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On November 5-6, ECO will hold its annual conference and I am honored that the group has asked me to be a keynote speaker. Below you will find details about the conferenc.


November 5 & 6, 2013Sheraton Imperial Hotel & Convention CenterRaleigh/Durham, NC 
Mark your calendars to join keynote speakers Steven Feuerstein and Elke Phelps at the premier conference for Oracle users on the east coast. 
 to join 250 other Oracle functional and application users at the most economical Oracle training event on the east coast - the East Coast Oracle Users Conference (ECO) - Tuesday, November 5 and Wednesday, November 6, at the Sheraton Imperial Hotel in Raleigh/Durham, NC. 

Keynote Presentations
Coding Therapy for Software Developers aka How Does This Code Make You Feel? Steven Feuerstein, Oracle PL/SQL ExpertÌýÌý
Steven Feuerstein is considered to be one of the world's leading experts on the Oracle PL/SQL language, having written ten books on PL/SQL, including Oracle PL/SQL ProgrammingÌý²¹²Ô»åÌýOracle PL/SQL Best Practices (all published by O'Reilly Media). ÌýÌý
Oracle E-Business Suite Technology: Latest Features and Roadmap
Elke Phelps, Oracle CorporationÌýÌý
Elke Phelps is a Senior Principal Product Manager in the Oracle E-Business Suite Applications Technology Group. She joined Oracle in 2011 after having been an Oracle customer and Oracle Technologist since 1993. Her primary areas of expertise include Oracle Database and E-Business Suite deployments and upgrades, platform migrations, and infrastructure design.
Pre-conference Workshops
Monday, November 4
2:00 pm - 5:00 pm
Pre-registration required Dynamic Action Instant Immersion
Dan McGhan, Enkitec
JavaScript is the programming language that brings web applications to life. But for most Oracle developers using Application Express (APEX) to build web-based front ends for their databases, learning JavaScript can be quite an undertaking. Enter Dynamic Actions, a feature of APEX that provides a declarative interface over JavaScript. This hands-on mini-class is designed to give students a jump start when beginning with the Dynamic Action framework. Attendees will bring their own laptops and be provided access to an APEX workspace with an application just begging for some Dynamic Action enhancements. Attendees will start with the very basics and quickly move on to solving more complex tasks based on real business requirements. Along the way, related concepts, such as jQuery selectors and event propagation will be explained to provide a background for understanding the various options within the framework. 
Developing Faster Performance Solutions: Make Oracle Work for You!
Craig Shallahamer, OraPub, Inc.
Oracle DBAs find it difficult to get complete and correct information about how the database engine works. Even when bits of truth are collected, consolidating the data into a useful performance optimizing solution is complicated. When a diagnosis is incomplete or the DBA doesn't understand why a solution improves performance, solution creation becomes a guessing game resulting in haphazard performance improvement. In this seminar you will learn how selected areas of Oracle work together. Care is given as to why performance solutions work and how to make them usable and practical in a complex and highly available production environment.

I received this plea yesterday from a developer who works for a health insurance company:

I am attempting to leverage APEX in my organization. Specifically, I am developing a white paper and would like to include your thoughts of APEX in it. Here's what others are saying in my company regarding APEX:

"It's an application add-on. Oracle's quick and dirty web application builder / report writing tool. It's for teams with limited development skills. It's totally web driven and installs as a free add-on to the database. As far as I know only one system uses it and that's Rick's team. Could be the way the team developed their app but it is a pain to tune. I  would say the time you save developing is used to performance tune it afterwards."

I know what I would like to say however I think that a person with your name recognition could provide more leverage. If you are so inclined please provide me your impressions of APEX.

Rick, I am happy to share my views on APEX with you. My views are formed through my own application development experience (check out the , an APEX application); my communication with the APEX dev team (a very accessible and smart group of developers); and my contact with countless APEX developers at conferences and trainings.

There is no doubt in my mind that the attitude towards APEX expressed in the quote above is based on "old data." There was a time when APEX was mostly a curiosity, used by Oracle consulting on web-based app development projects, and leveraged mostly for small, departmental apps.

Such caution made sense in the Oracle community; Oracle has a reputation for building so-so development tools and not always sticking by them (with several notable exceptions, such as SQL*Forms 3.0, to completely date myself!). But those days are past.

