craft. You need to get the right materials and do a number of steps to get a solid foundation. Meaning you have to create a solid data-model (yes, even in the world of BigData, schema on write, etc.) most applications still rely on a data model and all that we were taught to go with that. Not much sense in repeating what’s in the presentation here though.
An eye opener and something to (re)consider!! I plan to talk about this a bit more later.

EBR & Oren
One of the best sessions I visited during OOW16 was the presentation by Oren Nakdimon accompanied by the illustrious Bryn Llewellyn.
The presentation discussed a true implementation of CI/CD using some of the capabilities of the Thick database paradigm as discussed above, combined with the possibilites that Edition Based Redefinition brings.
Using these technologies, Oren has been able to implement a rolling upgrade scenario for Moovit. I find this impressive.

Philippe Fierens & SPARC
I had the honor and pleasure of working closely together with my good friend Philippe Fierens during this edition of OOW. It always adds a dimension if you are able to tackle some of the challenges of the week as a team! Thank you Philippe.
Though Philippe I am also affiliated to the continuing efforts to build and maintain the Oracle SPARC architecture of which he is a strong advocate. Be sure to follow his blog to learn about the latest developments in this area.

Panel discussions on the last day
Saving the best for last… Literally!
On the last days there we some panel discussion regarding SQL / PLSQL and application architecture. I found these discussions to be quite meaningful and the interaction with the attendees was grand. Having people like Chris Saxon, Connor McDonald, Toon Koppelaars and Carry Millsap on a panel, there is no way you can go wrong!

OTN & a bow
Finally, looking back at this OOW, it was actually the first one I visited as a member of the OTN Oracle ACE community.
Boy, does that make a difference in how you experience Oracle Open World!!
Of course, you can chill and relax at the OTN Lounge, learn a lot of different things, spot Oracle Hero’s as the wander by if you are a “regular” visitor to OOW. And, by all means, I recommend you do as it is extremely valuable.
But the difference this time was that I really belonged there.
A very big thank you to Jennifer for the hard work you put into making all of this possible!
And, please, support Girls who Code, the initiative OTN sponsorred this year by tweeting a selfie with the hashtag #girlswhocode and the appropriate sticker!!