For example, looking at the Apex Evangelists homepage in Safari -

Or perhaps you want to send a snapshot of a Google Maps location to a friend via email:

So now you can take a screenshot of just about anything on your iPhone, tap on the photo and email it to someone else (or use it as a Wallpaper etc)….very very cool.

So how do you take a snapshot? Simple…just quickly press the Home button and the Power button simultaneously and the screen should flash white for a second or so to show it has taken a snapshot. You should then find the snapshot in your Photos application.

I noticed it has *just* been released:

It’s a quick easy process to install the new firmware onto the phone (I do get the impression that most people who hate iTunes simply haven’t tried using it long enough, it is one of those application that is just ‘done right’ to me).

It took around 25 minutes in total to download and upgrade the firmware followed by a synch to restore all my old contacts etc, which gives this (very little changed other than the App Store icon) screen:

Now it’s time to go and check out the App Store and download some goodies for it!

Hmm, I guess that really makes me a geek huh? I get to look at the iPhone apps and the first one I look for is an Oracle related one.

Of course, being an Application Express fan, I’ve been used to using an Oracle related product for a long time on the iPhone (since it’s just a web app).

If you travel often enough, then sometimes you’re going to have bad journeys and I guess this was my turn for a bad-one.

When I checked in at the airport, the woman at the check-in desk just didn’t give me that ‘warm fluffy feeling’ that she knew what she was doing. You know how some people inspire confidence and
others don’t? She was definitely in the “don’t” category. In fact as I waited for my flight, I checked my emails and tagged this line to the end of an email I sent to Dimitri:

“I have a funny feeling my luggage is going to go missing for some reason”

My journey down to Heathrow (my first flight of three), was probably one of the most turbulent I’ve ever had. To make things worse, the planes were being stacked up at Heathrow, so we had to keep circling until it was our turn to land. This meant we had to circle through the same (or at least it seemed the same) bit of turbulence 4 times. By the 2nd or 3rd time around this, there started the unmistakable sound of people being sick all round the plane. Even though I don’t really get travel sick myself, I was starting to feel a bit ‘green’ at this point too.

Once I got to Heathrow, I only had 40 minutes until my connecting flight to Dallas. I always plan to do a little work on the flight between the UK and the US, because it helps to pass the time. However about 10 minutes into the flight (literally just after taking off), the person in-front of me put her seat right back into the “I’m practically sleeping on your lap” mode. Now as much as I like my Macbook Pro, it still has to obey the Space-Time Continuum laws and it was impossible to even open the screen with her seat all the way back. Luckily the flight wasn’t full so I moved over to the seat next to me (which was empty obviously), and as soon as I did that her boyfriend (who I was then sitting behind) decided to put his seat fully back (I’m 99% sure he waited for me to move before doing it).

Anyway, I decided enough was enough, and did something so shocking he wasn’t expecting it…I actually tapped him on the shoulder and said “Excuse me, your seat is too far back and I can’t work, can you move it forward?”. That’s right, all notions of ‘being British and not causing a fuss’ went out the window and the guy actually was so shocked I’d done it, he did actually move his seat far enough forward so I could work.

So, great, I could now pass the time by doing some work. It’s a good thing too, as there were so many crying babies on the flight (I stopped counting at 6) that the chances of sleeping were next to nil (for me anyway, the couple in front of me had no such problems apparently).

Anyway, once I landed at Dallas I went straight tot he baggage reclaim bit (well, after the obligatory customs clearance) and just as I was walking into the baggage claiming area. I heard the words that no traveller (especially after a long flight over the atlantic) wants to hear…I heard my voice being called over the announcement system and was told to make myself known to help desk. Well, it turned out that the words “I have a funny feeling my luggage is going to go missing for some reason” came back to haunt me, as indeed they had lost my luggage (I really wish I’d emailed Dimitri and said “I have a funny feeling I’m going to win the lottery this weekend” instead).

So, there I am in Dallas Fort Worth airport, with no case and I think to myself (since nobody else there would have cared!) “I’ll go and stock up on some provisions”, well I can honestly say if you’re ever in the situation were you have had your luggage lost and need to buy a toothbrush, razor, spare t-shirt etc, you’d better hope you’re not in Dallas FW airport, as there wasn’t a single shop that I could buy anything like those in (come on…is there really no market for selling toothbrushes in an airport shop?!?!).

