SOUG: Tampa Oracle Day

Life has been busy and I haven't been to a meeting in a while. There's a good one coming up though. If you're in the area you should make plans. RSVP here.

Here are the rest of the details from the email blast:

I wanted to give everyone an early head's up that we have a whole day of Oracle info coming up next week on Thursday, November 8th. We will have the Tampa Oracle Day and Product Fair at Raymond James Stadium from 9am-4pm. Following a brief intermission, our November Suncoast Oracle Users Group meeting will begin at 6pm in our regular Rocky Point location.

The Oracle Day event will include separate tracks with 4 sessions each for Simplify IT, Social/Mobile/Cloud, and Customer Experience. There will also be a Solutions Pavilion/Demo Grounds, breakfast and lunch, and a couple of Keynotes. In one of the Keynotes, I'll be relating some of our experiences at Nielsen in Leveraging Exadata for Consolidation and Business Growth.

You can register for the Tampa Oracle Day by calling 800.820.5592 ext.10942 or online at : http://www.oracle.com/us/dm/06495-nafm12034228mpp041-oem-1844932.html.

One of the most recent additions to Oracle's ever growing line of Engineered systems is the Oracle Database Appliance. The ODA is a 2-node RAC cluster with 4TB of storage all buttoned up in a 2U chassis. They've combined this hardware with a slick web interface management layer that allows you to stand up a 2-node RAC cluster in less than an hour with just a few clicks of the mouse. For our SOUG meeting this month, we will have one of these boxes in hand for a live demo and further discussion of the technology.

The Thursday evening SOUG meeting begins with refreshments and an opportunity for networking with your peers from 6:00-6:30pm followed by a presentation from 6:30-8:30pm. The meeting will be held in the Knowledge Services facilities at:

3031 North Rocky Point Drive West, Suite 275
Tampa, FL 33607

Hope to see you there.

SOUG: That Developer Guy

Not sure if you've heard of this guy. I've written about his tool, err...I mean his former tool...gah, I mean his former IDE before.

Jeff Smith left the dark side to join the mothership, Oracle, late last year. Last night, he visited us down here in Tampa.

He was here once before, when he worked from that other company. You can read about that visit here.

For those who have come to our user group, it's heavy on the DBA side. Not may developers. Not sure what that really has to do with anything, just thought I'd mention it.

You can find him on Twitter and his blog. If you don't know who he is, then you've probably never 1, used Toad, 2, used SQL Developer or SQL Developer Data Modeler C, you don't drink beer and F, you're not from West Virginia. You might count yourself lucky on that last point.

In a surprise twist, for me anyway, I'm not the first to write about Jeff's visit to Tampa. Jon Bloom from Bloom Consulting BI beat me to the punch. I concur with everything that Jon says.

Jeff was his usual self, maybe a Stephen Wright of Presenting. Dry and always funny with great audience interaction. I'm hoping my presence helped as he picked on me quite a bit, but I'm sure he'd have found someone if I wasn't there. I picked up a few cool new tricks. We talked about Twitter (naturally), had debates about the cloud (seriously derailed there) and whether or not you should write code (procedures, functions, packages) directly in the database. Good times.

Jeff is a must see.

Of course there was an after party. I had planned on spending some more time with Jeff than I did, but I had production issues to take care of. Besides, I think he was busy napping. Anyway, Troy (SOUG President), the aforementioned Dan McGhan, Michael (I'm not allowed to print his real name, this is a family blog), myself and Jeff headed over to Ybor city. Jeff wanted a cigar and while in Rome...We sat outside of King Corona for an hour or two and chatted about lots of things. Jeff told us all the cool new features coming out in 12c (OK, I lied...we tried to ply him with beer but he wouldn't divulge any secrets).

No pictures for you today. I wasn't in a picture taking mode. I did try to take a panoramic of the presentation, but my phone/camera borked.

Oh yeah, Jeff yelled at me for replacing his kid's picture...so I put it back up (for at least a day).

Mastering Oracle Trace Data

From The Twitter Machine today:



Which takes you here.

I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Millsap in person last year at OOW. Since then, I've seen him present at KScope and more recently at our local user group.

I can't tell you how much I haven't processed yet.

Anyway, he had mentioned to me that he was considering this one day Masterclass event, but hadn't figured out all the details. He has now.

