A Report from DOAG 2009 (German Oracle User Group Conference)

I spent last week in Europe, a very nice trip in many ways. I was invited by the German Oracle User Group (DOAG) to do a keynote presentation at their annual conference in Nurnberg (Nuremberg). So I built a week of activities around that event.

First of all, I flew out to Germany from North Carolina, where I'd spent the weekend watching my nephew, Brian Daniels, play in his last college football game (actually in Danvilla, Virginia, at Averett University). Now he will continue to train hard, attend the Spring 2010 Combine, and hopefully be invited by an NFL (or other professional football league) team to actually make a living from football. Talk about tough jobs.

I have discovered that it's quite a lot fun hanging out with college football players. In my experience, these massive, heavily muscled, incredibly disciplined young men are also unfailingly polite and very sweet. Big teddy bears. Until they get on the field. Then it's all business.

Well, so from Raleigh, NC, my wife Veva went home on Sunday - and I took a flight to Heathrow. Then after a few hours layover (spent comfortably in the British Airways premier lounge in Terminal 5), I took another plane to Frankfurt, and from there a 2.5 hour train ride - and finally I was in Nurnberg. I was up for over 30 hours, but I must say my body is a strange machine. It doesn't really object too much to such situations. In fact, when I got to the hotel after being awake for some 25 hours, I went down to the fitness and exercised for an hour.

In any case, the DOAG conference was incredibly well-organized and well-attended. I did a short technical talk on Tuesday, organized at the last moment, and still had an overflow crowd of developers show up. DOAG asked me for a "head shot", so I sent my standard zip file with a wide variety of photos, mostly just to be entertaining. For example, it contains this photo:

But that doesn't mean they are supposed to use such photos, correct? Well...you never know. So DOAG (and Quest Germany) apparently decided that they wanted a somewhat "formal" appearance for me. So I arrived at the conference center and found variations of the following photo appear on agendas and signs and so forth:

I haven't seen me in a tuxedo in a long time! I sure didn't wear a tux at the conference. Heck, I didn't even bother with a suit. Lots of people still wear suits in Germany, I have found.

On Tuesday night, the DOAG board invited me (and all other English speakers) to dinner at a traditional German restaurant (the Golden Posthorne). That was fun, though I definitely ended up eating way more meat than I am used to.

On Wednesday, I did my keynote talk: Guarantee Application Success. I was determined to improve over my last keynote performance for DOAG several years ago. I really didn't think I did a very good job back then. I mostly presented the ideas of someone else (Lawrence Lessig - Code as Law) and I talked way too quickly. A number of people came up afterwards and said "That was a great presentation, Steven, but I could only understand half of what you said." That made me feel really bad.

So this year, the keynote contained all and only my own ideas, which meant I could be a bit more comfortable in my presentation. From what I can tell, it was well accepted. I certainly had a good time doing a talk in a hall that probably held 400-500 people, and offered not only a projection of my Powerpoint on a giant screen, but also threw up an image of me speaking that must have been 50 feet high.

Afterwards, I also sold and signed a bunch of my Oracle PL/SQL Programming, 5th edition. Then a hurried and truncated "Ask Steven" session, then back to the train station, and off to Prague.

So on Wednesday night I took a late flight (10 PM) to Prague and then spent the next two days teaching my Best of PL/SQL class to 25 students. This was my third class in Prague and each time I have been impressed by the quality of the students. Lots of really excellent questions, critiques of my code, new ideas for me to pursue....and I got to enjoy Prague for a little while.

It is a delightful city, especially the sidewalks and especially because I have had the very good fortune to become friends with some current and former employees of Oracle, and they seem to be perfectly to take me out for excellent meals. I had a wonderful dinner with Roman and Lenka at Trattorio Cicala on Thursday (lots of photos on the wall of the owner with big movie starts - Sean Connery, Johnny Depp, Brad Pitt, Vin Diesel - but he didn't ask to take a picture with me. How insulting! Didn't he know who I was? Guess not...), and then on Friday at La Finestra with Petra. Oh and a fine but quick lunch with Roman, Lenka and Martin, who manages the Oracle University team there in Prague. Thanks for organizing the class, Martin!

Then on Saturday morning it was time to go home, or so I thought. I got to the Prague Airport 1.5 hours in advance - and found the entire airport shut down. There had been a fire, apparently. All systems were down, no one could check in for their flight....within an hour, my British Airways flight was cancelled and I was starting to contemplate having to stay an extra night in Prague - or London/Heathrow, but then I got onto a Czech Airlines flight, and was able to catch the third and last American Airlines plane back to Chicago. We are, in fact, starting our descent into my home city right now. [At which I found out that my suitcase was not on the plane; a day later, though, it had been delivered to my house.]

Unfortunately, I go back to an empty house. About 10 days ago, my son, Chris, fell while skateboarding and broke his left leg - badly. Now he has a titanium pin in his left leg and needs lots of help. So my wife, a former nurse, flew down a few days ago to assist.

Well, my house may be empty, but it's still home and I very much look forward to sleeping in my own bed, making my own bowl of old-fashioned oatmeal for breakfast, and so on.

And in six days, I fly back to Europe, to Birmingham, UK for the UKOUG conference!

See some of you there....
SF

Sure hope Oracle keeps mySQL!

I have decided that I really hope that Oracle gets to keep mySQL when it completes the acquisition of Sun (though I can certainly understand if the European Union draws the line and demands that it be spun off).

