OUG Ireland Meetup 11th May

The next OUG Ireland Meetup is happening on 11th May, in the Bank of Ireland Grand Canal Dock. This is a free event and is open to every one. You don't have to be a member to attend.

Following on from a very successful 2 day OUG Ireland Conference with over 250 attendees, we have organised our next meetup. This was mentioned during the opening session of the conference.

We typically have 2 presentations at each Meetup and on 11th May we have:

1. Oracle Analytics Cloud Service.

Oralce Analytics Cloud Service was only released a few weeks ago and we some local people who have been working with the beta and early adopter releases. They will be giving us some insights on this new product and how it compares with other analytics products like Oracle Data Visualization and OBIEE.

Running Oracle DataGuard on RAC on Oracle 12c

The second presentation will be on using Oracle DataGuard on RAC on Oracle 12c. We have a very experienced DBA talking about his experiences of using these products how to workaround some key bugs and situations to be aware of for administration purposes. Lots of valuable information to be gained.

Check out the full agenda and to register for the Meetup by clicking on this link or on the Meetup image above.

There will be some food and refreshments available for you to enjoy.

The Meetup will be in Bank of Ireland, Grand Canal Dock. This venue is a very popular locations for Meetups in Dublin.

OUG Ireland 2016: APPs Track highlights

Today I was joined by Debra Lilly who is the APPs track lead and conference chair for OUG Ireland. Debra lets us know what we can look forward to on the APPs track at this years conference.

Check out Debra's video.

Click on the image below to get more details of the agenda and to register for this 2 day conference.

Follow the conference and OUG Ireland on twitter using #oug_ire

OUG Ireland 2015 is next week

The annual OUG Ireland conference is on next week on Thursday 19th March.

If you haven't already signed up for the conference this is only a few days left to do so. Click here to go to the registrations pages.

Also don't forget to sign Maria Colgan's one day seminar on the Oracle 12c In-Memory Option.

As always there is a very full agenda with 7 streams, 47 presentations and several keynote presentations.

I'll be a draw for a copy of my book and I'll be giving away a few Oracle Press goodies too. Check out this blog post for the details and rules of the book draw.

The following are the presentations I'm planning on attending (so you know where to find me)

Time	Presenter	Topic
09:10-09:30	Debra Lilley	OUG Ireland Welcome, Introduction and Opening
09:30-10:10	Jon Paul (Oracle)	Opening Keynote by Jon Paul from Oracle
10:15-11:00	Oralce Presentation	Oracle Big Data Strategy
11:00-11:25		Exhibition Hall
11:25-12:10	Antony Heljula	Real Business Value Using Predictive BI (I've seen this before but I worked with Antony on some of what he will be talking about)
12:15-13:00	Roel Hartman & Brendan Tierney	What Are They Thinking? With Oracle Application Express & Oracle Data Mining. (we gave this presentation at Oracle Open World back in September 2014)
12:15-13:00	Gurcan Orhan	How to handle Dev, Test & Prod with ODI
13:00-14:00		Lunch (and then freaking out before I give my second presentation)
14:00-14:45	Brendan Tierney	Predictive Queries in Oracle 12c Database (I suppose I have to turn up to my own presentation)
14:50-15:35	Roel Hartman	Hidden APEX 5 Gems Revealed (APEX 5 is due out any day now)
15:35-16:00		Exhibition Hall & Coffee (and then freaking out before I give my third presentation)
16:00-16:45	Brendan Tierney	Running R in your Oracle Database using Oracle R Enterprise (This presentation generally runs for 50 minutes)
16:50-17:35	Maria Colgan	BI, Dev & Tech Closing Keynote: Oracle Database In-Memory-The next big thing
17:35-18:35		Event Social i.e. free drink :-)

As you can see it is going to be a busy, busy day.

I would love to attend lots of others, but being able to be in multiple places at the same time is not one of them.

NOTE:The User Group has a rule that a presenter can have a max of 2 presentations. Unfortunately we had to break this rule a week out from the conference, due to some cancellations. And that is why I've ended with 2.5 presentations.