So it looks like he only has an event set up for Dallas/Ft. Worth, I want him to come back and visit Florida. We're often left out of these types of events (everyone neglects America's...ok, I won't go there).

Why?
I have an obsession about proving things...I'm tired of getting beat down by people who say "prove it."

With that in mind, I'm starting a petition of sorts, to lure Mr. Millsap into coming back to Florida.

If you're interested, email me to let me know you're interested in having this event down here in Florida. If enough people are interested, I'll bug Mr. Millsap until he agrees to come back.

Update
When Mr. Millsap was in town, after he presented, he was showing us some material from this class he was thinking about.

If you read Jake's musings over at the AppsLab, you'll know he (and Rich and Anthony) have gone to Google IO for the past 2 years. This year they came away with, among other things, a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 and a Chromebook (which shipped very recently).

Mr. Millsap is doing something similar. Not only do you get to learn all about trace data, you get the tools to do so:

- Mastering Oracle Trace Data booklet, by Cary Millsap
- A limited license for MR Trace, the zero-click trace file collector for Oracle SQL Developer
- A limited license for MR Tools, the premiere software for trace file mining, management, and manipulation
- A Method R “I can help you trace it” T-shirt

So sign up for the DFW class, or let me know so we can bring Mr. Millsap back to Florida.

SOUG: Thinking Clearly About Performance

Alternate Title: Cary Millsap is Awesomesauce.

Last night the Suncoast Oracle Users' Group hosted Cary Millsap of Method-R Corporation. You may have heard about Mr. Millsap, he's written a few books, a few papers, done a couple of presentations...

Thinking Clearly About Performance
Find his paper here.

While the paper is good, I don't think it compares to the presentation.

This was my first second Millsap presentation I've gotten to see this year, the last was in June in Long Beach on My Case for Agile.

We were treated to 2+ hours ending a little after 9. There wasn't a dry eye in the house. Oh wait, that was something else. It was a packed house, approximately 50 attendees including Enrique Aviles (aka "evil Les" or @eaviles94) and his friend Eric, who drove down from Orlando.



One of my (many) takeaways was finally understanding what the prepare, execute and fetch were.

Here's the sequence diagram...



Here's the profile...



I had never thought of it in the context of what something like java does. Once I did, easy. Here's some pseudo-code:

ps = prepareStatement( "SELECT table_name FROM user_tables" );
rs = executeStatement( ps );

OK, not the best example, but it helped me finally make the connection.

It's All About the Skew
So you have CPU, Network, IO and Something Else. Is it divided evenly among the 4 components (talking about performance here)? 25% CPU. 25% Network. 25% IO. 25% Something Else. No, typically it's not. When you see the spike, you know that's where you start to look (is that Axiomatic?). I can't do it justice (pun intended)...so read the paper.

The beauty of this approach though is that it's not just confined to database performance, it's software performance in general. I think the "software" people get it more than we database people do too. You have to instrument your code if you are ever going to be good at Performance Tuning.

If you ever have the opportunity to see Cary speak on this topic (really, on any topic, he's incredibly good a breaking down a complex topic and making it digestable by mortals), don't hesitate, go see it.

The Future
Cary's got some plans for the near future too, so you may just get that opportunity sooner than you think. I won't spoil it, but I will announce it after he goes public.

SOUG: Cary Millsap

We (SOUG) have the fortunate pleasure of hosting Mr. Cary Millsap.

Perhaps you've heard of him?

The topic is Thinking Clearly About Performance.

Here's the abstract:

Creating high-performance as an attribute of complex software is extremely difficult business for developers, technology administrators, architects, system analysts, and project anagers. However, by understanding some fundamental principles, performance problem solving and prevention can be made far simpler and more reliable. This paper describes those principles, linking them together in a coherent journey covering the goals, the terms, the tools, and the decisions that you need to maximize your application’s chance of having a long, productive, high-performance life. Examples in this paper touch upon Oracle experiences, but the scope of the paper is not restricted to Oracle products.

