UKOUG Day 0.5

As a number of others have mentioned UKOUG 2007 is in full swing at the ICC in Birmingham.  I arrived last night and after the usual night before catch up with old friends and a surprisngly nice burger courtesy of all-bar-one it was off to bed and then this morning I broke the habit of a lifetime and sat in on the keynotes. - well the second keynote. This was Tom Kyte who was using the theme of unconventional innovation to talk about the history of innovation in the Oracle Database and the latest innovations in 11g. It has also to be the only time I have ever seen Tom present without sqlplus.

The first part of the keynote made me feel pretty old really. Tom asked the entire hall to stand and then to sit down when he called out the release at which they started working with Oracle. From my vantage point at the back it was pretty clear to see that there have been waves of fresh adopters/users both of 9i and 8i - the vast majority of the hall however went back to 7.3.4. We did have a smattering of Oracle 5 and 4 users withus and even one delegate who worked on 3. I had to sit down at 6 (which was released nearly 20 years ago in 1988!). The majority of the presentation though was a look at the new features in 11g. Highlights for me included :

• truly transparent access to the Oracle OLAP engine in the database via the query rewrite mechanism
• data mining access again through sql
• the data recovery advisor designed to answer the three core questions you'll encounter in a recovery scenario:
  Can I fix it?
  How do I fix it?
  How long will it take?

Incidentally Tom asked how many people had done a recovery in the last 30 days - maybe I misinterpreted the question but I was surprised at how few people put their hands up - we do test recoveries - or at least database duplications from the backup media - at least monthly. 

Next off I put my E-Business suite hat on and went to a session on devising a strategy for an upgrade to R12. I have to say that I was rather disappointed with this since approximately half the presentation showed off improvements in R12, and the remaining half essentially suggested that the drivers behind an upgrade strategy were much as they had always been. There was an interesting snippet though suggesting that in 2003 - 4 years after the release of 11i 60% of Oracle's customers were still on 10.7. Given the message that applications support will continue up to and beyond the fusion time frame and the suggestion by Larry Ellison that fusion apps may arrive in 2008 I was left a little bit wondering if R12 will be the release that never was for many people.

Finally before lunch it was off to hear the excellent Toon Koppelaars talking about the theory and practice of database constraint design. Starting with set theory and using just the emp and dept tables Toon took us through the implementation of database integrity constraints from theory to practice. Sadly we had to cut the session short, but an excellent discussion was held around set theory, logic, requirements specifications, mid-tier application design and so on.