Oh, and connecting flight between Dallas FW and New Orleans wasn’t great either. They changed the departure gate twice, which meant racing between gate A and B and then from B to C (even though there’s a shuttle, there’s still a lot of running involved, not exactly what I needed at that point).

So, once I got to New Orleans airport I had to fill out a claim form for my luggage (again they didn’t inspire me with confidence, so perhaps I’m not holding out much hope of seeing it again). I jumped into the nearest cab and all I can say is that I have never been driven so fast in such busy traffic before, I glanced at the speedometer at one point and we were doing 120MPH. Just when I thought things weren’t going too badly, the tax driver made the classic mistake of setting off at a traffic light when the traffic light hadn’t even changed, causing him to bump into the car infront (luckily at more like 1MPH than 120MPH), still it meant sitting in the back of the cab for 10 minutes while they shouted at each other (I made sure the meter was turned off for that bit, so at least the entertainment was free).

I checked into the Hotel, which was the first trouble-free experience of the day, a special thanks to the girl on reception who managed to rustle up a nice ‘mini travel-kit’ for me, so I do now at least have a hotel-sponsored toothbrush, razor etc.

I gave Dimitri a call (it was about 10PM friday evening by now) and we went out for a walk to Bourbon Street for a look round, some food and a very well earned (or at least well justified) drink.

It’s my first time in New Orleans, but I’m loving it so far, Bourbon Street is a crazy place, I’ve been to lots of crazy places, but something about Bourbon Street just seems even crazier than most.

Oh and for those travelling out to New Orleans for the conference and wondering what the weathers like? It’s hot with a capital H…it is HOT. When I landed it was about 85 degrees (when I landed in Dallas it was 97 degrees apparently). So you can pack light…just not as light as me!

So, anyone know a good tailor in New Orleans? The thought of having to race out and buy a new suit, shirt, tie, shoes etc for my first presentation on monday isn’t really that appealing right now!

You can download the patch from Metalink, Joel Kallman has blogged with more details on the patch number (7032837).

So, what are these training days? Well, we host a lot of on-site training for clients, however we also hold ‘open training’ days, where anyone can sign up, come along and get training by people who know the product inside-out. We believe that our training provides the highest quality training for superb value for money.

The current agenda (subject to change) covers a variety of topics, but it doesn’t just stop there. We don’t believe in just a 9-5 training schedule and one of our core beliefs with these training events is to provide an open format where you can also raise any other (APEX related!) problems/questions you might have, particularly during some of our ‘out of hours’ relaxed sessions.

Following the previous training, we expect interest to be high (and places are strictly limited, so please don’t delay to register).

You can find more information on exact location, pricing and signing up at http://eurotraining.apex-evangelists.com

You can register for the webinar here, but here’s a snippet from the Hotsos site:

Application Express (ApEx) is a highly flexible and highly scalable Rapid Application Development environment for web applications. But what do you do when your application’s success starts to become its downfall? This free, one-hour presentation will cover strategies and tactical advice for monitoring and addressing performance issues, and presents some of the best practices for making ApEx Performance Problems easy to diagnose. This webinar is presented by Doug Gault, head of Hotsos Product Development.

If you’re currently using APEX, you won’t want to miss this.

Here at APEX Evangelists, we have been busy toiling away for the last few months and we’re pleased to announce that we have finally managed to port APEX to run on Microsoft SQLServer and MySQL.

Now you can use the full power of Application Express regardless of which backend database you’re using.

We have issued a couple of press releases about the product, which we are calling “Application Espresso”. Product Manager for Espresso, Dimitri Gielis was heard to say “It’s AWESOME”, whilst John Scott was quoted by Time Magazine as saying “It’s a major step forward for Database Independence, whilst maintaining a synergistic paradigm shift for adaptive conceptualization of Web 3.0″.

We are currently looking for Beta testers, so drop us a mail if you’re interested.

The course was a 3-day Advanced class covering many different topics related to APEX, from Best Practices, through the APEX Dictionary through to APEX 3.1 New Features (and beyond).