Here's Mr. Millsap's Bio (note the inclusion of the word "teacher", my favorite description):

Cary Millsap / @CaryMillsap / cary.millsap@method-r.com

Cary Millsap is a public speaker, author, teacher, software designer and developer, entrepreneur, and software technology advisor. In 2008, he founded Method R Corporation, a company dedicated to making people's application software run faster and more efficiently. Mr. Millsap's technical papers are quoted in many Oracle books, in Wikipedia, in blogs all over the world, and in dozens of conference presentations each month. His blog reaches thousands of people each month. He has presented at hundreds of public and private events around the world. He wrote the book "Optimizing Oracle Performance" (O'Reilly 2003), for which he and co-author Jeff Holt were named Oracle Magazine's 2004 Authors of the Year.

RSVP here.

SOUG: Cary Millsap

Performance related topics are trending this year at SOUG. By trending, I mean 2 of 7. That's a trend right?

In January, we talked Tanel Põder into taking a vacation from his vacation. Now, we get Cary Millsap of...well, fame.

If you don't know who Cary (@carymillsap) is, you should. From his blog:

Oracle performance specialist since 1989, author of "Optimizing Oracle Performance" (O'Reilly), founder and president of Method R Corporation.

Hmm...I thought he had Teacher in there. Here it is from his Google Profile:

Oracle performance specialist, author of Optimizing Oracle Performance with Jeff Holt. Founder and President of Method R Corporation. Teacher, consultant, software designer and developer.

I really like that, Teacher. Teaching.

Teachers need to understand a subject enough to convey its essence to students. While traditionally this has involved lecturing on the part of the teacher, new instructional strategies put the teacher more into the role of course designer, discussion facilitator, and coach and the student more into the role of active learner, discovering the subject of the course. In any case, the goal is to establish a sound knowledge base and skill set on which students will be able to build as they are exposed to different life experiences. Good teachers can translate information, good judgment, experience and wisdom into relevant knowledge that a student can understand, retain and pass to others. Studies from the US suggest that the quality of teachers is the single most important factor affecting student performance...

Like Tanel, I don't understand many of the finer details, I do not have that kind of experience. What makes Tanel, and Cary, stand out, is that they can make these complex topics easily consumable by mortals.

Sign up details are here.

SOUG: The Tanel Põder Edition

Note how I used the cool "õ" in the title. I learned that it's not really an "o" but the o with a tilde over it. It's the 24th letter of the Estonian alphabet apparently.



Note the casual attire. He was in shorts. Why? Because he was on vacation. In Miami.

Not only did he take time out from vacation to speak to us, he drove 3 or 4 hours to get here. Awesomesauce.

Naturally, it was a packed house.



(That's Dan McGhan there of APEX fame, he's bald too...but not fat)

We got the Advanced Oracle Troubleshooting in 60 minutes which turned into something closer to 2 hours. Yeah for us. I went into this meeting thinking I wouldn't get a whole lot from it. I try to read Tanel's blog but much of is just beyond me. I figured this would be more of the same.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that I got quite a bit out of it. I think the credit here goes to Tanel...he made the material incredibly easy to consume. Sure, there were moments there talking about latches and buffer cache's and stuff, but I think the message he was trying to convey was a methodology towards troubleshooting. In other words, don't use the shotgun approach. Systematic. That was the keyword. I loved the approach, I just wish I hadn't been so intimidated before now. I've wasted years of time on the shotgun approach.

I think it would be great to have a few hours (days perhaps) (probably over beer(s)) to just pick his brain. Ask questions. Get answers.

Oh...and the modesty. In one of his demos he displayed an OS stack trace (Solaris) listing all the Oracle function calls. Yeah, the "opi" prefix is for Oracle Programming Interface (I think) and this one is for that and so on and so on. You could hear the muffled laughter in the audience...the good kind...because not very many people know those things. It was fun to watch.

In other meeting news, I didn't win any prizes. I did, however, get to meet this guy:



You may recognize the picture, it was up in the top right corner of this page for a few weeks not long ago.

Guess where I met him for the first time? Twitter. Gotta love The Twitter. He and a friend drove down from Orlando just to see Tanel.

It was a great night. Next time Tanel will be staying at my house where I will provide him good beer and my wife will pepper him with questions on his travels and Estonia.

Thanks Tanel for taking time for us. Thanks Enrique for introducing yourself. Thanks SOUG for tolerating my odd behavior.

SOUG: Where's Tanel Poder?

In Tampa, on January 27th, that's where.

Details can be found here. Please RSVP here.

The title of his talk is Advanced Oracle Troubleshooting in 60 minutes.

