#DOAG2017 wrap up

Another DOAG is over and here are my summary.

Day 1

As my presentation is planned for noon I arrived this year on the evening before, so I could attend the early sessions on 8:30.

Sten Vesterli: APEX, ADF, or ABCS? A real-life application built in 3 tools

He compares the development of a real application in APEX, ADF and ABCS. He don’t believe that ABCS is usable from end users and shows interesting problems with the date pickers in APEX and ADF.

Welcome by DOAG and Oracle

Stefan Kinnen from DOAG welcomes the attendees and gives an short overview for the conference. The part of the Kenneth Johansen from Oracle was very dry in the contrast.

Keynote: Neil Sholay – Tracking the Inevitable (How to plan for likely and disruptive business scenarios.)

Quite the reverse the colleague of Kenneth Johansen. He present interesting views about the ongoing disruption in every business and how to prepare for this. Unfortunately the presentation is not available for download.

Markus Lohn: Road to the (Oracle) Cloud

The next title was pure understatement. As I know Markus expanded his talk to the details of a complex SOA & ESB migration report, which most of the attendees sure does not expect. I think at least my boss not :-). I left this a little earlier as now I had to go to stage.

Torsten Kleiber: PL/SQL: Therefore test automation for those who bind themselves forever!

After several presentations about ADF and the related development life cycle I decided this year to speak about the selection process of a PL/SQL testing tool. Additional I promised to do some of this last year. The room was packed with round about 100 people, which I unfortunately never reached with ADF in the past. Despite some technical problems when starting and in the demo’s all went fine and I will thank again all my attendees. You find my presentation additional here:

Because of some discussion with my attendees and lunch I skipped the next slot.

Sabine Heimsath, Jan Karremans: #DBADev – Like dog and cat? It doesn’t have to be!

This was a “lightweight” simulated battle between DBA and > as DB developers. I little bit oversimplified, but ok, unfortunately I seen none of our DBA’s in the audience.

Alexander Weber: Cloud service – heaven and hell (application and data away)

This was report> from a real world oracle database cloud customer with an APEX app. Maybe I will remind me to look at his experience, when we will ever go the cloud.

Bryn Llewellyn: Ten Rules for Doing a PL/SQL Performance Experiment

Bryn shows how to best analyze and broke down a performance problem and the idea’s are often not restricted to PL/SQL. Lession learned “Don’t use SET TIMING ON”, as this includes additional network roundtrips.

Elmar Juergens: The sow does not get fat from weighing: PL/SQL quality analysis

I see already a similar presentation from Elmar Juergens at Javaland 2017. Same message this time. Additional he recommend to measure at first only the changed source code via a diffing algorithm to only identifying the changed lines. Most tools can’t this. Will have a look at his own tool sometime. Additional our bosses want Elmar Juergens for a presentation for our developers. Will look if this will change their minds an they will look a least a bit more at the existing measured violation.

Day 2

Markus Klenke: Better, more beautiful, more modern: barely used beads in ADF

Markus likes ADF and show this. Fine that he is at our company site to help us with this.

Daniel Hillinger, Tobias Deml: Battle: Database Virtualization

First at the beginning the decision was made, who of the both is pro and who is contra. Nice format to find the arguments for this. I’ve learned that all databases in the same virtualization farm has to be the same license and options, if you want not to pay to much. Additional it’s not usual to begin if you have fewer than 100 database instances.

Thorsten Wussow: Let the orchestra play –- Docker orchestration and visualization

Unfortunately, my expectations were disappointed here because most demos didn’t work. Not a good start to use the technology.

Dominic Weiser: Continuous integration in database development

This was another nice database CI presentation which contains utPLSQL, and the presenter had enough time to show the CI part on Jenkins too. Similar you can find in my upload too, but I had enough time in my talk to present.

Duncan Mills: Web Components, the Oracle Way

Duncan describes how to define and use own components in Oracle Jet as professional as ever. Unfortunatly I see that he has moved from ADF product management to JET architecture team now.

Michael Schulze: Tools for diagnosing Weblogic (FMW) performance problems 

A surprice for me – lot of new tools and information for my toolchain.

Markus Lohn: Quo Vadis Agile Software Development

Again Markus on the stage. He shows his Agile project experiences on several customers and I’m not sure  if he mentioned us or not.