The attendees had a variety of backgrounds and were using APEX in many different ways and it was really interesting to discuss what they had (and had not) been able to do in APEX. Obviously the things they had not been able to do we took as a challenge to try and show them how they could do it!

We always try to make our training events nice and informal, so that the attendees always know they can ask us questions to either clarify something that we discussed in a presentation, or even just ask us a pop-question if they bump into us in the elevator first thing in the morning (it happened and I ended up missing my floor because I was engrossed in the problem!).

One thing we keep noticing about people who use APEX is that they’re so passionate about the technology and eager to learn new ways to use it. The challenge for us was to show them things they weren’t aware of, or to solve some of the problems they had.

We also try to keep the training interesting (always helps!) and interactive, so we always make time for questions, include dedicated open Q&A time (which from the feedback was greatly appreciated, as an example Dimitri sat and demonstrated how to solve a problem that someone had been trying to solve for a while in their own system).

We also held an APEX Quiz which went down very well (although it helped that we had some nice prizes to give out for the top 3 people!).

On wednesday evening we took the attendees out to a great little Italian restaurant in Knightsbridge called Sale e Pepe, the staff there were absolutely crazy, particularly the manager, but the food was amazing and it gave everyone a great chance to ‘bond’ even more. The only drawback to this of course was that I was the first to present on thursday morning (Dimitri managed to schedule that on the Agenda without me spotting it!).

Some particular highlights for me:

• One attendee told me it was the best course he’d ever been on (thanks Roger!), of course I then had to check it wasn’t the first course he’d been on! It is always amazing to hear feedback like that. Particularly when it comes from someone who is already using APEX on a daily basis.
• An attendee from the first training we held came back for the second one. That type of ‘vote of confidence’ really does help us to know we’re doing something useful!
• We managed to ‘re-unite’ a couple of attendees who hadn’t seen each other for close to 20 years, they looked at each other on the first morning at the Welcome Break and recognised each other (perhaps we should rename ourselves ‘APEX Friends Reunited?).
• Attendees asking us almost as soon as the course had ended, when the next one would be held…now that’s keen!

I really enjoyed last week and it’s particularly nice to see that the attendees are not only staying in touch with us after the training, but they’re also staying in touch with each other…the APEX community is indeed a friendly one!

It’s been a hectic week, I got the train back from London on friday afternoon (a public holiday here in the UK, which was fun…let’s just say that the UK does not manage to make public transport run on public holidays very well).

I have about 30 hours at home, before getting ready to fly out on Easter Sunday (another bad day to travel!) to do some more APEX Training, time to check those demos work again!

Once again, thank you to all who attended, it was a pleasure to meet you all.

We will be announcing the locations and dates of our next training sessions very shortly.

Now, I am quite risk averse when it comes to updating software, especially when I’m going to be demoing or training in the near future. However when APEX 3.1 became available a week ago (on the friday evening), I knew I had to download it and play around with it. I’d previously tried it out on the Beta evaluation provided by Oracle, however it’s still not the same as having it on your own machines.

My test upgrades went smoothly, but I also had a dilemma, did I dare risk using 3.1 for a training session I was doing on the monday (giving me just 48 hours or so to test it all worked nicely).

Well call me stupid or call me brave, but I decided that the risks were outweighed by the rewards and I decided to upgrade my ‘presentation’ instance to 3.1 (after taking a backup of course!).

Roll forward to monday and the start of the 3-day training session, it was my first time to demo (in the wild, so to speak) the new 3.1 features to an audience. Bear in mind this was beginner level training to people who hadn’t even used APEX before, so as far as they were concerned *all* the features were new.

However, I needn’t have worried, APEX 3.1 was extremely stable and the new features in 3.1 (particularly interactive reports and the declarative blob support) went down extremely well with the attendees.

Once again, by the middle of the 3-day course a couple of the attendees had downloaded XE and one person was trying to upgrade their XE to use APEX 3.1 (they ran into a few problems but I helped to sort those out).

By the way, I put ‘First APEX 3.1 Training’ with a trailing question mark, since as far as I’m aware this was probably the first training course which 3.1 has been used on (outside of some of the demos done by the Oracle team themselves of course!).

