OOW2008 day 2 – Oracle Beehive

Written by Paweł Barut
This day started with Keynote presented by Oracle President Charles Phillips. He spoke about Oracle acquisitions, and more complete portfolio of products that Oracle have now. What caught my attention most was announcement of new product, new collaboration platform Oracle Beehive. It joins features of email, calendar, document sharing, web conference and few more in one suite. What is most important those tools are open, so user can use ex. MS Outlook to access mails or calendar entries. Security is one of the key features. When you share document with others, they can see document in theirs workspace. They can even make local copy of this document. When document is deleted by original author, then all copies of the document become unusable for anyone. This is because all shared documents are encrypted and signed. While opening document there is validation of access rights for document. For me it seems as this is based on technology acquired from Stallent. It seems that this product will try to get market from MS Sharepoint and IBM Lotus.

Today I took some time to see Exhibition Hall, and walk around the city. While walking I’ve found one interesting bus – I was Bus that was advertising Microsoft SQLServer:

It looks pretty old :). Microsoft does not want to be absent in San Francisco during Oracle’s big conference.

I’ve also participated in few session on SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) and AIA (Applications Integration Architecture). Basically I wanted to have better understanding of Oracle offering in SOA area.

Cheers,
Paweł

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• Oracle OpenWorld 2008
• Preparing for Oracle OpenWorld 2008
• Arriving San Francisco – OOW2008 day 1.
• OOW2008 day 2 – Oracle Beehive
• OOW2008 day 3
• OOW2008 day 4 – HP-Oracle Exadata Server Announcement = Extreme Performance
• OOW2008 day 5 – It’s A Wrap

Arriving San Francisco – OOW2008 day 1.

Written by Paweł Barut
My trip to San Francisco went well. No delays, no problems with flight reservation – see what happened to Tim. I had small problems with hotel reservation, but finally everything is fine – I’m in different hotel then I’ve reserved. I’m suffering little from jet-lag. I slept an hour or two in plane, and then I could not sleep during night. So I feel little tired. The weather in SF is great, especially when comparing to very cold and rainy weather in Krakow last week.

My first experience of San Fracinsco is not very good. Seems to be not very friendly, and is definitely not of my style. I might change my mind when see more places in SF. But Oracle Conference is organized very well, so my attitude is improving :).

For today, I’ve planned mostly session regarding Security and Identity management. First of those session “Oracle Security Risk” was very good. Especially speaker Tanya Baccam from SANS.org was impressive. Presentation was about common problems with security in web based and forms application that use Oracle DB as backend. One type of attack was new to me: CSRF – Cross Site Request Forgery.

Next one was Security Roundtable – lot of questions from audience on variety of topics. Most hot one: applying CPU patches, Auditing, DB Valut, Encrypting data and transmissions.

Then was Oracle Identity Management lead by Matt Topper. Good overview of identity products from Oracle stack.

My last one session “Storage: A New Paradigm for Database” was also very good session. Ari Kaplan show now storage solutions can improve Backup/Restore times for database and decrease demand for storage space. He also presented new RAID-DP concept, and claims that it can provide better performance, with lower storage demand, and provide higher availability. This is something that I need to investigate in more details.

For the evening I’m going to take part in Bloggers Meetup.

Cheers,
Paweł
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Related Articles on Paweł Barut blog:

• Oracle OpenWorld 2008
• Preparing for Oracle OpenWorld 2008
• Arriving San Francisco – OOW2008 day 1.
• OOW2008 day 2 – Oracle Beehive
• OOW2008 day 3
• OOW2008 day 4 – HP-Oracle Exadata Server Announcement = Extreme Performance
• OOW2008 day 5 – It’s A Wrap

Preparing for Oracle OpenWorld 2008

Written by Paweł Barut
It's just few days left to Oracle OpenWorld 2008. First of all my trip starts on Saturday 20th at 13:00 in Kraków, Poland. Then I switch planes in Munich, Germany, and land in San Francisco at 19:20. Just 6 hours ahead, but when I add 9 hours difference in time zones, that it adds up to over 15 hours travel. The worst thing will be adaptation to totally different timezone. I will stay in Americas Best Value Inn at Hallam Street - I hope this is in reasonable walking distance from Moscone Center. I've created an map on Google Maps - the street view feature is great - now I know how the hotel neighborhood looks like. I've also checked transportation services by BART.
And the most important thing - My OOW2008 Schedule:

I do not expect big changes in this schedule, but still, some smaller changes are possible. I could skip one or more sessions to see Exhibition Hall or go for Unconference.
I'm also looking forward for meeting other Oracle Bloggers during Blogger Meetup organized by Eddie Awad.
Update: I forgot to mention about After Dark at Oracle OpenWorld where are evening parties listed.