Bryn Llewellyn: Guarding your Data Behind a Hard Shell PL/SQL API – the Detail

Bryn shows here a security model for how accessing the data via an secure API which contains of 4 schema layers: data, code, implementation, API. Unfortunatly this is not really good handled by some of Oracle own development frameworks like ADF despite you develop only on the rest API on top. But definitely give it a try.

Roland Dürre, Knud Johannsen, Christian Botta: Creative communication

The paintings was good but the rest was very esoteric presentation of philosophic messages. I think I was to inspired by the vita of mr. Botta when selected this slot, this was what I had expected.

Before the evening keynote Ulrike Schwinn was awarded, congratulations! Over my career I heard a lot of presentations from her, which was impressive, none where I’m not learned something new.

Keynote – Karl-Heinz Land: Digital Darwinism: The Silent Attack on your Business Model and Brand

Good and provocative but unfortunately in my opinion also with some mistakes. The law of moore does not apply anymore, and as this was his main explanation, why all will be automated in the near future. Yes automation will happen, but only where a real business case is. If you see that over 50% of internet traffic is eaten by video streaming already, than I think this will hamper this process. Blockchain is not an oprating system, it is an distributed secure database. But it comes with cost, which actually is not paid, for example: A Bitcoin transaction consumes more electricity than a one-person household per month. And the verification of security need to many time. This has to be solved or Blockchain will only be used productive in edge case. Generally  I’m more a fan of WildDueck.

ADF Community Meeting

Unfortunately this was greatest disappointment of the whole DOAG conference for me. Once again we discussed several things

• ADF is not visible from Oracle because not actually marketed
• Errors in JDeveloper: the IDE for ADF and lack of support for this
• Provide an Virtual Machine for ADF development. This is ok for trying out, but will not supported in restricted environment at customers as at my company – a bank. At least this should not be an replacement of support for JDeveloper
• Should we open the community to other technologies like SOA, JET, ABCS an so on. My opinion: definitely no, as this is the final dead of ADF in the community.
• We see that some of the important product managers move to JET and does not support us anymore.

In this atmosphere this year no common dinner happens after the meeting.

After that I spent the time with some colleagues at the evening party. This year I see early clearing the rooms of the NCC. I don’t know if the starting Scope alliance party was the cause, but maybe they will do this next year on the first day instead?

Day 3

Hans Eichenberger: DBaaS with APEX 5.1 Frontend and Oracle Multitenant Option 

Will repeat my tweet here: The developer dreams come true – getting an inhouse sandbox database in minutes from the DBA! Whoops – unfortunately not my company!

Adam Lukaszewski: Boost your Forms Development with GIT and Forms API Master

At the moment I define a future proof build and deployment process at my company for the loan platform. Part of this is security and mandatory review. So the presented Forms API Master tool is the perfect tool for handling the review and merge process of branches for our legacy Forms and Reports development. Will look how to implement this in Atlassian BitBucket.

Keynote – Robert Schröder: The Difference between Errors and Failures – Experiences in Aviation 

Key message are for me: Accept that failures happen, learn from failures and change your processes accordingly. Define a clear language for your business.

Marcus Hammer: Die Hürden großer ADF-Anwendungen

Not really new for us, but as we speak a lot with other colleagues from his company the solutions are mostly known for us – and for the whole ADF community in Germany. Interesting is the decision to implement batch processing in Java too, seems that it is problematic to get PL/SQL staff right now. I’m not understanding the decision to write an own framework for database deployment, but as this was not his own topic, he could not answer why Liquibase or Flyway does not fulfill their requirements.

Frank Munz: WebLogic 12c and Java Cloud Service

I missed Franks sessions last years, but often look at his slides in the web. This was a very good entry in differentiating the different Oracle Cloud Servives, which I could use for Java Develoment. Oracle Java Cloud Service is only one of it and should correctly named Oracle WebLogic Cloud Service. Great another naming dropping: Application Container Cloud should better by named as Language as a Service. Look at the slides to get the whole picture.

Alex Nuijten: Regular Expressions: Say What?