So, I can rest easy that nothing could possibly go wrong during my next training session in London (hint of sarcasm there, since to assume nothing will go wrong when you’re planning to do that many live demos would be plain self-delusion!).

There are some incredibly cool features in 3.1, such as (from the SoD):

• Interactive reporting region types which natively integrate Web 2.0 features to filter, break, sort data, etc.
Improved PDF report layout
• Enhanced print attributes allowing for more control of PDF document structures
• Optional runtime-only installation, which will install the minimum number of database objects and grant the minimum number of privileges to run Application Express applications in a production environment
• PL/SQL API to manage a runtime installation of Application Express
• Documented and supported Application Express JavaScript libraries
• Improved calendar region type supporting AJAX requests
• New PL/SQL API to send attachments in e-mail
• Enhanced integration with Oracle SQL Developer for MS Access to Application Express migration

I’ve just tried a couple of test installs and have it up and running on my laptop, so far it’s delivered everything it promised!

None of the attendees were what I’d call ‘Oracle Developers’ or indeed Developers at all, they were (self-confessed) Microsoft Access and Excel addicts.

Well, as anyone who has used Apex before knows, Apex makes it extremely easy to migrate your existing data from these tools. However, just migrating isn’t enough, after all who wants to move away from a tool that already does what they want to another tool that (at best) might just do exactly the same job.

So, my job as Trainer is to show off all the nice features in Apex (and the Oracle database) that not only makes the idea of moving to Apex attractive, but actually makes it into a ‘why didn’t I know about Apex sooner?’ type of reaction. Needless to say that after using Apex for as long as I have (and in as many different ways as I have) I have lots of things up my sleeve that should manage to convince even the most sceptical die-hard Access or Excel lover.

Of course, I never claim that Apex is a silver-bullet (no tool is) and it certainly isn’t suitable in every case or scenario, however I’ve found that by demonstrating the features of the product itself you are more likely to show that one feature that each person in the audience has wanted to use or that they think will be useful to them.

In other words, 100 powerpoint slides of “Apex Good, Access Bad” won’t work, it just sounds like propaganda. However letting people see the tool in action (At Apex Evangelists we’re big advocates of live demos) they can see whether the features you’re talking about are really as easy to use as you say they are.

So, what has this got to do with Earthquakes? Well for those of you reading this outside of the UK, last week we had an Earthquake here in the UK (yes really…it does happen here occasionally). The day after the earthquake I was talking to one of the training attendees and he said he was awake when the quake hit (around 1am) because he’d been installing Oracle XE on his home PC to use Application Express. Now bear in mind that this was someone who hadn’t even heard of Apex 2 days before and had actually stayed up until 1am in the morning to download and install it (I don’t mean it takes a long time to download or install by the way! Just the fact that he was interested enough to stay up till the early hours to do it).

When you stand up in-front of a group of people and Present, there is almost no better reward than hearing back that you’ve said something that interested them (or at least interested some of them).

I always do a quick straw-poll when I do these types of things, here are the results (it was just a quick hands-up exercise) -

• At the beginning of the one course only 1 out of the 12 attendees had even heard of Apex
• After day 2 (of a 3 day course), 2 people had installed Apex on their home PC’s
• By the final day, 4 out of 12 people had installed Apex on the home PC
• By the final day, 9 out of 12 people said it was ‘extremely likely’ they would use Apex as part of their daily work rather than Excel/Access (obviously where appropriate)
• Of the 3 people who said it was not ‘extremely likely’ the main reason they gave was that they would first want more training (which was good, as they weren’t just simply saying ‘no’, they wanted to evaluate the tool more

With Apex 3.1 just round the corner, my job of convincing people to use Apex is going to get even easier!

This training will be held in London in March 18th-20th 2008. It’s not a beginners training, more an advanced one, although “advanced” is difficult to measure.

There are still a few places left, so if you have been looking for some Advanced APEX training by some of the most passionate APEX people around then sign up quickly as places are limited.

So far this year I’m going to be presenting at IOUG Collaborate in Denver (April) and also at ODTUG in New Orleans (June).

At both conferences I’m going to be presenting on the same topic:

• Application Express Hints, Tips & Best Practices.

