Oracle OpenWorld

Eleven days out now...I'm still a bit bummed that I won't get to attend.

I have been...well, I can't help, but follow along.

What To Do?
There should be more than enough to do while there. A full week of learning, networking, schwag, boozing...I mean networking.

Wow, how could I forget...the Appreciation Event. Aerosmith, Three Dog Night, Roger Daltrey, Shooter Jennings and The Wailers (of Bob Marley fame). (Thanks Justin for reminding me).

Joe D'Alessandro, President and CEO of the San Francisco Convention & Visitors Bureau located just steps from Moscone Center, lists the top 10 things to do around the Moscone Center. Part I is here, Part II is here.

Alex Gorbachev is organizing the Blogger Meet-up. Strangely, I have heard/read hardly a peep about bloggers that are going on the blogger pass. I'm pretty sure Fuad Arshad is going on the pass...but that's the only one I am aware of. I don't doubt there are others...just haven't seen any related posts or tweets to that effect.

Chris Muir is helping to organize the ADF Enterprise Methodology Group Meet-up. Chris informs me that Siman Haslam is doing much of the work.

Bob Rhubart has the enterprise architects, Enterprise Architecture Meet-Up

Update
Not sure how I missed the Apex meet-up...find information here. I'll definitely miss that one as I believe almost all of those guys and gals owe me beer.

Unconference, which seems to have become quite popular since it's inception in 2007.

Sessions
Application Express, my how that has grown since I began using it in 2005. WIN!

How about something on Solaris? Anything from Sun?

Coherence?

Some XMLDB from Marco Gralike?

BI Publisher

The CRM blog lists out all of their sessions by...ummm...everything:
Communications
Business Intelligence
Insurance
Financial Services
Sales Productivity
Public Sector
Education and Research

Exadata events can be found here (pdf).

Here is the OOW 09 page on the Oracle Wiki. Of course much of this information can be found via the official Oracle OpenWorld blog.

Finally, check out OpenWorld Live if, like me, you won't be attending. Looks like there are some pretty cool sessions to check out there as well.

Database Cleanup: Metrics

Before my current refactor/redesign goes to production, I would like to capture some metrics. I'm fairly limited in what I can actually do (i.e. I can't use DBMS_PROFILER in production).

So far, this is what I have come up with:

1. Lines of Code (LOC) - I don't believe this is necessarily a reflection of good or bad code. For instance, I can take that 2 line INSERT statement and turn it into 20 lines.

Was

INSERT INTO my_table(id, col1, col2, col3, col4, col5, col6, col7, col8, col9 )
VALUES ( 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 );

Is

INSERT INTO my_table
  ( id, 
    col1, 
    col2, 
    col3, 
    col4, 
    col5, 
    col6, 
    col7, 
    col8, 
    col9 )
VALUES 
  ( 1, 
    2, 
    3, 
    4, 
    5, 
    6, 
    7, 
    8, 
    9, 
    10 );

That's a pretty sane example. The 2 line version isn't all that bad, but it does run off the page. The point I am trying to make is that "cleaning" up can actually add more lines to your code.

In my opinion, when more than one person is going to support the code, readability is a nice thing. Whether or not you like my style, it is (more) readable. So LOC is not necessarily a great metric, but it can give you an idea which way you are going (after it has been properly formatted anyway).

2. COMMITs - Many argue that there should (almost) never be commits (an exception is logging with the AUTONOMOUS_TRANSACTION pragma) in the database. The calling application should perform the commits. Unfortunately that general rule is not always followed. I've added it to my list of metrics because it is pertinent to our environment. Of course I have gone to great pains to make sure that the removal of one commit will not impact the entire system...that possibility does exist when you have commits everywhere.

3. Text - This was a real stretch. What is the size of the individual procedure, package or function? I wouldn't have considered it (I never have until now), but I was desperate to define something...anything. How do you determine that?

SELECT name, type, SUM( LENGTH( text ) ) t
FROM dba_source
WHERE owner = 'MY_OWNER'
  AND name = 'MY_NAME';

4. Dependencies - Also known, to me, as modular code. Why have 200 INSERT statements into a single table when you could wrap that up into a single procedure and call that? If you add a column, you'll still have to go through and fix all those occurences (if it's not defaulted to something). But if you remove a column from that table, it can easily be hidden from the calling code, thus you only have to change it in one place. Of course you wouldn't want to leave it there forever, but it can be done piece-meal, bit by bit as you work on affected parts.

Have you ever thought about this before? What kind of metrics would you suggest? I know mine are a bit of a stretch...so please share.

Offset Costs to OOW?

I had an idea today (yeah, I know, scary).

What if I got someone to take ORACLENERD T-Shirts to Oracle OpenWorld and sold them there, on site? It would help me by getting the word (and the t-shirt) out, and it could help you as I would split any profit with you.

Not sure if it could be done or if anyone would be willing to do it...but hey, desperate times calls for desperate measures. If you are at all interested, let me know.

Blog Update

Somewhat spurred on by the redesign of the AppsLab last week, I decided to (finally) do a little redesign myself.

Friday night I spent about 6 hours on it.

Minus a few minor modifications, I had been using the original design I started with 2 years ago. I liked it as it was fairly simple and allowed for a lot of space for code (as opposed to the limited width blogger templates). In fact, anytime a technical friend starts one up, I suggest the use of a screen wide template because inevitably, their code examples will not look so good.

First thing I did was remove almost all of the <div>/<span> tags. I've never liked them. I prefer the old <table> tag approach. Of course I am not a web guy or designer by trade, so I probably miss out on the advantages...actually, I don't use them like they do so who cares. Apparently the differences are great amongst some in the web community, religious I would dare to say. Table tags are like putting the commas where they should go, at the end of the line. The span/div tags are like putting them in front.

That was tedious to say the least.

Also inspired by Rich's redesign of their social media buttons:



I decided to do the same. A couple of times. What's up top is what I ended up with. A brief survey on Twitter has some people not liking them. What do you think?

I like them because I made them (mostly). Of the 6 hours, probably 4 were spent in Gimp trying to create those silly things. The idea was simple, I wanted more real-estate on the side and there seemed to be a bit of unused space up top.

Tell me what you think in the comments. Good? Bad? Indifferent?

While I'm on the subject of the blog, I've been trying to reconcile the differences in numbers between the statistics that are gathered. There are three services I use: GoDaddy, their default web server statistics they provide, Google Analytics which I've been using since the beginning, and most recently, Quantcast.

Here are the last 2 years from Google Analytics:



Here they are from the web server statistics (GoDaddy):



I have no idea what that large spike is...here are the numbers for the last 9 months:



Of course there is no explanation of what is a "request" and a "page request." I'm pretty sure I've never had 242K hits. I can only assume that "request" includes all the objects that are downloaded with each page (css/images/javascript/etc). Which leaves me with page requests. Neither Analytics or Quantcast has ever shown a number in the tens of thousands (though last month did show a total of about 10k page views). Not really sure what to make of it though. I'd love to say that I'm getting 60K hits per month, but I don't believe that to be the case.

Anyway, if you know the difference let me know.