There should be no doubt in anyone's mind  (anyone who pays close attention to Oracle, in any case) that APEX is a key component of Oracle's future plans for web-based application development, cloud and otherwise. It is used to power the Oracle Cloud and the Oracle Store. Thousands of companies are building robust intranet- and internet-delivered applications. There is every reason to believe that Oracle is firmly committed to this technology and will ensure that it continues to mature.

I love the "for teams with limited development skills." As opposed to, say, for teams with "unlimited" development skills. I can only imagine that this person believes that knowledge of PL/SQL and SQL is "limiting", while knowledge of Java is tremendously liberating and "limitless."

No doubt about it, APEX allows groups to leverage existing, deep (and always limited) skills and experience in SQL and PL/SQL. There is also little doubt that if you want to build really cool, Web 2.0, mobile, etc. apps with APEX, you will need to complement that knowledge with the ability to code in HTML, CSS, Javascript, Jquery, XML, etc.

Which is to say: APEX is open. Leverage existing relational skills and utilize the latest web technologies inside APEX. It accepts all comers and keeps on giving and giving and giving - in productivity, robustness, performance and security.

Oh, right, performance: I must admit it's a bit difficult to make sense of "Could be the way the team developed their app but it is a pain to tune. I  would say the time you save developing is used to performance tune it afterwards."

I really don't see how an APEX app could be harder to tune than a Java-based app with a much looser connection to the Oracle Database. Certainly, an APEX developer can create a mess of their app, with poorly written SQL statements plastered all over the app. But that is not the fault of APEX. The bottom line with APEX is that you will or should be encouraged to move as much of your database logic (especially SQL) into a packaged API and views. If you do this, I am certain that it will be easier to tune and maintain an APEX app than just about anything else built to run against an Oracle Database.

Is APEX perfect? Far from it. Like any other tool that grows "organically" out of a consulting engagement, it has its architectural strengths and weaknesses. If you come from a background of building Ruby on Rails apps or PHP or any number of other super cool languages, you may find yourself frustrated with APEX, but Oracle has never positioned APEX as a competitor to all such development tools (heck, they even offer support for Java-based development with JDeveloper and ADF). 

Bottom line: if you are an Oracle shop with experience in PL/SQL and SQL, and you want to quickly build and deploy Oracle-based web applications, APEX offers a fantastic way to achieve success at a lower cost and greater user satisfaction than with many other technologies.

Ah, beautiful brain:
Where have you been all my life?
And where are you going?

I don't know what I would do without LinkedIn.

Before this amazing website came along, I was pretty sure that my software skills could be described as:

1. Oracle PL/SQL: excellent
2. SQL: just OK
3. Database Design: well, sort of
4. HTML: dangerous
5. XML: really dangerous
6. Java: pitiful
7. Everything else: nothing going on

See, I am probably the most narrowly specialized high-tech "expert". I know PL/SQL and that's really about it.

At least, that's what I thought I knew. According to my endorsements on LinkedIn, however, well....I will let them speak for themselves:

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Now all LinkedIn has to provide is a tool that takes these endorsements and constructs an iResume.

My good friend, Marcelle Kratochvil, is the Oracle ACE Director for (as she put it to me) "all data/any data." She's been working with Oracle since V4 and specializes in Oracle Multimedia. She has been a beta tester for this product since Oracle8i and runs a SIG on multimedia and unstructured data. Check out her blog at:
Marcelle is a great speaker and able to communicate clearly how to work with complex data in Oracle. I first met and worked with Marcelle when she flew up from Australia to speak at my first Oracle PL/SQL Programming conference in November 2005). And now she's written her first book! has just been released by PackT and covers everything a person will need to know to get them working in multimedia. And Marcelle should know; as CTO of Piction, she works with customers all around the world including major museums and universities. She performs database administration on multi-terabyte Unix and Windows environments as well as doing serious development work with PL/SQL. She has designed and built a multimedia search engine, e-commerce system, security system, reporting engine, shipping system and her own XML parser and language specifically to handle the workflow needs of managing multimedia.
The book, according to Marcelle, provides an introduction to multimedia, how to search on it, how to manage it and how integrate it into your current environment. With lots of PL/SQL examples and schema setup scripts, Marcelle promises that this book will get you loading and using unstructured data in no time at all.
Best of all (to me), Marcelle is a strong advocate of PL/SQL and recommends it for anyone to use for building web based applications and for working with multimedia. My kind of Oracle technologist. J
To encourage us to check out her book, Marcelle is offering a chance to win a copy. All you have to do is choose from the most relevant section below, and send your answer to the question to Marcelle at [email protected]. Marcelle tells me that "The best, most creative and accurate answer will win a copy of the book." You must submit your answer by 31 May, 2013.
1. Open Category (open to everyone): Name three key advantages for storing multimedia in a database.