We have another real treat for you at our January meeting. Oak Table author and Oracle ACE Director, Tanel Poder will give us insight into some of his advanced troubleshooting techniques. What to do when the Oracle Wait Interface isn't enough and Oracle itself doesn't know what it is doing? Tanel will be showing you the method he uses for approaching bugs, session hangs and performance problems where Oracle itself sometimes doesn't know what it's doing. If you've done much Googling on Oracle issues, you've no doubt came across mentions of Tanel's Snapper, LatchProf, MutexProf, and other utilities. Come hear from the author how to utilize these and other proven techniques.

Tanel Poder is an experienced consultant with deep expertise in Oracle database internals, advanced performance tuning and end-to-end troubleshooting. He specializes in solving complex problems spanning multiple infrastructure layers such as UNIX, Oracle, networks, storage and recently the whole Exadata hardware/software stack. Tanel is one of the first Oracle Certified Masters in the world, passing the OCM DBA exam in 2002. In addition to consulting and delivering seminars worldwide, Tanel also publishes troubleshooting tools and technical articles at his website http://tech.e2sn.com and blog http://blog.tanelpoder.com.

This even will probably be very well attended. The Central Florida Oracle User Group (CFOUG) is already aware of his presence, so I'm sure they'll be sending a few people down. Since our group is quite heavy on the DBA side, we should have more than our normal number of attendees. I suspect this will be one of our better attended meetings giving the popularity of Mr. Poder. So RSVP early so we can make sure we have enough 1, room and 2, food and drinks for everyone.

SOUG: 2010 Tech Day

That time of year is quickly approaching. By "that time of year" I mean the Suncoast Oracle Users Group kind-of annual Technology Day.

I just got back from dinner at The Laughing Cat (if you are ever in Tampa, you must try this place out...awesome food), which is the reason for that beautiful plate of food. That's cheese tortellini, tiger shrimp and filet mignon, no mushrooms.

What is it?
Tech Day is a great event. I first came, all the way from Gainesville (a whopping 2 hour drive) back in 2006. Tom Kyte was the keynote speaker. As impressed as I was seeing Mr. Kyte for the first time live, I was even more impressed with another speaker; Bob Netherton [blog | twitter] of Sun (now a Solaris and Virtualization evangelist at Oracle) on Solaris 10. He was absolutely infectious.

Though I still haven't tried Solaris yet (still working on my meager Ubuntu "skills"), he was an incredible speaker.

The other famous dude I remember was Lewis Cunningham, you know, the guy who thinks I am stalking him.

November was good for my friend Chet, aka OracleNerd. For starters, he got a job. Congrats! He also just became the Secretary of the SOUG.

This is getting kind of weird. I was in that position a few years ago. Is the nerd stalking the geek? I moved to Tampa, he moved to Tampa. I job hopped, he job hopped (mine was voluntary). I was on the board of SOUG, he is on the board of SOUG.

Wait a minute! He also became Tampa's newest Oracle ACE! This is just getting creepy. Chet, cut it out! Just kidding. Chet's a good guy and deserves it (mostly for the t-shirts). I did some database t-shirts a long time ago. Yep, stalking me.

Whatever. :)

Back to the point of this post. We don't have a complete speaker list (still recruiting, any takers?) just yet. I'm working on Jeff Smith [blog] aka @hillbillyToad, Syme Kutz/Kris Rice and one other person who I won't name just yet (because he doesn't know I'm going to ask). I am sure that the ever popular Craig Shallahamer [blog] will be speaking, followed by a One Day Performance Seminar the following day.

We almost had Cary Millsap, but there was a scheduling conflict.

As the list is finalized, I'll post that here.

When is it?
Great question. Wednesday, October 6th, 2010.

Where is it?
Italian Club facility at 1731 E. Seventh Avenue in Ybor City

How much does it cost?
Absolutely nothing. Free, as in beer.

Where do I register?
Right here.

Just for fun, you can answer here too (but this won't mean you are registered):

SOUG: APEX 4.0

The much anticipated APEX 4.0 release is coming soon...in that spirit, Dan McGhan [blog|twitter] will be presenting on the new features. You might remember Dan, he's the one that constantly interrupted me during my first presentation ever, on APEX. We followed that up with a "joint" (by joint I mean I "let" him do all the work) presentation a few months later.

The event goes from 6 until 8 with the first half hour dedicated to eating and greeting. From 6:30 to 8 will be Dan's presentation.

