San Francisco Impressions

Here are some impressions from the city, shot in the days after the test-event

From Lombard Street to Coit Tower

17 Miles Drive

Muir Woods

Another proof: Second Life exists in reality and not in virtuality

Stone Art in Sausalito

The Golden Gate

Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g Beta Test - Last Day

Today was the last Day of the Beta-Test. After the last testings started the big Feedback-Session in Oracle's Conference Center.

All customers which tested this week and fifty Oracle experts came together, plus dozens through a Web-Conference. In the next 3 hours all products of the Fusion Middleware-Stack got feedback from us. The only tester for Oracle Forms (myself) gave this feedback to Oracle:

First of all: Forms is a really big platform in germany and this Beta 2 program showed us in the last days the first Oracle Forms, which has new functionality in the Forms Builder itself.

After that I described the new features and how important they are for the Forms Community.

In the end I had time to explain, which functionality I personally wish to have in the Forms Builder :

* an object called Web-Service at form-level
* the integration of BI-Beans
* and most important: a new PL/SQL-Editor

That was my statement and now I have to thank Oracle for the invitation to this event, Duncan and his group for the best support that you can have in such a week. It was fantastic to have the chance to work with such profis.

And the last thanks went to Rolf (my boss) who sponsored this trip, Manuela (who let me go) and Andreas, who backup'd me for this week in Krefeld. Many many thanks to you !

This must be the proof, that Duncan's career started in the NBA, before Oracle found him (I'm 6'7"):

PS: If you wonder, why I don't name the new features by name or describe, which functionality they have. Please excuse for that, but I had to sign many Documents at Oracle, which don't allow that.

Forms Beta-Test, Day 4

Duncan and I invented a new feature in mind some days ago and today I was able to develop it in Forms 11g and have now a showcase:

Remote Debugging-Start through AQ

The idea is simple: A developer enqueues a payload to a Forms-AQ, where all running forms-applications have to listen on. Then the payload is transfered to a specific forms-runtime and starts a new AQ-Trigger. The user is asked, if he wants to switch into debugging mode. After a Yes the form starts a debug.attach and developer can use his Forms Builder to attach to the clients runtime.

This is a new and interesting remote debugging extension which can be used in Forms 11g.

Forms Beta-Test, Day 3

Today Duncan and Phil Kuhn worked hard on some of my forms issues. It's great to see, how they and the team behind them work.

It's the first Oracle Forms Version since seven years, which has new functionality, new objects and new triggers in the Oracle Forms Builder!

All those, who propagated the end of Oracle Forms get invalidated, when the new release is launched.

Forms Beta-Test, Day 2

The second day of the Beta-Test started with a big overview of the new Application Server. Four sessions were presented on this tuesday. The rest ot the time was testing Oracle Forms 11g.

At the end of the day Oracle invited us to a nice restaurant near the HQ.

Invitation to Oracle Forms beta-testing

Oracle HQ in Redwood Shores invited me to participate at the 2007' Beta-Test for the Fusion product-stack.

Today we started at Oracle HQ with 16 other companies. In addition to us testers Oracle supports us with nearly 50 Oracle Cracks. For example Duncan Mills as Oracle Forms Guru

They created large test-szenarios for our 5 day testings. So we can test all parts of the new versions and look deep into them.

The spirit of the event is great!

Set Record-Status to Query after a POST-QUERY

In a block with a POST-QUERY-trigger you often have the problem, that the Record-Status changes to CHANGED, if non-basetable-items were changed through the POST-QUERY.

Setting the recordstatus back to QUERY is a good method to solve this problem. First create a procedure for setting the record-status to QUERY:

PROCEDURE Set_Record_Query_Status IS 
BEGIN
  Set_Record_Property (NAME_IN ('SYSTEM.TRIGGER_RECORD'), 
                       NAME_IN ('SYSTEM.TRIGGER_BLOCK'), 
                       STATUS, 
                       QUERY_STATUS);
END; 

then use it in your POST-QUERY-triggers:

BEGIN
  SELECT someColumns
    INTO :myBlock.nonBasetable_Item
    FROM myTable
   WHERE someFilter;

  Set_Record_Query_Status;
END;

After resetting each record to QUERY-Status you don't have problems with the fetched data in this block.

Important: If the POST-QUERY changes Basetable-Items in the record you create record-locks, if the block-locking is Immediate. This problem can be solved:

BEGIN
  Set_Block_Property ('myBlock', LOCKING_MODE, Delayed);

  SELECT someColumns
    INTO :myBlock.nonBasetable_Item
    FROM myTable
   WHERE someFilter;

  Set_Block_Property ('myBlock', LOCKING_MODE, Immediate);

  Set_Record_Query_Status;
END;

try it
Gerd

Oracle Certified Trainer

Since last Friday I'm an Oracle Certified Trainer. It is the precondition to work for Oracle University.