OraTransplant

Hurrah! I’m an Oracle ACE

Last week I got a notice that I was awarded the Oracle ACE status. My profile is already listed at oracle.com, and other updates like the foum status and listing at blogs.oracle.com will follow soon. I’m pretty proud of getting the Oracle ACE status, especially since I’m not employed by an IT company with a commercial interest in having an Oracle Ace on board. I think compliments to my employer, Eurotransplant, are in place for giving me the possibilities to do the things I do and tell people about it in several ways.

I was pleasantly surprised when I got an email from the Oracle ACE program telling me I was nominated by Grant Ronald. Grant and I have been working together on quite a number of occasions ever since I started at Eurotransplant and started blogging about it in 2005. Eurotransplant’s story fits perfectly with the Oracle strategy Grant is trying to get out there to Forms users: UPGRADE and INTEGRATE. Upgrade to the latest version of Oracle Forms and then integrate it with other (newer) technologies to get the benefits of both worlds. This might seem obvious, but apparently it’s not so obvious for many Forms users. Having Eurotransplant as a successful example can help convince them of this strategy.

Fellow Oracle bloggers, please join our LinkedIn group

If you’re a fellow Oracle blogger, please join the new LinkedIn group “Oracle Bloggers”. This will help you to get (and keep) in touch with fellow Oracle bloggers. You’ll be able to contact each other, and we can use it to facilitate things like the bloggers dinner at Oracle OpenWorld. Having the “Oracle Bloggers” group logo on your profile page might also be an asset to your LinkedIn profile, but that’s your own call

If you’ve already got a LinkedIn account, you can also look at the current members before joining. The group will accept anyone with an Oracle related blog aggregated at orablogs.com, orana.info or listed at blogs.oracle.com. Please give it some thought, and join.

PS. If you know any other Oracle bloggers, please ask them to join as well.

If you’ve never heard about LinkedIn, here is their own introduction:

LinkedIn is an online network of more than 14 million experienced professionals from around the world, representing 150 industries.

When you join, you create a profile that summarizes your professional accomplishments. Your profile helps you find and be found by former colleagues, clients, and partners. You can add more connections by inviting trusted contacts to join LinkedIn and connect to you.

Your network consists of your connections, your connections’ connections, and the people they know, linking you to thousands of qualified professionals.

Through your network you can:

• Find potential clients, service providers, subject experts, and partners who come recommended
• Be found for business opportunities
• Search for great jobs
• Discover inside connections that can help you land jobs and close deals
• Post and distribute job listings
• Find high-quality passive candidates
• Get introduced to other professionals through the people you know

LinkedIn is free to join. We also offer paid accounts that give you more tools for finding and reaching the right people, whether or not they are in your network.

Log Buffer #51: a Carnival of the Vanities for DBAs

I’m honored to publish my first ever Log Buffer, the 51st edition. Thanks to Dave Edwards of the Pythian Group blog for inviting me.

Let’s get started with the aftermath of the yearly ODTUG conference. Michael Armstrong-Smith starts of with his memories focused on Oracle Discoverer. Dimitri Gielis blogs about being interviewed for the 8th Oracle Buzz podcast by Lewis Cunningham. For me personally, ODTUG has been the event of the year with me winning the Editor’s Choice Award. Another big conference, the UKOUG is finalizing its abstract review cycle, as Andrew Clarke explains.

Frank van Bortel blogs about a whole bunch Firefox plugins for Oracle users. Alex Gorbachev from the Pythian Group finally got his voice heard on being able to change your OTN email address.

I also came across a number of handy programming tips for Oracle programmers; Eddie Awad writes about regular expressions and the never-ending discussion about implicit vs explicit cursors. Gerd Volberg shows how to calculate the day of the week for non-US calendars. Finally, Lucas Jellema from Amis shows off some fancy SQL to create a conference schedule.

Performance tuning an Oracle database will always stay a hot topic. This week I found a number of articles; Tanel Poder writes about session level statspack. Coskan Gundogar talks about sub latch wait events and finally Jeremy Schneider has a very interesting part 1 article about statspack and AWR latch waits. Hang around for the second part. Another DBA topic this week was a reminder to check your local_listener parameter when using RAC by Paul Gallagher. Decipher completes the list with an example to resize a undo tablespace by switching tablespaces.

