The OOW 2010 schedule builder is up and ready to run. It's pretty cool. You can do various searches for sessions, vendors, exhibits, etc. You can also find content by user tagging. Something I would like to get a look at is the recommendation engine that's using Oracle Data Mining.

Oracle's most popular technology newsletter: Database Insider Newsletter's July Edition is now available!

Includes:

• Exclusive interview with IOUG President Andy Flower
• Migrating from Sybase to Oracle Database
• Customer stories and podcasts
• Tips and techniques
• Upcoming Events not to miss
• much more

Available online.

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[back to Introduction] In over six years of doing data warehouse POCs and benchmarks for clients there is one area that I frequently see as problematic: “batch jobs”.  Most of the time these “batch jobs” take the form of some PL/SQL procedures and packages that generally perform some data load, transformation, processing or something similar. [...]

In my previous post on Modeling Addresses, we worked through a logical model where we normalized out the parts of an address that are important to us. Now we want to model how we would attach those addresses to a person. We aren't going to cover the person entity this time. We'll save that for the future. For now we are just going to say we have a default person entity that contains a first name and a last name.

I am going to be working mostly in a logical model and showing a potential physical representation of that model at times. I'm not going to be strict about the terms I use and I won't be digging into the meaning behind the concepts, per se. My brain doesn't work like that when I'm working and this is really to show how my brain works, and what I'm thinking about, when I do this kind of work. I will put some conceptual stuff in the first logical model and I will put some physical stuff in the logical model; it's just the way I work.

Database Workbench 4.0.3 brings you some small improvements, bugfixes and introduces the free Lite Editions for MySQL, InterBase and Firebird.

Version 4 introduced full Unicode support, 4.0.3 fixes some issues found in that initial release and subsequent releases, including the "Query was empty"-error in some parts of the MySQL module.

Version 4 feature highlights:

- Unicode Enabled
- Click header to sort data
- Integrated BLOB Editor with SQL Editor
- "Secure Object Drop" and "Secure Database Drop" functionality
- Code editor enhancements
and much more...

Database Workbench supports:
- MySQL
- InterBase
- Firebird
- Oracle
- NexusDB
- Microsoft SQL Server
- Sybase SQL Server

Now that Oracle OpenWorld 2010 is just under 70 days away I thought I would take a moment to mention that the Oracle Real-World Performance Group will again be hosting three sessions.   This year I think we have a very exciting and informative lineup of sessions that are a must-attend for those wanting to see [...]

Oracle has started rolling out Oracle Exadata Intelligent Warehouse solutions based on Oracle Exadata, which deliver pre-built advanced analytics tailored for the retail and communications industries. These solutions include Oracle Data Model, Oracle Business Intelligence, Oracle Exadata, Oracle OLAP and Oracle Data Mining and offer:

• Deep industry-specific insight to all business users
• Extreme performance and unlimited scalability
• Fast time-to-value and easy adaptability

With Oracle Exadata Intelligent Warehouse solutions, you can be up and running quickly with an industry-leading data warehousing solution tailored for your specific industry. Learn more now.

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I know you must be wondering if I have just become a microsoft fanboy or possibly have lost my mind. Neither actually. Give me a few minutes to explain.

As a member of the Real-World Performance Group at Oracle I have participated in quite a number of Exadata POCs over the past two years. Often times those POCs are constrained in a number of ways: time, schema/app modifications, etc., because the objective is a proof, not a full blown migration. As a result there [...]

So I believe I left off at Monday in my last post about ODTUG. As a matter of a fact I said I would post again the next day but didn't quite meet that. The conference has been over for a few days now but I still want to get my thoughts down.

As Larry Ellison mentioned in the Q4 analyst call last week, "the 2011 Exadata pipeline continues to grow and is now approaching $1 billion, making Exadata the fastest-growing new product in Oracle history. " The high customer demand for Oracle Exadata can be attributed to its unique value proposition: only Oracle Exadata provides extreme performance for both data warehousing and OLTP applications on the same database machine.

This value proposition resonated with Hokuriku Coca-Cola Bottling. It was looking for a high-speed data solution for its data warehouse yet at the same time, was looking to reduce the number of physical servers, as well as cut server licensing and maintenance costs.

