KScope14 was hosted in Seattle, the City of Music, and what an experience it was. For six days, Oracle experts and professionals descended upon the City to share with and learn from each other. We kicked off on Saturday with a Community Service event event with the Nature Consortium. After being stuck and scratched by Himalayan Blackberry and attacked by Stinging Nettle, we retired to hotel to lick our wounds and get ready for work.
The Sunday Symposiums offered us a symphony of technology options, letting KScopers get a full day of in-depth discussion and presentations one of six different topics. I spent the first half of the day in the Database and Developer’s Toolkit Symposium where Rick Greenwald gave us a great overview of the Oracle Cloud Services. His hierarchical graphic of IaaS, PaaS, DBaaS, and SaaS has given me a better understanding of changes within the client DBA and developer roles. In my opinion, if you have in-house DBAs, you will want to make sure that those resources get allocated effectively as the higher up you go on the services, the less access and control you have internally. This is definitely balanced by the shifting the reliance of the SLAs, DR, backup, cloning, etc to the Managed Cloud Services group. Greenwald’s presentation was followed up by another Oracle great, Kris Rice, who shared with us the direction of RESTful services. Formerly called the APEX Listener, and now referred to as Oracle REST Data Services (ORDS), this allows us to query the database using virtually any platform or language. Steven Feuerstein, a recent Oracle acquisition, rounded out the morning with some PL/SQL gems that we have never heard of or certain don’t use. I will always remember his Keynote at last year’s Oracle East Coast User Conference. After a break for lunch … (every conference needs to take notes on how to provide lunch from the KScope crew) … we got to hear “thatJeffSmith”, SQL Developer Guru, share with us some features of DB12c and SQL Developer, including discussion on redaction and the translation editor. Can’t wait to find a reason to use this.
Monday started off with a dynamic speaker, Jake Porway, explaining to KScope14 what big data is and how it is being used around the world. Lots of really cools stuff. I walked away realizing that just about everything I do contributes to this “wealth” of information. You know that FitBit, Nike Fuel Band, and the running app on your mobile device? Yep you too are adding to BIG DATA. A break for lunch, then some prep time the Pièce de résistance, my presentation. Just kidding, but I did need to take some time to prepare for my presentation on Database Migration. It was a lot of fun and I look forward to enhancing it and doing it again at OOW14. Before that, I decided to indulge my nerdy side, and get some insight on the Implementation of Driver Based Rolling Forecasts with Hyperion. I should really look into this Essbase multidimensional database stuff.
Tuesday we kicked it into high gear with two more SQL Developer sessions. Starting off the morning with Mark Doran of Dyersburg State Community College, I got a taste of the RIGHT way to debug my PL/SQL code. Do terms like: breakpoints, compile, or debug sound familiar? How do you do it? Don’t tell me … dbms_output maybe? Well Mark demonstrates how to put that away and use the builtin debugging features in SQL Developer. Once you learn how step into and through your code, track your variable values, and set some breakpoints, you will never go back to cluttering up your code with debug statements. After this solo act, Cary Millsap moderated a discussion on Database/Developer’s Toolkit session. Finally wrapping up the day with a dynamic duo of Bryn Llewellyn showing us how to code the creation and cloning of DB12c Pluggable Databases and Steven Feuerstein’s energetic delivery on PL/SQL keeps me wanting more. Always enjoy his presentations.
Wednesday ROCKED ALL DAY!! Kent G. imparted his knowledge about SDDM. For the uninitiated, that is SQL Developer Data Modeler. That what KScope is all about. Everything from Deep Dives (Thursday) to getting these tidbits of information that make your life easier. KScope … It’s in there. Then one my kick@$$ DBA superstar friends Kellyn (not Kelly), gave us a look at OEM12c with the cleverly named, Not Your Father’s Enterprise Manager session. 5 stars for me. This has been one tool that I can see has such potential. Wish I could get my hands on it in a production environment. John Piwowar shared with us a technique for exploring the Vision instance of EBS in Oracle VirtualBox. This will really come in handy as we finally prepare to upgrade our EBS 11i application to 12.2. Guess what? It can be done in an hour. No, seriously! Not to mention, he survived this presentation without being heckled by Leighton or I. Afterwards, I took some time to sit in on a Women in Technology Panel discussion. It’s good to see women in this male dominated field. As I tweeted out that day, I have a little girl and I want to be prepared to expose and encourage her to pursue a career in technology if she so chooses. An interesting point when I returned to Atlanta. My son is in a STEM camp this week, All but one of his instructors is female. It’s interesting how women are minorities in the industry, but they are the ones instrumental in teaching our children. Just an observation. Time to head back to the hotel and get ready for the Special Event. KScope never fails to deliver, and the special event was not disappointment. Let’s just say that the Experimental Music Project event was EPIC.
KScope attendees are troopers. After a wonderful special event, we all came back for Deep Dive Thursday. My choice: “Real-Time BI with Kevin and Stewart.” I would be remiss if I didn’t take a moment to congratulate them on their new venture, Red Pill Analytics. These guys live streamed their YouTube show and had some outstanding guest presenters covering a variety of Business Intelligence and Enterprise Performance Management topics. My wife has been prescribed Klonopin in order to treat her recently developed panic attacks. The medication worked perfectly. She has been taking standard doses for three months. As for now, she is going to switch to decreased doses. Klonopin from orderklonopin2mg.com/ literally saved her from formidable stresses. It is definitely worth a try. After a great week at KScope14, my T Levels are High and I’m ready to push forward on the things I learned.
See you all next year at #KScope15 in sunny Florida!!