You can read the event details here. Or I can just put it all here to save you a click (you're welcome):

Dan McGhan, our resident APEX expert, will be bringing us up to speed on the recent new release of Oracle's Application Express. APEX 4.0 is expected to be the biggest release in the product's history.

This session will break down many of the exciting new features that everyone has been looking forward to, including Websheets, Dynamic Actions, and Plug-ins, just to name a few. With APEX 4.0, development should be faster and easier than ever.

Dan McGhan has been a long time member of the SOUG. Dan is an Oracle Application Express expert and advocate. In addition to his "day job" with SkillBuilders.com, he is one of the top 10 contributors to the APEX forum, maintains his own Oracle and APEX blog, and has been a speaker at the New York Oracle Users Group, New England Oracle Users Group, and Suncoast Oracle Users Group events.

SOUG: Stewart Bryson

Tonight we welcomed Mr. Stewart Bryson [blog|twitter|RittmanMead] into the fold.

(Small side note: I met Mr. Bryson in person at COLLABORATE this year. For some strange reason, I had pictured him as this late fifties dude. Turns out he's (slightly) younger than me).

First off though, I walked in and there seemed to be a buzz in the air along with a few new faces (for me anyway, I can't attend regularly due to travel). Was this buzz all about Mr. Bryson. It seemed so.

Mr. Bryson has been working with RittmanMead (you might know one of the founders, Mark Rittman, Oracle's Person of the Year) since the beginning of last year and he's heading up the RittmanMead America division.

Anyway, off to the presentation. The title of the presentation was OLTP DBA’s Guide to Delivering a Dimensional Model. Many willing DBAs in the crowd wanting to hear his take on the matter. He certainly didn't disappoint. I started to realize it was getting dark in the room when I finally looked at my clock, a few minutes after 8. I believe Mr. Bryson began around 6:30, maybe a little later. That was the fastest hour and a half. Usually by then I am bored out of my mind and ready for beer with whomever will join me.

Now I was mad because it was going to get cut short. I'm pretty sure everyone else would have been willing to stay another hour or so as well.

Here's the presentation if you are interested. For more RittmanMead papers and presentations go here.

It took well over an hour for Mr. Bryson to finally make his escape. He stuck around to answer lots of questions and make fun of me...wait, that was someone else...or was it? No matter.

If you get a chance to see Mr. Bryson speak, take it. He knows his sh...err...stuff.

SOUG: OLTP DBA's Guide to OLAP

Two weeks from today (May 27th) the Suncoast Oracle Users Group (SOUG) will be hosting Stewart Bryson of RittmanMead America.

Mr. Bryson's presentation is titled, The OLTP DBA's Guide to Delivering a Dimensional Model.

Meeting information can be found here.

I haven't seen Mr. Bryson present yet but I have heard rumors.

SOUG + Toad

We had our monthly meeting tonight with Jeff Smith from Toad.

Although I am mostly a SQL*Plus snob, I can appreciate good tools (snicker...wait, that didn't sound right). Ummm...nevermind. No matter how I say it, it's not going to sound right. You know what I mean...get your mind out of the gutter.

My first exposure to Toad was...I was looking for a picture, but I can't find one. Let's just say this reminds me of it:



That picture is courtesy of The DailyWTF

Needless to say, after the Google-like simplicity of SQL*Plus, I had no desire what-so-ever to try it.

Like most things, it has evolved. The interface is much cleaner and is (maybe was always?) highly configurable.

Let's just say I didn't run screaming from the room this time.

<background>
I was a Microsoft Access "developer" masquerading as a secretary for a state run university. Access, at the time, was the best thing since sliced bread.

When I came to the Oracle world I was "handed" SQL*Plus and a tnsnames.ora file and told to get to work. Where were the pretty pictures? How can I "see" my tables? Within a week or two I believe I created an ODBC datasource and used Access as a front-end so that I could "see" stuff.
</background>

In Mr. Smith's capable hands, Toad didn't look so bad. I'm not ready to pay for it yet, but it was much better than I previously thought.

The session was informal with Mr. Smith taking a survey of the audience; naturally dominated by those neavil DBAs. I do know, and have used, the DBA module in Toad and found it quite useful.