No, I’m not doing the same one twice because I’m lazy ;), it’s because it’s a topic I hear people mention again and again (coincidentally mentioned only last week on H.Tonguç YILMAZ’s blog)

It can be difficult when you’re starting out in any development environment to know the ‘best’ ways of doing things, so lots of newbies to APEX will hopefully find this topic interesting. For the more seasoned APEX developers, I’m throwing in some hints and tips that not everyone may be aware of (in other words I’m hoping to show something that will be useful to APEX developers of any skill level).

For those of you not attending either the Collaborate or ODTUG events, I am writing a Whitepaper on the topic which I hope to be able to make public.

Of course, the first people to get to see this topic, will be the people attending the APEX Evangelists European Training event in London (March), there are still a few places left so if you’re looking for some advanced APEX training then sign-up here!

So my turn for 8 things about me -

• I’m a very keen scuba diver and was taught to scuba dive by a french ex-Special Forces instructor, my first dive-buddy was an ex-KGB agent (seriously).
• I’ve almost been ‘lost at sea’ twice whilst diving. The first time the dive boat hit some shallow rocks cracking the hull (luckily we made it back to shore before the flooding got too severe), the second time due to strong currents we surfaced well away from the dive boat and spent the next few hours bobbing around aimlessly waiting to be found.
• As a child I always wanted to be an Airforce Pilot, right up till the first time I saw a computer, the rest is history as they say…
• I took a year out before going to University and worked on a building site. I loved the job immensely, however working outdoors in Newcastle in winter when the rain is so heavy you can’t see 10 feet ahead has now made me appreciate just how ‘cushy’ working in an office is, despite how much we ‘IT people’ might complain about our jobs, we should be thankful that we can still feel our fingers and toes when it gets cold outside.
• When I went to University, I was the first ever male to register in the Hall of Residence where I stayed as it was previously an all-female Hall and it was the first year they were allowing men to stay (from memory around 300 women and 18 men).
• The only food that I absolutely hate is turnip. Can’t stand the stuff, you can’t make me change my mind on that one.
• I usually can’t watch old films that are in black & white, no matter how good they’re supposed to be.
• I proposed to my wife (or then fiance) in the gardens of the Palace of Versailles.

As Howard points out this is almost a pyramid scheme blogging craze, so there aren’t that many people for me to nominate as ‘next’, so rather than going for 8 people I’ll just go for two Flavio Casetta and Carl Backstrom it’s your turn!

I was in two minds whether to blog about my ‘results’, since on the one hand if the results were good it could be seen as ‘boasting’, on the other hand if the results were bad then it wouldn’t exactly spur anyone on to sign up for our Advanced APEX training in March next year!

However, I noticed that Marco Gralike has also blogged about his results, so at least I’m not the first (or only one!), plus I think it’s nice to nice to compare how you think it went with how the audience thought it went.

So, on with the results -

Main scores are:

• 1 - Poor
• 2 - Below Average
• 3 - Average
• 4 - Good
• 5 - Very Good
• 6 - Excellent

The Length of Session scores are:

• 1 - Too short
• 2 - Just right,
• 3 - Too long.

My Scores:

• Topic evaluation average: 5.8
• Content evaluation average: 5.8
• Presentation Skills evaluation average: 5.8
• Quality of Slides evaluation average: 5.7
• Value of Presentation evaluation average: 5.8
• Length of Session evaluation average: 1.52

I was amazed at the feedback scores, I felt the presentation went well (overall I felt confident doing it and there were no major hiccups during it besides one demo which I hopefully managed to ‘workaround’ without anyone noticing too much!), but it is great to see that the audience felt it went very well too.

I’ve blogged a couple of times before that I find it very difficult to sometimes tell if the material I’m presenting is useful or whether the levels is pitched right for the audience and really feedback forms like this are pretty much the best way to find that out, since people can be much more honest in an ‘anonymous form’ than the sometimes are to your ‘face’ afterwards.

As for the Length of session score (1.52, remember that’s out of 3 not out of 6 unlike the other scores!), I was actually happy to get that too considering that originally this was a 90 minute presentation that I had to chop down to fit into 60 minutes. I had a couple of choices here I could have either left out some of the sub-topics I was covering, or I could have reduced the level of detail I went into for each sub-topic.

