Currently at Tom Kyte’s session regarding topics new, improved or coming in Oracle Application Development. Tom told about the history APEX has gone thru and the current setup with the APEX Listener and even the “PL/SQL Gateway” was mentioned. I always have to laugh a bit because this last one touches the XDB Protocol Server which can do way more then only this PL/SQL extension for APEX which has been embedded in this XDB Protocol Server framework. There is a APEX book out there that touches a bit the possibilities of the framework, one of the reasons I will promote and explain it a bit more during conferences like UKOUG, because I think its a shame that people don’t know its full potential. Anyway. Tom stressed once again that APEX is a serious environment regarding the huge websites out there based on APEX supporting 1000th of user sessions. Also it nowadays had a better debug support (4.1) and use / support for ROWID, improved data upload and calendar wizard support and redesigned websheets in APEX 4.1.
The SQL Developer is the programming tool that can be used for Oracle 9, 10, 11 or other database like Microsoft SQL Server or DB2 via JDBC connection, also nowadays it has a ER tool embedded and support for Oracle Data Miner. In all it is becoming a very impressive tool for your development work in a Oracle database or others… Some of the cool stuff in there is the support for SQL Monitoring…
SQL Monitoring is very powerful when used during your development work. It enables to see you in real time if your code will work out as you thought it would be and where it should be improved. Also it gives you access to the ASH (active session history) data.
I think am on Tom’s site, being a DBA, that it is a shame that developers are denied by my peers to all this extra info. I never get why developers should be denied to extra info which would help them to improve their code they are making. It just doesn’t make sense to deny access and overall it introduces problems which could be avoided in the development environment straight away and what I guess most DBA people don’t realize, they increase by the “security paranoia” behavior extra costs during the development process or during the testing process when all these performance problems or bugs are found and will have to be corrected by developers afterwards.
Net Services now support bigger SessionData Units (SDU) sizes up to 64K which can be used for bigger data support of datatypes like CLOB’s and XML data, via setting these values in the sqlnet.ora or tnsnames.ora file. Some of those small info snippets which can very useful if it applies to your situation. That said, test it of course, because it might introduce some congestion which counter acts the improvement you would like to see.
Tom told a bit about the new Database Resident Connection Pooling which was introduced in 11.2.0.1 (or 11.2.0.2?) which supports a lot of programming out there like C, Java, PHP etc. I still have to play with this DRCP environment. It could be really interesting to see how this would work in a big session environment with the connection pooling already in place.
In short, Tom’s session didn’t address a lot of new things, but added value by just summing up all the features out there which were introduced since the last year of so… For me its now up to the next session which could be interesting because its addresses a XMLDB use case presentation.
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