See you in San Francisco,
Paweł

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DB Link to Oracle 11g

Written by Paweł Barut
As you know in Oracle 11g passwords are case sensitive by default. This applies to connecting via SQL*Plus or other client tools. And it also applies to database links between databases. So when you link from Oracle 10g to Oracle 11g create database link like this:

CREATE DATABASE LINK my_link
CONNECT TO remote_user IDENTIFIED BY "CaSe_SeNsItIvE_PaSsWoRd"
USING 'TNS_ID_11G';

Do not forget to enclose password by double-quote marks!
When you do not set password this way, you will be getting:

ORA-01017: invalid username/password; logon denied.

Hope this small tip will be useful for someone.

Paweł

More on Creating Database Links.

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Lost Pictures - Recovered Pictures

Written by Paweł Barut
This weekend I've spend great time with family, and we make lot of pictures. But when I've arrived home, and plugged camera to PC, it looked like this:
All pictures seems gone ...
For us computer geeks data lost is not an option. I've started to look for tools that can help me recover those data. In such situation rule number one is: not allow to write anything on this storage. Any additional write could lead to total data lost. I've googl`ed for software that could help. I've found lot of software that does "FAT Recovery", "Recover Digital Camera", "Data Recovery" - most of them priced 49-200$. Well, not big money, but still quite many when you need to recover 50 pictures. And you never know, if this software is worth it, and will solve your problem.
Finally I've found really great software that I would like to recommend: PC INSPECTOR™ smart recovery. It run very fast, and recovered almost all pictures. When looking into Camera counter and number of files, only one picture is missing. This software is freeware, but authors wants us to "Pay What You Want". And I've did it, as this software did his job perfectly.
Hope it help someone else to recover lost pictures.

Paweł

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Oracle OpenWorld 2008

Written by Paweł Barut
It's only 2 month left to Oracle OpenWorld 2008. Few news about this conference and my first time ever participation. Last week I've registered for OOW2008 as Blogger. Yesterday I've received confirmation email - I was accepted. I'm really looking forward to be in San Francisco and meet with all Oracle geeks, enthusiast and other bloggers.
I still need to apply for US Visa, and organize my trip. And of course choose sessions in which I would like to participate.

There is also one good news for people in Eastern Europe, Post Soviet Republics, Middle East & Asia. People from those countries can get discount on registration fee.

Attendees will need to enter EMKT as their priority code during "Step 2" of the registration process.

The countries from the EE, CIS & MEA regions which qualify for the discount are:

African Operations (except South Africa), Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Cyprus, Estonia, FYR Macedonia, Georgia, Hungary, Iraq, Iran, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lebanon, Lithuania, Malta, Moldova, Montenegro, Oman, Palestine, Poland, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Syria, Tajikistan, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, and Yemen.

Do not wait. Register for Oracle OpenWorld 2008 !

Paweł

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ORA-00904: "XMLROOT": invalid identifier

Written by Paweł Barut
Some time ago I've had noticed strange problem with XMLRoot function. I was installing application on production server and I've noticed that code:

SQL> select XMLRoot(xmltype('<a>a</a>'))
  2  from dual;

gives error:

select XMLRoot(xmltype('<a>a</a>'))
       *
Error in line 1:
ORA-00904: "XMLROOT": invalid identifier

WTF, it was running perfectly on development and test environment!
Quick search revealed that XMLROOT is function in XDB schema, which was missing in production environment. I've just copies source code for function from test environment and I could proceed further.
After some time, I've decided to check why this function was missing?
Quick search showed that function is created by script ?\demo\schema\order_entry\xdbUtilities.sql
Strange, well documented function is created only when you install demo schemas? Seems that there should be another explanation.
Then I've found that in documentation this function has 2 mandatory attributes, while my code has only one attribute. So there are 2 versions of XMLRoot function:

1. SQL function; see documentation
2. Simplified version created by demo in XDB schema - this version can be also used in PL/SQL

Conclusion: my original code should look like that:

SQL> select XMLRoot(xmltype('<a>a</a>'), version '1.0', standalone yes)
  2  from dual;

XMLROOT(XMLTYPE('<A>A</A>'),VERSION'1.0',STANDALONEYES)
------------------------------------------------------------------------

<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?>
<a>a</a>

This can run without XMLROOT function in XDB schema.

Hope this will help someone to save some time.
Cheers,Paweł

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