Sunday’s Conference day started very early at around 07:30 by going straight to registration, then on to a quick breakfast and the first session at 08:30 AM. Joel Kallman of the APEX Development team started my round of that morning by explaining all the tools and processes which are used / were used by the APEX Development teams that is located more or less around a huge amount of different places in the US, Europe and India. Not even to mention al the supporting people on topics like security, creating manuals, testing, supporting etc, etc. Fun to see that the team uses tools like Hudson, Subversion and Oracle’s conference tooling to be able to work wherever you as a team member are located.
Kris Rice talked about new and sometimes not so known features in SQL Developer 3.0. It was cool to see, while demo-ed by Kris, which features went in, in this new version. Stuff like drag & drop tables into a worksheet that give you a wizard for insert, update, delete etc and join options that automatically generates the SQL you need as a basis or the final statement needed. There are a lot of new options in there, I don’t know really which ones, because I started really using SQL Developer now in a project from version 3.0 “onwards” but, although I am not that GUI guy, I really start to like it. Not sure if it already will replace my UltraEdit tool, but it is getting there for some of those features like explain plan, autotrace, doing a “DIFF” between a baseline environment and a development user schema. Something I also use very much is all those fast wizards to create “load” and/or “unload” features in CSV, insert statements, SQL*Loader format or, for example (there are lots more), if needed, secured pdf file format. Something I didn’t notice yet is that you now also can open Oracle trace files and SQL Developer nicely formats the output. You also have the option to sort or filter this trace output in SQL Developer. Nice one. Also still a lot of nice stuff to come like Scheduler wizards that help you graphically layout the Scheduler process.
To give you another small teaser of what you were missing out on, have a look at the peak of the “SQL Developer’s Build in Logging and Monitoring presentation of Kris later on in the afternoon…and although not everything went that smoothly, Kris demo’s some of the power which has been build-in nowadays in SQL Developer V3.
Sue Harper demoed and talked about the SQL Developer Data Modeler, as always, very passionately and justified… SQL Developer Data Modeler is a great tool to design or getting fast info about an existing database environment via reverse engineering. At least for me thats a great plus… SQL Developer Data Modeler is nowadays even a free product, that is “a no cost option”, so in other words “free” as long as you have licensed your database. You can use it as s stand alone product or as a embedded option via SQL Developer. I would really like in SQL Developer as in SQL Developer Data Modeler an option like WebDAV, so it would/could be using XDB Repository options (XMLDB) to store XML related info like metadata stored, in XML, data. Said that most options are integrating with Subversion like looking up the differences between different saved designs. I can’t loose the feeling though that I could might make sense to store, handle XML related data in the database, instead on a file system (or even Subversion), for a tool set that pinpoints on database design and database development and its in there so why not use it. It could make even more sense regarding saving design in the same database as the development /code and options you would have like, backup & restore, oracle (text) search options or XML search via an XMLIndex and / or using XML diff’s.
Tom Kyte’s session started with pointing out all those tools you already have for free, what’s out there for free at least say, those “no cost options”, that are already there in the database and how important it is to gather some info to be able to further improve you environment if it is the code in the database or if there are problems outside the database. So the session mentioned and demo’d items like DBMS_APPLICATION_INFO, DBMS_MONITOR and DBMS_TRACE. To give you a small peak of the presentation have a look at the following short 10 min. Tom Kyte video I taped during the session.
Hope you enjoyed this small overview of the things that went on during Kaleidoscope’s 2011 Sunday’s Conference day.
M.
