It took ~22 hours for me to get to Cathedral Hotel on OOW’s Route 2 from my home, everything is cool until now. OOW 2008 is well organized and the city is like Oracle’s home, Oracle is everywhere here and below are the highlights from my first day at OOW 2008.
Sess.1 – Getting started with Oracle Fusion Middleware by George Trujillo
During this presentation I sensed George was trying to underline the next big thing, the change we will soon face as the database developers and DBAs. Call Forms and Reports developers Developer 1.0, then Fusion Middleware developers are the Developer 2.0 era, here key components are XML, SOA, BPEL, Web Services and J2EE. XML is like English, it is the common language all applications must speak in order to integrate with each other in this architecture. Oracle’s Weblogic purchase was an important step, within Oracle Weblogic Application Server SOA Suite, Identity Management, Business Intelligence and User Interface, Portal, ADF, JSF will be the four major areas of interest. All managed with a single point of view, by Grid Control, similar to the RAC environment at the data tier.
To my experience these technologies’ experts all stand very far from the database so if Fusion Middleware and these guys are the future I suspect there will be big threats on building successful database applications, but of course on the other hand for experts who can additionally manage to learn these technologies there will be important opportunities to fix these problems.
Sess.2 – Extending Oracle Application Express Framework with Web 2.0
This was a hands on lab based on OTN OBE’s for Javascript and Ajax usage within Apex 3.1.
Sess.3 – All About Encryption by Tom Kyte
This was another very typical Kyte presentation, with demos on performance and storage effects of the encryption options. Presentation’s focus was three features inside the database;
a. DBMS_CRYPTO: no additional cost, labor intensive, not transparent, not performant when compared to the other two options.
b. Column Level Encryption: Advanced Security Option needed, semi transparent, can not use index with LIKE ‘ABC%’ type of queries, storage cost is higher after encryption, much more performant compared to DBMS_CRYPTO.
b. Tablespace Level Encryption: Advanced Security Option needed, completely transparent, performant on both read and writes and also disk usage doesn’t increase.
With DBMS_OBFUSCATION_TOOLKIT instead of using VARCHAR APIS it is better to convert to RAW first and always return BINARY formatted data. After 11g Data Pump can export encrypted and preserve the protection, leave old EXP it will be depreciated soon, but IMP will stay. Undo, Redo produced and Data cached all are encrypted also, but a last minute question was related to Temp(Sort) data and Kyte promised to blog on this topic. Becareful about the legacy information, old backups for example, encrypting today will not protect the data sitting there.
Sess.4 – Doing SQL from PL/SQL: Best and Worst Practices by Bryn Llewellyn
There is a new OTN paper on this session, Bryn mentioned some very interesting PL/SQL Best Practices during this session. This was my best session for the day.
Sess.5 – 11g New Features Exam Cram
I planned to attend Kyte’s Efficient Schema Design session but changed my mind to move to the Exam Cram, within 8 hours all 5 days 11gR1 NF education topics were discussed, it was cool to attend the last 2,5 hours, but I couldn’t have the booklet prepared for the cram, hope to get one tomorrow.
I had the chance to chat with three Oracle bloggers until now; Tim Hall at the plane, Carl Backstrom and Steven Feuerstein during the sessions today, but now it is time for the bloggers meetup of OOW 2008 but everything is turning around my head tonight after the first 1,5 days, I hope I can make it. :)
ps: I tried to twit my sessions as they happened today and will try to continue this until Thursday, so if you want to follow here is the link; http://twitter.com/TongucY
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