Oracle will be launching version 11 of their database on July 11. The Oracle blogosphere is getting ready for this with a number of articles. Laurent Schneider has the link to the live video webcast for July 11th. Eddie Awads has a link to an official Oracle presentation on new features. Alex Gorbachev of the Pythian Group is wondering what the name will be; 11g, 11f, 11w, or what… Gary Myers has the news that Application Express (APEX) will be included with Database 11 by default. Then there’s a whole list of blogs by the AMIS guys on specific new or improved features: Transparent Tablespace Encryption, the SQL Performance Analyzer, New sql.bsq structure, XMLType Storage Options and their First Impressions.

Although I’m a true Oracle guy, I did stumble upon some SQLServer blogs that looked interesting; Sean McCown has a handy (but dangerous - do not include yourself) script to disable all users in the database. SQLJunkies writes about a new version of SQLQueryStress being released. James Pipe has something about passing variables into an OPENQUERY argument. Finally, SQLskills has two articles on the new SQLServer 2008; table valued parameters and a list of new features.

I even found two interesting DB2 articles; Philip Nelson is writing about DB2 going more the “automatic way”, just as Oracle has been doing over the last few versions. Willie Favero has its second podcast on upgrading to DB2 for z/OS Version 8.

The MySQL scene has been buzzing with people writing their top 5 wishes for MySQL: Cybersite Consulting, Jim Winstead jr and Dormando. Ronald followed up on this with a list of 5 best practices for MySQL.

And there’s always the miscellaneous category ;-). Just the stuff that wouldn’t fit in any of the other paragraphs. Curt Monash has an interesting article about SolidDB, a memory-centric database. Sue Harper, from Oracle, has a great tip for using a screen magnifier. Also great when showing of code on a beamer. Jeff Hunter is wondering why everybody is always blaming the database. Finally, Josh Berkus has a list of golden rules for database contracting. Joshua Drake has some editions to this list.

And that’s a wrap. As you can see there is a whole lot going on in the database blogging community. Be sure to add any interesting blogs you see to your favorite RSS reader. If you haven’t got one yet, check out Google Reader. And don’t forget to add my feed

Jaap Poot started blogging

One of our DBA’s, Jaap Poot, has started blogging actively. Jaap will describe the challenges he faces during his daily job as an Oracle Database and Application Server administrator at Eurotransplant.

Jaap has always been a pleasure to work with both at Eurotransplant and our former joined employer. He has a wide range of knowledge about all sorts of techniques and systems (Oracle database, application server, Unix/Linux, networking, Windows, hardware, etc). He’s one of the few people I know that have such a thorough knowledge of these diverse techniques. This makes him a crucial player in introducing new technology at Eurotransplant.

Limited subscriptions to comments

Since April 2006 I’ve been using the very useful Subscribe To Comments plugin for WordPress. This allows commenters on my blog to check a box before commenting and get e-mail notification of further comments. I also used the feature to subscribe without leaving a comment with the show_manual_subscription_form PHP function. This allows people to leave their email address and also get notified of new comments without leaving a comment of there own.

As it turns out this last feature was mis-used by spammers. They dumped thousands of email addresses to be notified of any new comments. This led to my hoster disabling email functionality for my blog. I’ve now disabled the feature to subscribe without leaving a comment and the email is back on. I had to remove all the email addresses that were subscribed this way. My apologies for the real readers that left their email address this way. They will no longer be notified of new comments.

Spammers cannot misuse the basic feature of subscribing to comments as you have to leave a comment yourself. This comment has to pass the spam filter and/or moderation queue, so the chances of a spammer getting an email address on the mail list this way are very slim.

Again, my apologies for the readers who now no longer get their updates by email. If you want to keep getting notified by email, you will have to leave an actual comment and check the check box to subscribe.

Blog interview by Grant Ronald

Grant Ronald recently approached me with the idea of a “blog interview”. He is starting a series in which he’s going to interview a number of fellow Oracle bloggers. He decided to start with me, and I’m honored. Read below for the full interview or read it on his site.