As this new case study describes, Hokuriku Coca-Cola Bottling was running a large number of systems, an Oracle Database and a Teradata data warehouse to process and analyze sales and order data from Coca-Cola retailers and vending machines. The amount of data could reach more than 5 million records a month. As the volume of data increased, it started taking longer to store, extract, process, and load it into the data warehouse. Queries and batch processing slowed down, hampering the ability of staff to work efficiently.

To address these issues, Hokuriku Coca-Cola Bottling engaged HISCOM, the systems integration business of the Hokuriku Coca-Cola Bottling Co., to implement Oracle Exadata. Oracle Exadata enabled Hokuriku Coca-Cola Bottling to improve its data processing speed by more than 3,000%, which shortened batch processing time by 97% and enabled complex search queries to be completed in five seconds, compared to three minutes in the past. And because they could consolidate their OLTP database and data warehouse onto a single Oracle Exadata Database Machine, Hokuriku Coca-Cola Bottling also eliminated its Teradata data warehouse licensing costs.

Read the case study.

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So, I got to Washington on Thursday. I brought my wife and older son with me for the weekend. Getting there was an uneventful trip. The Wardman Park Marriott, where the conference is being held, is an aswesome hotel. Plenty of food near by when you don't want to eat hotel food (which I usually don't). In the last few days I've had Indian, Italian, Thai (3 times) and a sandwich. Friday was the ace di

In a press release today, Oracle announced the general availability of Oracle Application Express release 4.0, the popular application development tool included at no additional cost with every edition and release of Oracle Database 11g. This latest release streamlines the development of Web-centric database applications and includes new Dynamic Actions, plug-ins, RESTful Web services, Websheets, and improved themes for a modernized user interface.

Download Oracle Application Express release 4.0 today from Oracle Technology Network.

Learn more about Oracle Application Express here.

By answering a few quick, simple questions about your storage practices, this nifty little assessment will help you determine how well you are managing your storage, whether you're doing everything possible to optimize performance and to mitigate the risk of information loss - all while keeping costs under control.

You'll learn how you can use Oracle's storage management solutions to optimize your storage infrastructure and deliver a cost-effective, scalable information management platform that is easy to manage and that delivers the performance and availability required today and in the future.

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From An Expert's Guide to Oracle Technology I originally published this on the database-geek blog but I want to share a warning about yahoo. I'm pissed. Really pissed. Advance warning: I will rant now. I forget the exact year but in the early 90s (I think 1993 or 94), I signed up for a novel service. Online email. Remember this is the early 9

Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database
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Sometimes having the right data is not enough. If that data takes too long to access, customers can be unhappy, business opportunities can be lost, and additional costs can be incurred. If you need extremely fast transaction processing speed for mission-critical applications such as real-time billing, low-latency trading, and risk/fraud analysis, Oracle has a solution.

Join us for a complimentary live Webcast featuring Oracle Vice President Marie-Anne Neimat who will discuss how to:

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Guest Speakers
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Peter Jeffcock, Senior Principal Product Director


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I totally get that Oracle is not bug free. But bugs in Oracle are usually a transient phenomena. Oracle employs a lot of people to fix bugs. They produce patches and new releases that fix bugs all the time.

Advances in data-management architecture - including CPU, memory, storage, I/O, and the database - have been steady but piecemeal. In this report, Merv Adrian describes how Oracle Exadata not only provides the latest technology in each part of the data-management architecture, but also integrates them under the full control of one vendor with a unified approach to leveraging the full stack. He writes, "the real "secret sauce" of Oracle Exadata V2 is the way in which these technologies complement each other to deliver additional performance and scalability."

Merv interviews two Exadata customers, Banco Transylvania and TUI Netherlands, and concludes that early indications are that Oracle Exadata is delivering on its promise of extreme performance and scalability. His recommendation to IT is to target corporate applications with the biggest potential for speed-based enhancement, and consider whether Oracle Exadata V2 can cost-effectively enable new ways to use these for competitive advantage.

Read the full report.

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From An Expert's Guide to Oracle Technology

Ran into something the other day and thought I would blog about it. No great shakes but an interesting side note. Everyone knows what procedure overloading is right? If not, read Overloading Procedures in PL/SQL before continuing.

In the post from the link above