Month: October 2008

MOOW, Day 1

Miracle Oracle Open World is claims to be the best conference in the world. It claims that the “best” rating is not because of the number of attendees, but I disagree–the (relatively small) number of attendees is one of the things that makes this event great! There are less than 200 attendees here, but a … Continue reading “MOOW, Day 1”

Miracle Oracle Open World is claims to be the best conference in the world. It claims that the “best” rating is not because of the number of attendees, but I disagree–the (relatively small) number of attendees is one of the things that makes this event great! There are less than 200 attendees here, but a high percentage of those are some of the most highly respected Oracle experts in the world (at least in my book).

Last night, I attended the opening session which included a technical presentation from Toon Koppelaars called “The Helsinki Declaration.” The session discusses the trend of the last 6-8 years where we’ve seen less use of database features and fatter middle tier applications. His plea was that we reverse the trend and return to using the database features (that customers pay a lot of money for) and shrink the middle tier bloat. This, Toon contends, will make more maintainable, more optimized applications overall. Forget about “database independent applications” since that necessitates using the database for little more than a spreadsheet. Toon encourages the use of Oracle Application Express (APEX) which promotes putting almost all application components in the database. I’m not sure I see that APEX is the best tool for every job, but I do see a lot of opportunities for APEX in the coming years and think it certainly could replace Oracle Forms once APEX matures. Continue reading “MOOW, Day 1”

My interview from Open World posted

While I was at Oracle Open World 2008 in September, I met Ignacio Ruiz and agreed to an interview with him. Ignacio is the person behind www.databases-la.com which publishes database-related content aimed at the Latin American community and he also blogs at oracledisect.blogspot.com. As a result, most if not all of his content is available … Continue reading “My interview from Open World posted”

While I was at Oracle Open World 2008 in September, I met Ignacio Ruiz and agreed to an interview with him. Ignacio is the person behind www.databases-la.com which publishes database-related content aimed at the Latin American community and he also blogs at oracledisect.blogspot.com. As a result, most if not all of his content is available in Spanish. He also makes most of it available in English.

I thought Ignacio asked some good questions and (fortunately or unfortunately) didn’t edit the interview at all. The one unfortunate part of the interview is that you don’t get to see Ignacio at all–only me. Without further ado, here’s the interview (if you can’t view below, you can see it on YouTube directly).

I am not Dan Norris

I’m not sure why it has taken this long, but I recently started getting about one email per week that was intended for a well-named member of the UK’s Parliament: Dan Norris. After communicating with Mr. Norris’ office, I found that we both found one another via Google Alerts that we’ve apparently both set up … Continue reading “I am not Dan Norris”

I’m not sure why it has taken this long, but I recently started getting about one email per week that was intended for a well-named member of the UK’s Parliament: Dan Norris. After communicating with Mr. Norris’ office, I found that we both found one another via Google Alerts that we’ve apparently both set up to notify us when Google finds our name somewhere on the intertubes.

The person that responded to my email was a staff member from Mr. Norris’ office who acknowledged that while they hadn’t received any emails intended for me, they were aware of my website and domain name registrations.

So, for clarification, Dan Norris is (also) the name of a Member of Parliament (MP) in the House of Commons in the UK. I am not him. In fact, I haven’t even been to the UK (yet) and have no interest in becoming a politician. Mr. Norris’ office offered that when I do finally make it to the UK, Mr. Norris would be willing to meet with me, so that’s exciting and something I’ll look forward to.

If you should wish to contact Dan Norris MP in the UK, he’s got a lot of contact options posted on his contact page. I find it very interesting that he offers a number to send him text messages–another (of the many) refreshing change from politicians in the US.

I’m still not exactly sure what surgeries are, but I can only presume that they’re something like office hours and there are no doctors involved.

Best of luck to Mr. Norris and his staff. While I haven’t made a habit of reading the emails that come to me, I read enough to determine that it isn’t intended for me and based on that sampling, I’m glad that I don’t have his job!

My Open World 2008 slides posted

I’ve been enjoying reading everyone’s OOW08 summaries and thoughts lately, which reminded me that I hadn’t posted the slides that I promised to put up. Unlike some presentations, my slides aren’t usually of too much use without the narrative that I spew in the session. That’s mostly because I try to make slides that have … Continue reading “My Open World 2008 slides posted”

I’ve been enjoying reading everyone’s OOW08 summaries and thoughts lately, which reminded me that I hadn’t posted the slides that I promised to put up. Unlike some presentations, my slides aren’t usually of too much use without the narrative that I spew in the session. That’s mostly because I try to make slides that have just enough information on them to remind me what to say–not to say it for me.

At any rate, I posted the slides for my three sessions. I’m not cool enough yet to use SlideShare–I’ll try that out in the future. Overall, I was pleased with how each of them went and was especially happy that I had more than 80 people at my Thursday at noon session.

If you attended one of my sessions or review the slides for one of them, please let me know your feedback either in comments below or send me a mail.