2. Museum/Gallery/Print Media (open to anyone in these industries): What is the biggest issue you face when digitizing and managing any multimedia in your organization?

3. Oracle (open to any Oracle employee):  Name five Oracle products that are tightly integrated with Securefiles and Oracle Multimedia.

 4. Oracle ACE Program (open to any Oracle ACE or ACE Director):  Which Oracle development tool or product is best designed for working with unstructured data (including multimedia)?

Back in mid-March, I :

A week ago, I played a game of Scabble with Veva and scored 32 points by placing the word "SEEN" on the board. Now, every letter in "SEEN" is worth 1 point, making it very difficult to get to 32 points. But I attached "SEEN" to a word on the board (of course!) and I got my 32 points by using a total of 8 letters, two of which were worth 3 points and the other 6 were worth 1 point each.

[Note: I must note a correction. I actually wrote earlier that I had scored 36 points, but I now realize that was an exaggeration, an honest mistake. Honest! It was only 32 points. I would be mortally embarrassed, but please know that when my wife and I play Scrabble, we don't keep score.]

I thought I'd see if anyone could figure out how to do it. It clearly wasn't a very compelling challenge, since no one answered. OK, so now I will reveal the secret!


On my previous turn, I had put down a seven letter word as follows:

That was a whole lot of points, right there, of course. But you expect that with a seven letter word.

On my next turn, however, I put down "SEEN" and now I expect you can figure out how I did it....

Haven't shaved for two weeks. Decided to give my skin a break, and I also wondered: what do I really look like? Shaving my head is, I have come to accept, the "main vain" thing I do in my life (well, that and painting flamboyan flowers on my toenails).

How much gray and white is there? Answer: Lots.

How much is left on top? Answer: Not very much.

Back in April 2010, I started up the PL/SQL Challenge () to provide quizzes on PL/SQL, SQL, logic and Oracle Application Express.

Hundreds of people take these quizzes each day. Since that time, over 670,000 answers have been submitted by thousands of Oracle technologists.

But you can't please everyone. I received this outraged message yesterday regarding the PL/SQL Challenge.:

This was the utmost bad joke on me. Would you be so kind to make clear your statement? My experience on the site was out of the limits of the common sense. No question but a popup nightmare required. Kindly please do something. This site is BAD, BAD, BAD. The worst I have ever seen in overall behavior!

I try not to take such criticism personally, though this did seem a bit harsh.

Well, I asked for clarification. I suggested that maybe the problem lies somewhere in his computer or network.

:-)

Let's see what he says, if he replies.

I like Scrabble, for many reasons.

I like words. I like to write. I like to read.

But one of the things I like best about Scrabble is how it is so much like life.

Every time I play a game of Scrabble, something totally amazing about the pattern of play in that game will strike me:

"Check it out! Ten turns and not a single letter E was used!"

"Whoa, that's amazing. Every word that contains an A also contains the letter I!"

and so on.

So why do I say Scrabble is like life? Because both Scrabble and life are filled with patterns that seem to be very amazing and profound, but in fact are meaningless, nothing more than coincidences to which our brain happens to be attuned.

OK, time for the Scrabble Puzzle:

A week ago, I played a game of Scabble with Veva and scored 36 points by placing the word "SEEN" on the board.

Now, every letter in "SEEN" is worth 1 point, making it very difficult to get to 36 points. But I attached "SEEN" to a word on the board (of course!) and I got my 36 points by using a total of 8 letters, two of which were worth 3 points and the other 5 were worth 1 point each.

Still not a whole lot of points to work from.

So how was I able to get to 36 points? I will post the answer next week.

Programmers are highly skilled logicians, masquerading as worker bees.

Programmers are craftsmen and craftswomen, masquerading as highly skilled logicians.

Programers are artists, masquerading as craftsmen and craftswomen.

Programmers are worker bees, masquerading as artists.

Very few programmers are artists.