doag wegweiser

Another DOAG is over and here is 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 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. Lesson 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 do 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 not 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. Unfortunately 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 Details

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. Unfortunately 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 not what I had expected.

Awards

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 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 the 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 Services, which I could use for Java Development. 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 there 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!