Why would I like this?

First, I am certain that Oracle will treat it right, probably do a better job of supporting and enhancing it than has Sun, simply because it has deeper pockets with which to finance such an effort.

Second, as you may have read by now, IBM has announced support for PL/SQL-based applications on DB2 9.7. So? Well, I think there is a rather good chance that in a few years, all of IBM's DB2 variants will support PL/SQL.

And if Oracle keeps mySQL, it seems to me that there is every reason to believe that Oracle will port PL/SQL over to mySQL, so that it has a solid programming language with which to manipulate mySQL data (the current state of mySQL's stored procedure language is not very encouraging).

Add to that the fact that PL/SQL now also runs on Oracle's Times Ten database, and it is possible for me to dream about a day when PL/SQL will become the de facto standard database programming language for SQL/RDBMS databases (well, except for Microsoft SQL Server).

What does that mean? I can sell more books! Do more trainings and webinars!

Go, PL/SQL, go!

An opossum in our tree

We thought we had a squirrel nest in the English Oak in our backyard - we certainly saw squirrels running around in the tree, and we could see a big bunch of leaves collected in the heart of the tree.

It also looked like the squirrels were actually able to bend down a branch from the English oak (which grows vertically for a long time and does not spread its branches) to form a bridge over to the pear tree and then to the garage.

But then recently I saw that a very thick branch had been bent at a sharp angle across to the neighbors yard:














Today, that branch above was bent almost down to the fence. It looked clearly broken - I investigated. It was. So I sawed it off and then Veva said: "Look, there's an opossum in the nest!" And then all became clear: that was no skinny little squirrel bending these branches. It was a big fat opossum:



Very cute!

Software Developers as Gods

Software - and testing it - is a very funny thing. Seems to me that in some ways software is our (humanity's) closest attempt to be gods - to create our own worlds.

In the real world, the "organic" one, stuff just happens and it is beyond beautiful. In the cyberworld, we - humans - must be the gods who pay attention to every detail. And every detail has to be right - which is awesomely overwhelming as tasks go.

To achieve the goal of a functioning, sustaining world, we have to explicitly and thoroughly test our software. In the real world, when stuff doesn't work, it does and does not make it to the next generation.

Can you imagine telling a god that it has to test its creation before we are expected to live in it? What an insult! The resulting fury would surely scorch a civilization or two to embers (perhaps that was really the sin of Sodom). So you can understand why we programmers do so little and so ineffective testing. It is insulting to think that what we wrote does not work, does not meet the needs of our users.

Well, it's hard being a god, but after a while you get used to it. You drink another Diet Coke, make snide comments to other gods about the fickleness of your subjects, and think up another methodology that will hopefully get you that much closer to perfection.

Somehow, I don't think that humans are up to this task.

But from one software developer to another (if that is what you, my reader, are), BEST OF LUCK!

Congratulations to Rio!

I am so happy. The Summer Olympics will not be in Chicago in 2016.

I thought it was such a bad idea. It was basically an attempt by Mayor Daley to establish his "legacy" of making Chicago a "great" city. It would have been a disastrous mis-allocation of resources very much needed elsewhere.

I tell you what, Mayor Daley, how about if you establish your legacy by ending the almost every day killings of children (almost always African-American) in your city?

It really burned me up that he could spend so much of his time, our money, etc., on trying to get the Olympics and so little of his time, effort, our money on making this city safe and healthy for its children. Disgusting.

Joel Silva, How Could You Be So Mean?

Got this email from my Dad (turns 80 next month) yesterday:

Subject: Twitter From: sheldon feuerstein

I took a look at Twitter and asked to see what was there for you and found one comment that asked "hasn't anyone told Steven that PL/SQL is dead?" I hope not...

DAD

I tracked down this message to Joel Silva, who wrote: "Going to attend Steven Feuerstein conference today. Can anyone tell him PLSQL is dead!?"

First of all, if it is dead, why are you coming to my event in Porto, Portugal? :-)

Second, you got my dad all worried....Joel, Joel, how could you be so mean?

So please people: be careful what you say on the Internet (about me, anyway). There are the tender sensibilities of parents to keep in mind!

:-)

OOW PL/SQL sessions with a multimedia focus

My friend and PL/SQL expert, Marcel Kratochvil, will be at OOW (up from Australia) to talk about his experiences using PL/SQL to deliver multimedia-rich applications. If you have any interest in this area, I strongly encourage you to check out his two sessions.

The first is at the Unconference, and covers Internet PL/SQL development Tips:
Wednesday - Oct 14, 1 PM
Overlook II: Mod PL/SQL Development Tips - including Google Maps, Spatial Integration and sending HTML formatted emails with graphics.

The second is a workshop to be held at the Oracle Develop Conference at the Hilton, and is a hands-on workshop for building an internet based multimedia PL/SQL application. Here are the details:

Tuesday Oct 13, 2.30pm -3.30pm Hilton Hotel
Build Fast, Secure Web Applications with the PL/SQL Gateway and Oracle Multimedia
In this hands-on lab, learn to build fast multimedia Web applications on Oracle Database with minimal code. Build a Web interface to query and view multimedia data with relational data. For example, query and retrieve a photograph, audio clip, or document in one piece of code. Tune the database so multimedia data will fly off the disk into the application.