Grant: Tell us about Eurotransplant and what you do

Wilfred: Established in 1967, Eurotransplant is a not-for-profit organization that helps coordinate the supply of organ donations and related information to relevant institutions in six European countries. All patients waiting for an organ transplant are put on a waiting list at Eurotransplant. Whenever a donor becomes available in any of the participating countries all available information about that donor is transmitted to Eurotransplant 24×7. Eurotransplant then matches this donor against all patients on the waiting list and assigns the organ(s) to the appropriate recipients. We also coordinate some of the logistics and financial consequences.
We have an IT department of 25 people. As the System Architect I’m responsible for the overall architecture and I determine our future technical policy.

Grant: What are the IT Challenges you have faced in Eurotransplant?

Wilfred: The current system was initially designed and developed in 1996. Remote access by hospitals and physicians was offered via dial-up connections and using telnet to run a SQL*Forms 3.0 character based application. In the late 90’s this was upgraded to client/server Forms 6i running on Citrix Metaframe over dial-up connections or VPN over the internet. At that same time the database was upgraded from version 7 to 8i. This sufficed for a number of years, but an increasing number of users demanded a light-weight user interface and access from any location not just the workstations with the appropriate VPN and Citrix software installed.
When I joined in November 2004, we decided to start upgrading most of our technical infrastructure. We set out to replace Forms/Reports 6i running on Citrix Metaframe by two brand new Oracle Application server 10g running Forms/Reports over the public internet. We also wanted to upgrade our 8i database to 10g and we needed to replace the hardware running these databases.
All of these upgrades had to be performed while keeping a 24×7 operation running 365 days a year. We cannot afford any unscheduled downtime. Organ transplantation is a matter of life and death to the people involved.

Besides the upgrade to the latest versions of Forms/Reports and the database, we also started our first web development efforts. The user interface of an Oracle Forms application is just not suitable for some of our (external) users.
We have a lot of ad-hoc users that require a light-weight interface. For example, we can contact a physician in the middle of the night to let him/her know that an organ is available for his/her patient. The physician can then lookup all sorts of information about this donor. Oracle Forms with its function keys and Query Mode is good for the “back office/professional users” but was not the right user interface for this type of ad-hoc application. Over the last two years we developed a number of J2EE applications using JHeadstart UIX projects and a disconnected Java Swing application.

Grant: With the upgrade of client/server Forms to the web, how did you plan this and what were the challenges?

Wilfred: Users require a Java Virtual Machine to run Oracle Forms on the web. We had the choice for Oracle’s own JInitiator or the more well known Sun JRE. We decided to go for Sun’s JRE since we had a higher chance this is already installed at a workstation and sysadmins at hospitals are more willing to install Sun JRE than Oracle JInitiator.
We opted for Sun JRE just about at the same time Oracle announced official support for Sun JRE to run Forms. In the beginning this led to some issues, especially since the use of Sun JRE was not that well documented back then. In the end, this was all resolved and Oracle Support and Development did a great job working with us to get the Sun JRE environment up and running.
We also had some work to get the Forms converted from 6i to 10g. Oracle Forms comes with a Migration Assistant that makes changes to a form and checks for use of obsolete features. During testing we found several more changes we wanted to make to the forms during migration. A simple example is that moving from Citrix (which is Windows based) to Linux also meant that all filenames became case sensitive. So all properties in a Form that refer to files (such as the name of the menu and attached libraries) had to be converted to the same case as used for naming these files. We ended up building our own Migration Assistant based on the JDAPI of Oracle Developer Suite. This is a great Java API with which you can open a Form, make any changes you like and save the Form again. We ended up with about 30 different modifications to be made to all forms. You can find the full list of the changes on my blog.
Once these were identified the process of upgrading the Forms to the web was reasonably straight forward allowing us maintain the rich Forms behaviour but have the benefit of being web deployed.
We wanted to offer our users a transition period of two months. During these two months we kept running the old client/server environment on Citrix Metaframe and the new Oracle Forms 10g environment in parallel. This gave users (and their sysadmins) enough time to make the transition.
During this two months transition period, we would just continue developing and releasing new features and bug fixes on our system. This is where our new Migration Assistant came in handy. Development stayed at version 6i. When deploying a form to the version 6i Metaframe server we would also run it through our Migration Assistant. The resulting Forms 10g file would be put on the application server.
The development not only used Oracle Forms, but also Oracle Designer 6.0. We planned to migrate to Designer 10g soon after closing this transition period. In the end, we decided the Migration Assistant is doing a great job and we postponed the Designer migration until we have more resources available.