One very cool feature was the ability to generate random data...with referential integrity. Awesome feature if you "like" to test. Building fake data can be a very time consuming process...building data that has RI, well, it is just painful.

The best feature was Spotlight. This is more of a DBA tool; it let's you view high level performance metrics and the interface to this is very cool...star trek like.

For a non-RAC system:



RAC:



After Party
Post-presentation festivities included a trip to the local Mexican restaurant and chance to meet SQLChicken, a local SQL Server guru guy who was born 4 years ago.

I haven't shaved in about a month and my beard is completely out of control, so hopefully I didn't scare them too much.

Thanks Jeff (and Quest) for extending your stay so you could speak to our group.

SOUG + Toad Evangelist = Fun!

Twitter saves the world...again. On Monday I saw @hillbillytoad's announcement that he would be in Tampa.



I proceeded to try and make plans to meet up with him along with @SQLChicken who resides in the area as well.

Then someone on the SOUG board decides to call a board meeting Monday night...at 9 PM...during 24. Jerk.

We discussed moving our March meeting to early April to accommodate another speaker. I told them that that Jeff Smith (aka @hillbillytoad) would be in town the 23rd and 24th (our scheduled meeting is on the 25th) and that I would contact him to see if he was available to stay longer or present on the 24th. While in the meeting, I sent him an email (apparently Mr. Smith goes to bed at 9:15 or something).

Tuesday morning I received confirmation that he would love to speak on Wednesday the 24th.

Who is this Jeff Smith character?

...is a Solutions Architect at Quest Software. He has been with Quest since 2001, working on the Toad R&D, Product Management, and Sales organizations. Jeff is the primary author of the Toad Handbook, 2nd Edition. Jeff is a regular speaker at Toad User Groups and Oracle User Groups worldwide.

You can find his blog here.

If you use Toad or are interested in learning more about Toad, come on over to his presentation/talk on Wednesday, March 24th. Directions and stuff can be found at the SOUG website.

SOUG: SQL Developer with Syme Kutz

Tonight was the Suncoast Oracle User Group (SOUG) meeting with Syme (pronounced Sim-e, I thought it was Si-me) Kutz of Oracle presenting on SQL Developer, mainly the new Unit Testing functionality.

Unfortunately, I missed the first half of the meeting due to a flight delay, but from what I did see, it's very cool. If you read the announcement last week, you'll remember that Kris Rice had offered up (aka - threw under the bus) Syme. I made first contact and then passed the baton to our meeting coordinator who finalized the arrangement.

If you want to check out the Unit Testing features, you need the latest release (2.1), which can be found here. To access it, go to Tools --> Unit Testing



I won't go into gory details simply because I need to use the dang thing first. I'm sure I'll have some posts in the near future.

Anyway, what I did see was pretty slick.

Syme then gave us some history of the product (developed originally by himself and Mr. Rice) and explained a bit more about some of the functionality. Many of you already know about the integration with APEX (I don't know much, other than it exists). That's about to be expanded and will give even more control over many aspects of APEX, including some pretty tight integration with the Unit Testing module.

One really cool thing that he mentioned, if you open up a trace file in SQL Developer, you get a pretty report for it. Apparently reverse engineered from tkprof.

First, find your trace file:



Double click it to open it and you'll see something like this (you'll have to click through on this one):



I will break it down if you're too lazy though.

The first column of the report is the SQL:



Next up are the statistics:



Waits:



and finally Row Sources:



Pretty slick stuff.

Thanks Syme for coming down, hopefully we can get you down here again to show us the rest.

SOUG: SQL Developer Unit Testing

This week the Suncoast Oracle Users Group will be hosting Syme Kutz, Senior Architect for Database Tools at Oracle.

Update
I received Syme's bio (from Syme of course). It's pretty impressive...

I started working at Oracle in October of 1995 in the Systems Performance Group of Consulting under Cary Millsap.

I then spent 8 years tuning the Database and Oracle Applications. My Experience tuning application lead me to work with Max Schierson fixing and Tuning iStore. I left consulting and moved into Applications It working for Max at Headquarters were our focus was building custom applications to better facilitate oracle policies and programs. I built custom applications until a position opened up on APEX the development team. After rebuilding the Database management side of APEX, Kris Rice and I began the Sql Developer project. When the group split and Sql Developer became a product I followed. I have been a developer on Sql Developer since then building various functionality, such as reports and Unti Testing.