In the end I decided that I couldn’t really lose any sections, since I wanted to cover as many different debugging tools and methods that you can use in APEX, but went for the ‘reduce the level of detail slightly’ approach. However I was still being extremely optimistic in trying to fit in all the information in the time allowed. I actually just overran by about 1 minute (which was about 20 minutes less than I thought I’d overrun by!).

Some of the feedback comments were very nice too including -

• “Loads of useful tips”
• “Best presentation I have seen all week. Many thanks.”
• “Fantastic - great debug tips. More, more, more.”
• “Excellent presentation.”

They weren’t all good though! I’m slightly intrigued by the comment -

• “Felt that he could have he could have been more forward facing.”

I’m not entirely sure what to take from that one!

So, all in all, I’m extremely pleased with that, now I just need to prepare for the next set of presentations (Collaborate 08 and the APEX Evangelists Advanced APEX Training in March). They come around so quickly!

It was quite a ‘lazy’ start to the day, checking out of the hotel and loading up the car with bags, then heading over to Peter Lorenzen’s session on “How to make your APEX Application Secure”. I hadn’t seen this session before and it was full of good tips on using the features available within APEX to secure your app.

Peter had a full room and once again I heard a couple of people leaving saying things like “I didn’t know you could do that”, so Peter definitely did a good job.

It was also a good chance for Dimitri, Peter and myself to have a chat after having not met Peter before UKOUG (but having corresponded with him via email/Apex forums etc).

After some lunch, it was time to make a difficult decision, i.e. which of the final sessions would be my final session at UKOUG. It was difficult because Jonathan Lewis and Steven Feuerstein were both presenting at the same time.

I’ve met Steven a few times (we created a simple APEX app for his new book) and he’s a superb presenter. However I decided to go to Jonathan Lewis’s session, as it just so happens I’ve spent the last couple of days wrestling with some queries and went to his session for some inspiration.

I’ve also seen Jonathan present a few times now and he is an absolute master at it, personally I like the more technical types of presentations and this didn’t disappoint at all. His session was titled “Optimisation Through Understanding” and whilst I wouldn’t even pretend to have understood everything Jonathan covered, it was perhaps one of the most instructive 2 hours of Oracle learning I’ve ever had.

All in all, an excellent first UKOUG for me, I’ll definitely try and go next year too.

I met Dimitri at the Hotel as he’d just flown in and had been unable to make the start of the conference. We headed over to the ICC for the first APEX session of the day -

• Programming Real Applications with Application Express - Andrew Woodward, Yorkshire Building Society

Andrew did a good job of covering lots of the features he used to build their applications, as well as discussing things from the business perspective.

Next up, it was time for me to present my session on “Debugging APEX Applications”, by the way the title of this post is a blatant lie, I didn’t actually share the stage at the same *time* as Tom Kyte, but I did share the same stage he used for his Keynote speech. This room was absolutely huge and I’ll be surprised if I ever present in a room bigger than this one.

The room was not full obviously (there weren’t that many people at UKOUG interested in APEX!), so I’m still not sure why they put me in that room, but from my perspective it had two great advantages:

• I didn’t need to zoom in for my demos that much as the screen was enormous
• It was very good experience to present in a room of that size, truely nerve-wracking, but also a very good feeling afterwards when it all went well.

There was one downside to this room and it was the fact that on the stage the lights shine straight at you so you can’t really see the audience that well (at least nobody past the first couple of rows anyway), so it’s difficult to see if people are yawning or whether you’re showing them something they’ve never seen before. Anyway, judging by the comments afterwards the presentation seemed to go down well for some people (which is all you can ask really!).

Oh, I almost forgot, for this session Dimitri was my session chair. I’d ‘pre-warned’ Dimitri that my timing was tight and I needed every second of the 60 minute slot to fit all the material in so I asked him to keep his introduction nice and short….meaning keep it to less than a minute or two. Dimitri didn’t let me down…it took him 8 seconds to introduce me (there’s a nice big clock built into the stage in that Hall). I know I said ‘keep it short’ Dimitri, but there’s short and there’s short ;)

After my presentation it was time for the APEX Roundtable, I arrived a bit late as I stayed back from my session to answer a few questions and also it took me a while to put my laptop etc away. The roundtable was hosted by Jeremy Duggan and the panelists were Dimitri Gielis, Anthony Rayner and Peter Lorenzen. As usual with the Roundtables, there were lots of good questions covering a varied range of topics and the panel did a good job of answering them (I wasn’t on the panel for this one, but I did pitch in with a few answers).