Grant: You mentioned that you started some application development on the J2EE platform. What did you see as the positive aspects of using the Java platform?

Wilfred: We wanted to move away from the rich (but sometimes) complex user interface of Oracle Forms for a certain part of our user base. It is still great for our "professional" users that can appreciate the richer user interface. However, we also have a lot of ad-hoc users that require a light-weight and intuitive interface. This means we have to move to more “self-service” web applications.
The decision between .NET and J2EE was quite easy for us. We come from a typical Oracle background. Oracle is investing heavily in J2EE and this means that the transition from Forms/Reports/Designer to J2EE is much easier for us than a transition to .NET. A lot of documentation exists to introduce J2EE development to Forms developer. Also Oracle is still increasing the possibilities to integrate an Oracle Forms application with a J2EE application.

We developed four web applications using Oracle UIX as the view layer. We generated the first cut drafts of these applications using Oracle JHeadstart. This development experience is very similar to what we were used from the Forms/Designer background. JHeadstart plugs in to JDeveloper and you use it to declaratively specify your application through highly functional metadata, using simple property editors. Using the JHeadstart Application Generator you can generate a fully functional Oracle ADF application. This development experience is quite similar to the Forms Generator in Oracle Designer, but much more light weight and pragmatic. All of these JHeadstart/UIX applications were developed by Forms/Designer developers with little or no Java experience. I can’t imagine how we could have turned them into productive Java developers without using JHeadstart and JDeveloper. The productivity features of ADF and the declarative and visual nature of JDeveloper were key in success of this project.
We also developed a Java Swing application with some supporting web services. This application is used by a transplant coordinator who is dispatched to a hospital whenever a donor becomes available. The coordinator uses this disconnected (offline) Swing application on a laptop to collect all sorts of information about the donor. The coordinator can then synchronize this information with the central Eurotransplant system via a wireless (UMTS or GPRS) connection. This was a more complex environment and we hired an experienced Java developer to help us out with this one. He worked with two of our own people to develop this system. These two internal developers came from a .NET and PHP background.
Unfortunately one of these developers has left Eurotransplant and that leaves us with a job opening for an experienced Java developer. Apologies for this shameless plug, but interested people can get more information about this role from my blog.

Grant: What IT plans do you have for the future (e.g. BPEL, SOA, Web Services, Ajax etc etc)?

Wilfred: We will continue to develop more and more web applications. We will move from UIX to JavaServerFaces (JSF) as soon as possible. The JSF version of JHeadstart was just released, so these applications will migrate shortly.
I see an increase of data exchange with external parties. In the past, a lot of information was exchanged by phone or fax and re-entered in our systems. Investing in an electronic interface with Eurotransplant isn’t profitable to a lot of hospitals. For some hospitals the volume of exchanged information is relatively low. Building such an interface traditionally required considerable investments and was very proprietary. With emerging XML based standards in healthcare, such as HL7, I expect more and more hospitals wanting to exchange data with Eurotransplant electronically. Their business applications will support such industry standards for data exchange. That makes it much less costly to develop an electronic interface with Eurotransplant.
We can also benefit greatly from a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Eurotransplant is a classic example of a service oriented organization. We offer services to participating hospitals and other organizations. Most of the work we do is initiated by these external organizations. If you look at it, matching a donor against all possible recipients on the waiting list and returning all these results is a classic example of a business service. If we would also model this as technical services in a Service Oriented Architecture, this would make us much more flexible. The different components of our system would be less tightly coupled and that can dramatically increase flexibility and decrease maintenance costs.
We are seriously looking at SOA enabling our current systems. Almost no organization can afford a complete rebuild and re-architect of their systems. That’s one of the promises I like about SOA. We can take bits and pieces of our existing applications and SOA enable them. Having this extra services abstraction layer will enable us to more easily redesign parts of the system as long as the external service interface remains stable. With our existing monolithic system it has become very hard to redesign parts of the system without impacting almost every other part of the system.
We also require an ever increasing flexibility and agility to change our business processes. The rules and regulations for organ allocation constantly change and these have to be reflected in our systems. That’;s one of the reasons why we can benefit from things like a Service Oriented Architecture, BPEL and Oracle Business Rules.