The best example that you can learn ever something new from a good presenter, despite you think you know all about a topic and you have already read the presentation before. For an example: a regular expression looks already for the longest possible match, which could be the whole string instead of the searched pattern. Interesting too the connect by regexp_count for splitting a string into rows. And look at the standard patterns in dbms_redact before you write your own, if it is not there write it in your own package for reuse.

Frank Munz: Microservices Runtimes

The second presentation of Frank I attend compares the actual available Runtimes on the market. But special interesting was the intro into micro services: are you sure you need this and do you know, what nobody tells you about latency and so on? Or do you know that accessing another micro service can need 100000 times more than accessing a functionality in the same monolith?

Conclusion

Again this year I attend colorful bouquet of presentations and again it pay’s off to look at the whole conference program and some abstracts and presentations before to minimize disappointments.

Generally I attend to few development sessions, maybe because I use other technologies or know already the presented topic.  But my feeling is that are really fewer development presentations.

Interesting is that finally many Development, Deployment, QA, TDD and CI/CD technologies used in other development languages find it’s way into classic Oracle development technologies like Oracle PL/SQL, Forms and Reports.

For the event organization I see a little degradation of service this year, for example the quality of the food or the cleaning of toilets and rooms. And a no go: Missing water for presenters in some rooms!

That’s it!

#DOAG2016 wrap up

Another DOAG is over and here are my summary.

Day 1

Unfortunately the early train from duesseldorf arrives not before 9:30, so I missed the first morning slot. But on the other hand I this was the slot where I had to decide between 8 presentations, which I’m interested in.

The first soft skill presentation was about creative techniques beyond brain storming. The mentioned 3 techniques was all unknown for me, maybe I give it a try next time.

The next presentation promises a live demo of a forms 12c migration to production. Nothing really new here and remembers me for an “beautify our village” contest. But fairly enough for customers which absolutely want to remain on Oracle Forms. As Translation Hub 12c is not available and Oracle Reports 12c will be the last version, I think 11g will the last version we will use on our side before completing migration to ADF.

I attend two presentations, which shows Auraplayer on top of Oracle Forms to provide mobile applications via Oracle Mobile Cloud Service (MCS). I understand the MCS thing, although I find it very complicated to use. But put another layer on complicated and most slowly Oracle Forms to create web services for mobile applications seems no use case for me. I doubt that the recording of web services works really well for complicated forms which switch the displayed items and canvases depending on the selected data. All samples was very simple forms, but the response time of the resulting mobile app was not acceptable for me.

The presentation about continuous integration in APEX give me some new ideas for maybe replacing our actual deployment processes for PL/SQL in the future. Will have a look at the mentioned sql-maven-plugin, when we go for Maven for ADF too. Will check Rspec as BDD framework to run PL/SQL unit tests. Promising is the feature to tie together Selenium tests and data checks in the same Rspec test definition. One drop of bitterness remains, as the presenter had no idea how to solve a merge conflict. Seems that this was only a proof of concept and not really used daily there.

Best practices for PL/SQL performance was a good reminder, what I all know about this topic but use to seldom. But will use some of the configuration things like native compilation of the system packages or PL/SQL optimization level in my docker instances for automatic testing to optimize test times.

SQL tips and tricks was a sovereign presentation, but shows me again that for several Oracle database releases only little improvements for the developer comes with.

Day 2

In session “Standing at a Crossroads, ADF and JET” Duncan Mills clearly show the differences between Oracle ADF and Oracle JET. Running gag: The “Schnecke Chart” for quick decision between both. Will look, if I can reuse this for other decisions.

Next I tried an meeting at the Unconference about continuous integration for PL/SQL. But the most discussions really goes about the automation part. Most participants missed the most importantly definition of continuous integration: ” … continuous integration (CI) is the practice of merging all developer working copies to a shared mainline several times a day.”. Unfortunately I realize now that in the German Wikipedia translation this basis is completely softened: “developer should integrate as often as possible”. Not really new for me here, hope I have told something useful to the others.

“Extending Oracle ADF BC Models to REST, Cloud and Mobile” was a good time to remember what’s now possible as it really available and we now try another migration away from ADF 11g to the hottest version. I have seen this in the last conferences already.

Have read “Deep Dive Into Oracle ADF Transactions: Advanced Techniques” in the web already, but the information was a little bit clearer after seeing Eugene Fedorenko live.