After lunch, I started to unwind after giving my presentation (there is definitely an ‘adrenaline dump’ after you give a presentation) and also sat with Dimitri doing some work related things while he prepared for his presentation on “Integration of BI (XML) Publisher and APEX”.

I’ve seen Dimitri present this topic a few times now, but he always puts a different spin on it every time he presents it, so it’s always worthwhile watching it again. The audience was quite split between people who had used BI Publisher with APEX before and those who hadn’t used it at all before. Afterwards I heard a couple of people discussing how impressed they were because they didn’t know that level of printing integration was possible, good job Dimitri!

After Dimitri’s presentation I met Borkur Steingrimsson, whom Dimitri already knew. Borkur told me that he’d already made dinner reservations for us to wind down after our presentations. This meant that he’d called Mark Rittman and Peter Scott and arranged for us to meet up. This was exactly what I needed, so thanks Borkur!

We headed over to some bar (which I forget the name of) and had some great tapas and a few good beers.

I’ve met Mark before at Collab and OpenWorld, but I’d never met Borkur or Peter before, they’re both really nice guys and very easy to talk with. After the food we headed over to another pub which was pretty empty when we arrived, but soon started to fill up and rapidly became a ‘who’s who’ of the Oracle world, with Lisa Dobson, Doug Burns, Marco Gralike and many many others arriving.

I lasted till around 11:30pm and then had to head back to the hotel to get some sleep…however I found out the next day that some people managed to stay in the pub until 4:50am…I won’t name names, but you know who you are ;)

Today I started off with “Oracle SQL Developer Latest Features” by Sue Harper, SQL Developer is a fantastic (and free!) tool that is becoming more and more tightly integrated with Application Express and I would encourage any APEX developers who aren’t using SQL Developer to try it out. There were some great tips and features on display here and after speaking to Kris Rice at OpenWorld there are plenty more to come I’m sure.

After a quick coffee break, it was time for a session very close to my own feelings on the subject, i.e. “Harvesting the Advantages of a Database Centric Development Approach” by Toon Koppelaars. This session in a nutshell was a breakdown of why you should almost always want to place your logic in the database because frontends (and front-end development tools) come and go, but the database and your data remain constant throughout. I’m very much ‘on message’ with Toon about this (hence my evangelism about APEX as a development tool). An excellent presentation and I was pleased to meet Toon in person after having swapped quite a few emails with each other over the last few months.

Next up it was another APEX session - “Building the Rich User Interface with Oracle Application Express and AJAX” by Anthony Rayner. Anthony is one of those APEX people who blog frequently and post very frequently in the forums, so I was looking forward to meeting him in person and seeing/hearing him present. The session was a good technical session on how to use AJAX in your applications to make the end-user experience much more rewarding (I’m definitely with Anthony on that one, it’s all very well designing an application that *you* like, but it’s whether the end-users like using it that matters!).

Unfortunately Anthony had a bit of a nightmare at the start when the projector didn’t seem to be working. From experience I know that it doesn’t exactly do your confidence any good when something like that happens right before you start. However, it happens to every presenter at some point (probably my turn for something to go wrong tomorrow!), however Anthony recovered well and the presentation managed to start more or less on time.

I mentioned to Anthony afterwards that he could have perhaps done with a longer time-slot, given the amount of technical information he was trying to convey (that’s not a criticism of Anthony, just that I know how difficult it is to present a lot of information in a relatively short space of time).

After lunch I caught the next session by Jonathan Lewis on “Understanding Statspack”, once again another Masterclass Presentation by Jonathan full of tips gathered from his extensive knowledge of the subject.

I had planned to visit one last session before the close of the day, but once again work beckoned and I ended up getting side-lined.

Tomorrow it’s a busy ‘APEX Day’, with -

• Programming Real Applications with APEX - Andrew Woodward
• Debugging APEX Applications - Me!
• APEX Roundtable - Jeremy Duggan, Dimitri Gielis, Anthony Rayner
• BI Publisher & APEX - Dimitri Gielis

I still can’t believe my session is scheduled to be in Hall 1…surely that can’t be right? Someone, somewhere has made a mistake (me?!).

