ODTUG Kscope13: The Clock is ticking…
Posted: May 2, 2013 Filed under: Kscope | Tags: Kscope Leave a comment »
So you haven’t decided if you should go to Kscope13. I’ll give you 5 reasons why you should stop procrastinating and register right away!
- 4½ days of great technical content for Oracle developers. Plenty of presentations and hands-on training on several areas such as APEX, BI, development tools, SQL, PL/SQL, etc… I guarantee you’ll wish you could clone yourself to attend several sessions at the same time.
- Are you the kind of Oracle enthusiast that is always reading books and blogs? If the answer is yes, let me tell that your favorite authors including Tom Kyte, Steven Feuerstein, Cary Millsap, Maria Colgan, Dominic Delmolino, Tim Gorman, etc… will be presenting at Kscope13. Most of them stay with you at the same hotel during the entire conference and they are very approachable people that you can meet and talk to.
- It’s a great opportunity to meet and network with fellow developers to learn about new stuff they’re working on. Maybe they already solved a problem you’re facing right now. I’m sure you’ll go back to the office with plenty of ideas/solutions for your own projects.
- You get to know the nice people that build and enhance the tools you love to use on a daily basis. You’ll have the opportunity to interact with Oracle product managers and developers that will answer your questions about their products.
- Last but not least, you get to visit beautiful New Orleans. I always wanted to travel to this historic city and never had a chance. Well, that’s about to change because now I have a great excuse to be there.
ODTUG really puts a great effort in order to make Kscope not only the best technical conference for Oracle developers but probably one with the best social activities also. Last year I attended for the first time and I really enjoyed it so much that I submitted an abstract for this year and it got selected. I really hope you can attend and if you do, make sure to stop by my session in case you haven’t heard about regular expressions before.
See you in NOLA!
Something I didn’t know: The REVERSE function
Posted: April 1, 2013 Filed under: Oracle, Something I didn't know, SQL | Tags: Something I didn't know, SQL 2 Comments »I was playing the pl/sql challenge the other day and the question was to identify valid implementations for a “reverse_string” function taking a varchar2 as the input and returning another varchar2 with the characters in inverted order.
One of the possible answers was this:
FUNCTION reverse_string (in_string VARCHAR2) RETURN VARCHAR2 AS l_return VARCHAR2 (100); BEGIN SELECT REVERSE (in_string) INTO l_return FROM DUAL; RETURN l_return; END reverse_string;
My immediate reaction was to skip this choice because I have never seen REVERSE as a string manipulation function in Oracle; but then I thought…what if this is a tricky question.
So I ran this small query expecting a syntax error but guess what?
SELECT reverse('hello world')
FROM dual;
It worked! The function displayed dlrow olleh.
So REVERSE turned out to be an undocumented function that has been out there for a while. I did find blog posts from 2006 that talk about it. I guess I have been living under a rock all this time or maybe I never had the need for such functionality.
By the way, I’m not suggesting that you should go and write production code around this function, because it’s unsupported and may not even work properly with multi-byte character sets.
RMOUG Training Days 2013
Posted: February 10, 2013 Filed under: RMOUG | Tags: RMOUG 2 Comments »Well… I made it to Denver and this place is really coooold but it’s also really nice. I have this wonderful view from my hotel room.
This is just a quick post to say that I’ll be presenting on Wednesday 2/13. Here are the details of my session:
Introduction to Regular Expressions in Oracle from 09:45 to 10:45 in room 4d
This will be the first time that I present at a conference, so as you can guess I’m a little bit anxious and nervous but I believe is normal.
I hope to see you at this great conference.
Oracle Open World 2012
Posted: September 28, 2012 Filed under: Open World | Tags: Open World Leave a comment »
Oracle Open World 2012
This is the second year in a row that I have the opportunity to attend the Oracle Open World Conference and looks like it’s going to be even better than last year’s.
I’ll be flying to San Francisco on Saturday morning and I’m planning to do some sightseeing at the Bay (a small cruise maybe) and hang out with some other conference attendees.
On Sunday I’ll be on all the ODTUG Database Development sessions.
From Monday to Thursday I’ll focus on sessions about database development, database performance, big data and some Exadata (looks like one of those monsters is coming my way). I will also attend some of the Oaktable World sessions featuring bright members of the Oaktable Network.
The afternoons and nights are going to be really interesting with all the receptions, music festivals and concerts that Oracle has organized including artists like Joss Stone, Macy Gray, Pearl Jam, Kings of Leon, etc..
I’m also looking forward to meet and network with other members of the Oracle community through the Bloggers Meet-up, the OTN Tweet Meet and the different activities taking place at the OTN Lounge.
I’m sure that by Friday I’ll be a zombie and ready to sleep the entire flight on my way back to Austin.
I’ll be tweeting my experience from @galobalda using the #oow hashtag. So if you see me, come by and say hi.
See you there.
My First Kscope
Posted: July 3, 2012 Filed under: Kscope | Tags: Kscope Leave a comment »
It’s been several days since Kscope 12 ended and what a conference we had!
The User Group Oracle Development Tools (ODTUG) organized the best conference I have attended so far. Everything was impeccable, starting with the conference site (JW Marriott San Antonio), presenters, activities at the end of the day and of course the party at Knibbe Ranch with an incredible atmosphere, good music, drinks, games, Texas BBQ, and we even attended a rodeo!
Kscope was a great experience and I recommend it to all those who use Oracle tools for application development. Not only the technical content is excellent but it gives you the opportunity to meet and often make friends with other members of the Oracle community.
I finally got to meet a lot of ”Oracle tweeps” that I’ve been exchanging messages with for some time like Jeff Smith (@thatjeffsmith), Chet Justice (@oraclenerd), Patrick Barel (@patch72), Dan McGhan (@dmcghan), Kellyn Pot’vin (@DBAKevlar), Tim Gorman (@timothyjgorman), Cary Millsap (@carymillsap), Dominic Delmolino (@ddelmoli), Alex Gorbachev (@alexgorbachev), Noel Portugal (@noelportugal), Christian Rokitta (@crokitta), Kris Rice (@krisrice), Dan Norris (@dannorris), James Murtagh (@allthingsoracle) among others.
Deciding which sessions to attend was one of the most difficult tasks because in many cases two or three sessions that interested me occurred at the same time. In the end I was satisfied with what I chose and this is the list of my favorites (in no particular order):
Single Table Access Paths by Jonathan Lewis.
Optimizing a Two Table Join by Jonathan Lewis.
Beating the Oracle Optimizer by Jonathan Lewis.
Understanding Optimizer Statistics by Maria Colgan (@sqlmaria).
Top Tips to get Optimal Execution Plans all the Time by Maria Colgan.
Implementing MapReduce with SQL Algorithms and PL/SQL by Dominic Delmolino.
Next year the conference will be held in New Orleans and the organizers promise to surpass the success of this year, and I bet they will. Registration is now open for Kscope 13, so do not think too much and sign up!