Something completely different: “Free Load Testing Tools for Oracle Database”. I had known Swingbench before. SLOB is completely new for me and did not seen Apache JMeter JDBC test in this context before. Will test the last maybe in the future.

“Top 10 stumble stones for ADF 12c” was very technical but cool, good to have Markus Klenke at our site while our coming migration next weeks.

“Faster, Better, Cheaper: Oracle ADF Development in the Cloud” – with lot of problems in the demo part. Maybe really because of the DOAG WiFi. Quick Tip for all presenters: as I know at DOAG conferences there is ever an laptop available with LAN, try to put it in your laptop! For the content: DCS seems to restricting to much. I prefer Jenkins over Hudson. No push option directly with commit i JDeveloper etc.

Masking test data is very relevant in our banking busines, so I attend “Oracle Data Redaction live in Telko”. Seems that there are many fall knits here, as this doesn’t seem to solve all requirements out of the box.

Before the evening keynote Günter Stürner and Jürgen Menge was awarded, congratulations to both.

Following keynote “Hacking for managers” was very entertaining, if you are German then you should look on youtube for the presenter.

Now we are not ready for the evening party, we start the yearly German ADF Community meeting. Interesting part was a presentation of the Tools Statement of Direction, which again clearly differentiate between ADF, MAF, JET, MAX and ABCS. We get the clear statement ADF is standard for SAAS and JET for PAAS development at Oracle. In my opinion Oracle miss to communicate this in other presentations and miss to further present ADF in the public. A lot of questions of the present Community members was answered here too. Later we eat together with some of the product managers and community members and discussed topics for future presentations.

Later I go back to my hotel to remotely patch our fresh ADF 12.2.1.2 Server with patch for critical escalated bug to start our planned migration for ADF 11.1.1.5 next week. More later in a separate post.

Day 3

In “Indiana Nimphius und der JavaScript Tempel des Todes” Frank shows us his view on the JavaScript Universum, maybe we can really not avoid this in the future on some business cases. But for the next time we will stay on strongly supported ADF and will reduce JavaScript usage there to the minimum.

Thank god the roll-out of SQL Developer 4.1.5 is not started already in our company. Will look how fast I can add the free PLSQL/COP SQL Developer Plugin of Philip Salvisberg from Trivadis to the silent install process. He showed in “Fighting Bad PL/SQL” the theory and the practice how his static code analysis tool for PL/SQL does work. Depending on the outcome and the price maybe we will later implement in continuous integration.

The keynote “Big Picture of digital revolution” wakes the expectation to us to take responsibility for the effects of digital revolution to the society and makes me very thoughtful.

After our hopefully successful migration to ADF 12.2.1.2 I want to change our deployment from ANT to Maven, so I attend the presentation “Migration Maven Possibilities”. This gives a good reminder what to do at that point.

Very interesting presentation, which really does not deserves so few visitors, was “Home Lab Setup and Familiarization of E-Business R12.2”. My time with E-Business Suite is over 15 years away, so I was surprised that I recognized much of the components. I think I’m sure not to install E-Business Suite for the moment, but lot of the instructions for the Home Lab Setup could I reuse for other technologies. Some concepts for the E-Business Suite, eg. double filesystem for reducing offline time for patching, are very interesting.

With last 2 presentations I enter again the world of ThickDatabase paradigm. We ever know that executing business in the database seems faster as in the middle tier, but we had no proofs. Now Toon Koppelaars from Oracle itself give us this with a deep analysis. The question remains – will the other Oracle departments will learn from this?

day 4

Tomorrow I will be trained in Continuous Delivery with Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle Cloud. I will release another blogs, when implementing some findings from this training.

conclusion

As you see I switch often between technologies. This happens not ever voluntary. Normally I interested more in the development like ADF, MAF and JET. This year these presentation are unfortunately distributed over the conference. So I have discussed this today with the DOAG executives, they will improve this next year.

Nevertheless I get a lot of ideas from presentations in technologies I do not or not regularly use, so sometime I intentionally choose from such interesting presentations.

A recommendation for all conference visitors. Read the abstracts before you go to a conference and maybe before you book! You avoid disappointments because of wrong expectations. Often the title has the only purpose to be accept the presentation and has little to do with the real content. Abstracts give you often a better idea about the content.

That’s it!