Grant: Thanks for being my first blog interview

WordPress plug in for Google Analytics

I managed to get a Google Analytics account. I added the tracker JavaScript to the footer of all my pages, as instructed by Google Analytics. This gave me some great statistics to start with, but I wanted more.

I also want to track outgoing links to other sites and links to downloads (e.g. PDF documents) on my own site. Google Analtytics can do this, but you have to add an onClick JavaScript to all these links. I didn’t like the idea of editing all my blog entries to add an onClick event to the links. So I ended up writing a WordPress plugin that does it for me. You can download the plugin for your own use.

If you have any questions, remarks or suggestions for this plugin, please leave a comment to this blog entry.

Update 24-jan-2006: I’ve opened comments on the original Ultimate Google Analytics page. If you have any support questions, please ask them at that page.

See where all the Oracle bloggers are from

There’s an Oracle Bloggers group at Frappr! All bloggers at orablogs.com are allowed to add themselves to this group. It gives a great view of where all the bloggers live. Currently 19 bloggers have subscribed. From the satellite picture you can see quite a lot of them are European.

It’s just a shame that the map is zoomed at the US by default. You have to zoom out to see the bloggers in Europe and Australia.

Added Google AdSense to my blog

I just added Google AdSense to my weblog. This means the blog will now show ads that are targeted by Google. Not that I expect to make lots of money from it, but I just wanted to get some experience with Google AdSense. It has always intrigued me and this is a great way to get to know it. I tend to try out a lot of online services just to get a feel from them. From most services I learn something new that I can even sometimes use in our professional applications. You can always use these kind of services as an example to illustrate something during a discussion or presentation.

I’ll probably remove it from the site after a while. After all I guess my visitors are not waiting to see ads and I do not expect to get a reasonable amount of clicks that would justify bothering you all with more ads. If you do not see any ads it might be that Google doesn’t know which ads to target at you and it just doesn’t show any.

First weekend in San Francisco

I made it! I’m in San Francisco for Oracle OpenWorld 2005 (and a bit of sightseeing). One of the first things I went to see is of course the Golden Gate bridge:

From a distance I wasn’t that impressed. Me being from the Netherlands, the country of water, dikes, windmills, bridges and other waterworks, am not that easily impressed by a bridge. To be honest I thought it didn’t even look that big. The next day I really went there and I have to take back my words. It really is impressive. I even walked up until the middle to take some pictures. For me that’s quite a challenge since I’m afraid of heights! It must have looked stupid to see such a tall guy (2m06 / 6′9″) walking on the wrong side of the footpath to avoid coming to close to the edge and acting a bit nervous as a stepped out on a sort of balcony for a photo opportunity

I spent the Friday afternoon and most of Saturday sightseeing the city. I only went to the Moscone center to register. Today (Sunday) I attended some sessions by the ODTUG for the J2EE and HTML-DB SIG’s. I was planning on doing some more sightseeing before the first keynote this evening, but my back just can’t handle it. I had a growth disorder as a child which will always leave me with a weak back. Combine that with a 11 hour flight, a way to short bed and walking up and downhill for two days and my back just said: NO MORE!

Coming to the up- and downhill walking; there are some seriously steep hills/streets here in SF. I’m only used to a completely flat country as the Netherlands, so this is something to get used to. I can already feel muscles that I didn’t even know I had

So much for the small talk. I guess I won’t have as much time for sightseeing the rest of the week. I’ll be going back to Moscone center in an hour for the first keynote address. Tomorrow things really kick of with a lot of sessions to attend and the OTN Underground night. Tuesday will be more sessions and an evening with both the Customer Advisory Board for Development Tools meeting and the bloggers dinner. I’m still hoping I can join the other guys/girls later that evening. Wednesday will be more meetings and at night the Appreciation Event. That leaves Thursday as the last day with even more sessions. In all these days I’m also planning on visiting the demogrounds a couple of times. Friday morning will be me flight back to Amsterdam.

I’ll try to keep this blog updated during the week.