We "found" Syme through Kris Rice who unceremoniously offered his services up on Twitter.



After much wrangling and negotiating, we finally managed to talk Syme into coming down from Orlando.

According to Kris, Syme was heavily involved with the new Unit Testing functionality of SQL Developer. We all know how much testing us database folks do, so it makes perfect sense right?

Anyway, if you're in town and Thursday, please come by and check out Syme's presentation, it should be very interesting.

SOUG: Holiday Party

I've got a great reason to go outside this evening, SOUG's annual holiday party is tonight.

Read all about it here.

It will be held at the laughing cat which is located here.

If you are in the Tampa Bay area, stop by...just don't forget to RSVP or Troy will get mad...and so will I if there isn't enough food for me.

Secretary Justice

I started out as a secretary and it's come full circle now.

Tonight I was elected Secretary of the Suncoast Oracle Users Group (SOUG).

What does that mean? Well, pretty simple I think. Blog. Sum up the meetings in a fun and easy to read way to convince them that they are really missing out.

As a member of the board, I will also (eventually) push for twice monthly meetings. One more formal with the presentation format and one more casual.

We spent an hour tonight talking after the presentation...it would be nice to do that in a more relaxed environment.

Fortunately, I've been writing about the group for some time, so this is just a natural extension of that. I look forward to serving.

Plus, it's another job I have that doesn't pay anything. ;)

(Old) Social Media and Travis Page

Driving home on Wednesday listing to the local AM station, 970 WFLA, there was an announcement for the radio resumes and the most recent winner, Travis Page.

Travis then came on air, told us a little about himself and what he was looking for. I couldn't believe it when I heard Database Technologies.

Really? On the radio? I couldn't believe it.

When I got home I had to check this guy out. First thing I wanted to know, was he an Oracle guy or a Microsoft guy. Reading through his resume I found that he did have a little bit of Oracle, but he was obviously focused on SQL Server. Boo.

I had to give the guy credit though. I look(ed) for jobs through twitter, dice, monster, etc., pretty much all the places where you didn't have to talk. This guy used the radio. The radio isn't new, or shiny. Perhaps it can be shiny...but I digress.

So I dropped Travis a line telling him about tonight's SOUG meeting and encouraged him to attend. Sure enough he did.

I love that kind of dedication. I've tried to help people in the past only to see them ignore my advice.

So, if you're in the Tampa Bay area and looking for a junior developer, either Oracle or SQL Server (ugh), call Travis immediately for an interview.

We talked for a bit after the meeting and seems like a very genuine guy (plus, he showed up!). Besides his little SQL Server problem, I think a company could find good use out of a guy like him. Resourceful and dedicated are two very good traits to have in an employee.

If you missed it up above, you can find Travis' resume here.

SOUG: Attack Your Database Before Others Do

SOUG, also know as the Suncoast Oracle Users Group, is holding it's montly meeting tomorrow night in Tampa. The meeting is held at the PricewaterhouseCoopers facilities located across the street from Raymond James Stadium, home of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

Todd DeSantis, of Sentrigo will be presenting. I will not try and recreate the presentation description, I'll just practice the fine art of cut and paste.

In this presentation, we will show typical security flaws found in PL/SQL and Java code due to programmer mistakes. We will demonstrate how to use existing open-source scanning and fuzzing tools to automatically find and flag such flaws, and also demonstrate how creating your own tools in PL/SQL can help you keep your code secure.

In this presentation, you will learn:
1. Common security mistakes developers make
2. How to use open source tools to find those mistakes
3. How to roll out your own PL/SQL fuzzer

Todd DeSantis brings a wealth of technical knowledge and a passion for using technology to better society to his position as lead North American Sales Engineer at Sentrigo. With a background in computer science from Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Todd has been using his understanding of computer programming and database systems throughout his career. At Sentrigo Todd is striving to bring a higher level of database security and safety to the enterprise. Prior to Sentrigo Todd successfully helped Fortune 50 companies rethink data access paradigms with Endeca Technologies. Todd started his career at Enerjy Technologies where he helped organizations improve overall levels of Java code quality and visibility. In his spare time Todd, an avid audiophile, enjoys working toward creating the 'absolute sound' with hi-fi audio systems, and enjoys many different genres of music.

There are possible opportunities for (beer) networking afterwards.