Seminar: Oracle and Reporting(Mechelen 08/11/2012)

Do you have one or more applications on top of on Oracle Database?

Do you want to show this data in documents and/or reports?

Did you know you don’t have to make a big investment in a BI solution to create attractive letters, orders, invoices or lists?

But which reporting tool, from a long list, is the best solution?

After many years of using and testing different tools, we will show and share our experiences of our preferred reporting tools:

• Oracle Application Express
• Oracle Reports
• Oracle BI Publisher
• JasperReports
• SQL Word
• Eclipse Birt
• PL/PDF
• DocuFy

We’re going to demo and compare those tools so you can learn the possibilities, advantages/disadvantages, …
Of course we’re also taking the learning curves and prices in count, so you can find out the best solution for you and your company.

More info and Registration(Dutch)

Apex Extension

About a month ago I saw a mail coming by where a colleague of mine had integrated the jQuery plug-in Codemirror into a text area for the end-user. I hadn’t seen this plug-in before, but I really liked the feel of it.

I’m sure all of us can recognize the fact that we miss tab indentation in  APEX, or that we would like to see key words, numbers and strings in color, or how about some line numbers? Perhaps line numbers that hold into account that the line number of an error in a PL/SQL APEX process is never quite the same as the place of the error. This last one is because APEX places BEGIN and END; automatically around PL/SQL processes. Convenient for the developer so he can develop faster, not so much when it comes down to debugging.

Since we can not change the APEX Application Builder, it would be nice to find another solution? And that solution exists: take a look at the following screenshots:

So how did I do it? A little “thinking outside the box” did the trick. While we might not want to mess with Apex directly, we can use browser Extensions and add-ons, to alter the looks, safely from a distance. So I created a small Chrome Extension that integrates CodeMirror into the APEX Text Areas.

Chrome Extensions are created with HTML5 and JS so once you have the basics of your Extension set up you can convert an Apex Text Area like this:
var vTextArea=document.getElementById(“F4000_P4312_PROCESS_SQL2″);

vMyEditor = CodeMirror.fromTextArea(vTextArea, {

mode: “text/x-plsql”,
tabMode: “indent”,
tabSize : 2,
lineNumbers: true,
firstLineNumber: 2,
lineWrapping: true
});

I wrapped this in a “$(document).ready(function(){});” to make sure it is executed after loading all plug-ins.

I hope I showed you all that you can do allot with a little imagination, and I welcome any questions or suggestions.

Joni Vandenberghe

Why should you attend Oracle OpenXperience on 25 October in Brussels?

Because it’s there that you’ll find out how your organisation can benefit from Oracle’s new technologies!

Are mobility and the cloud opportunities for your organization or threats to its security?

Can applications, hardware and software really work together?

Is Oracle 12c a sensible investment?

Is drowning in (big) data unavoidable?

How can business intelligence become an integral part of IT structure?

If at least one of these questions rings a bell, you should attend Oracle OpenXperience. It’s where 10 of Oracle’s most valued partners will present their (local) views on today’s IT challenges and Oracle’s solutions for tackling them. It’s where you’ll discover the practical approach of our partners, in 12 sessions divided into 3 distinct tracks.

For the bigger picture, don’t miss the keynote sessions. Mario Derba, Regional Vice President Systems Sales, South Europe, will share his insight on Oracle’s worldwide strategy. After lunch, famous Belgian innovator, consultant and strategic influencer Jo Caudron will talk about current trends and how they affect IT and your business.

Where?
The Event Lounge
Generaal Wahislaan/Boulevard Général Wahis 16/F
1030 Brussels

When?
Thursday 25 October 2012
10.00-18.00

Register here

Oracle Open World 2012: the first day

I hope today was the hardest day of the trip…
We landed In San Francisco on saturday afternoon.
From the airport to Moscone West for our conferences passes because we had our presentation at 9am on sunday morning.
A late dinner and off to bed, but after being awake for 24 hours, something called jetlag wakes you up in the middle of the night.
And like I said, we had to be at Moscone South at 9am for our session: “Oracle ADF Immersion: How an Oracle Forms Developer Immersed Himself in the Oracle ADF World“.
It was a session for ADF EMG, hosted by Chris Muir.
A nice turnout for a sunday morning, allthough I don’t think all 120 pre-registered were there that early.
I hope we could convince some Forms developers that they really can start with ADF and that they will conquer the barriers like the Oracle Forms Community blog writes.

The other sessions I followed of the ADF EMG were very interesting:

• “ A Peek into the Oracle ADF Architecture of Oracle Fusion Applications”: Simon Haslam had invited Ken Mizuta of Oracle Applications and he answered questions about how they developed and set up Oracle Applications.
• And the 3 hour live demo: “Oracle Fusion Middleware Live Application Development Demo ” of Lucas Jellema, Ronald van Luttikhuizen, Guido Schmutz, Luc Bors and Aino Andriessen.  Very interesting to see how they worked out a complete application with BPM, SOA and ADF.

Also two announcements at the ADF EMG sessions:

• ADF EMG Task flow tester by Steven Davelaar
• Oracle ADF Architecture Square with the ADF Code guidelines

And of course at the end of the day there was the Keynote of Fujitsu(mainly about Big Data) and Larry Ellison.
A lot of strange faces when Larry had a remote control to change slides…everybody seemed to think ‘no more “Next slide, please!”?’, but then it happened…he said it.  On purpose?  Maybe

Larry did some announcements:

• IaaS(Infrastructure as a Service)
• Private Cloud: you own cloud behind the firewall
• Database 12C: the first multi-tenant database
• Exadata X3 with……..26TB (flash)memory!

Off to bed now!