Tomorrow should be interesting…I guess I’d better make sure my demos work!

Knowing that my chances of driving down to Birmingham and finding the hotel (Jurys Inn, where all the ‘tech people’ seem to be staying apparently) without getting lost were next to nil, I had to race out to buy a new TomTom GPS from PC World (I know, I know! Desperate times call for desperate measures though, besides I’m not the only one who had to call into PC World at the last minute).

I also managed to forget to pack the cable to connect my camera to my laptop, so there’ll be a distinct lack of photos from these posts, although I can use my iPhone (with it’s woefully inadequate camera).

I literally bumped into Mark Rittman in the lifts at hotel on monday morning and we had a very quick chat before Mark had to race off to fulfill all his duties.

UKOUG is much smaller than OpenWorld, but that’s actually a nice thing (after the ‘excess’ of OpenWorld) since it increases the chances of bumping into people you know (or people you jus met the day before).

Registration was very straight-forward, then I did the usual ‘check my email’ early morning task while sitting down on one of the comfy beanbags. When someone came over and said ‘hello’, it turned out to be H.Tonguç YILMAZ, I’ve been reading his blog for a while now so it was really nice to meet up with him, like I say, it’s so much easier to bump into people at UKOUG!

It was time to head over to the Keynote headed by Ian Smith which was the usual sort of opening Keynote you’d expect from such a conference, talking about ‘30 years working with our customers”.

Tom Kyte then talked about “30 Years of Oracle”, Tom was his usual self, very easy to listen to and a great presenter. I particularly liked his joke about the 1.0 Clock and 2.0 Clock (I guess you had to be there to be appreciate it though).

I then watched “Oracle Application Express 3.0: Introduction and New Features” by Barry McGillin, which was a good overview of all the nice ‘juicyness’ in APEX 3.0 and 3.1 for those people who aren’t currently using 3.0 (or have not seen the 3.1 demo/beta evaluation). The presentation was full with a few people standing up at the back, Barry did a great job trying to fit in all of the features in the time available.

Next I went to the “Playing Russian Roulette with Silver Bullets” session by Jonathan Lewis, Jonathan (like Tom) is another fantastic presenter, so no matter what the title of the presentation chances are I’d have gone along to listen to it. The content was extremely topical (especially if you follow the OTN forums), since Jonathan covered not only those people who suggest ‘Silver Bullets’ to people who post problems, but also covered people who actively search for ‘Silver Bullets’. There were also a few funny quotes and examples thrown in for good measure, very entertaining and highly recommended if you get the chance to see it in the future.

After lunch there was another APEX related session on, this time by Jagdev Panesar about “Oracle APEX and Photographs, a mashup made in….”. This presentation was about Jaddev’s requirement to build an application to manage his photographs (and of course he chose APEX to do it), whilst Jagdev said at the beginning of the session that it wasn’t a technical session, it actually was in places, there was some good technical content particularly when he discussed using Oracle Text to help to index his data to make it easily searchable from his APEX application.

Final session of the day was back to Tom Kyte for ‘11g New Features for DBAs’ where Tom covered some of the features that make 11g an almost ‘essential’ upgrade in terms of making your life as a DBA easier.

Then it was time to head back to the Hotel (bumping into Doug Burns on the way) and catch up with some work, I then planned to go to the Blogger Meetup however unfortunately the fates conspired against me and the ‘30 minutes work’ I had to do turned into 3 hours, around 11pm I decided it was far from sensible to go out and start drinking at that point.

Perhaps the most worrying thing from Day 1 was noticing that the session I’m presenting on Wednesday, ‘Debugging APEX applications’ is scheduled to be in Hall 1. Hall 1 is the same place that was used for the Keynote speed, it is *HUGE*.

Now I’m hoping at this point there’s a severe misprint in the schedule and they’re going to relocate it on wednesday since I seriously cannot see enough people being at the session to make it worthwhile being in Hall 1.

On the plus side, I won’t need to ‘zoom in’ during my demos, as the projection screen in Hall 1 is about the size of a small house.