Book give away at OUG Ireland

The annual Oracle User Group in Ireland conference is on the 19th March in Croke Park.

I'll be giving 2 presentations, with one each on the Development and Business Analytics tracks. Here are the details of these presentations.

Time	Room	Presentation Title / Topic
14:00-14:45	InterConnect 681	Predictive Queries in Oracle 12c
16:00-16:45	Davin Suite	Running R in the Database using Oracle R Enterprise

I will be giving away a copy of my book to one luck person :-)

How will this book give away work?

During both of my presentations I will pass around a "hat" for you to put your name or business card into. Then at end of my last presentation we will draw one name out of the hat.

But you have to be in the room to collect the book. If you are not there then I will draw out another name (and so on) until the winner is in the room.

So by attending both of my presentations you are doubling your chances of winning my book.

(Maybe this is an attempt by me to have a good attendance at my last presentation)

Plus I might have a few other Oracle Press goodies to give away too.

Oracle ACEs at OUG Ireland 2015

The annual Oracle User Group in Ireland Conference will be on Thursday 19th March. This year the conference will be held in the Croke Park conference centre. This conference centre is only a short taxi ride from Dublin Airport and Dublin City Centre.

If you are planning a hotel stay for the conference I would recommend staying in a hotel in the city centre and get a taxi to/from the conference venue.

We have a large number of Oracle ACEs presenting at the conference. The following table lists the ACEs, their twitter handle and their website.

Oracle ACE	Type of ACE	Twitter Name	Blog / Web Site
Brendan Tierney	ACE Director	@brendantierney	http://www.oralytics.com
Debra Lilley	ACE Director	@debralilley	http://www.debrasoracle.blogspot.ie/
Jonathan Lewis	ACE Director	@JLOracle	http://jonathanlewis.wordpress.com/
Tim Hall	ACE Director	@oraclebase	http://oracle-base.com/
Alex Nuijten	ACE Director	@alexnuijten	http://nuijten.blogspot.com/
Dhananjay Papde	ACE Associate
Stewart Bryson	ACE Director	@stewartbryson	http://www.redpillanalytics.com/
Antony Heljula	ACE	@aheljula	http://www.peakindicators.com/
Gurcan Orhan	ACE Director	@gurcan_orhan	https://gurcanorhan.wordpress.com/
Heli Helskyaho	ACE Director	@HeliFromFinland	https://helifromfinland.wordpress.com/
Marco Gralike	ACE Director	@mgralike	http://www.xmldb.nl
Roel Hartman	ACE Director	@roelh	http://roelhartman.blogspot.com/
Martin Widlake	ACE	@mdwidlake	https://mwidlake.wordpress.com/
Liron Amitzi	ACE	@amitzil	http://www.dbaces.com/
David Kurtz	ACE Director	@davidmkurtz	http://www.go-faster.co.uk/
Marcin Przepiorowski	ACE	@pioro	http://oracleprof.blogspot.com/

Make sure you check out the full agenda for the conference by clicking on the following image. Plus there is a full day session on Friday 20th March with Maria Colgan on the Oracle In-Memory option.

OUG Ireland 2015 : Now open for Submissions

OUG Ireland Call for submissions is now open.

The closing date for submissions is 5th January, 2015.

and the submission webpage can be found here.

The OUG Ireland conference will be on Thursday 19th March. Yes it is only a one day conference :-( but we will be 5 or 6 or more streams. So there will be something for everyone and plenty of choice.

On Friday 20th March we will have Maria Colgan, formally the Optimizer Lady and now the In-Memory Queen (or something like that), giving a full day workshop on the In-Database option and the Optimizer. She will also be about for the main conference on the 19th, so you can expect a presentation or two from her on the Thursday.

Agenda selection day is the 8th January, 2015. So hopefully you will be getting the acceptance emails soon after that or during week of 12th January.

There is a committee of about 10 people who are involved in selecting presentations and setting the agenda. If it was up to me then I would accept everything/everyone. So if your presentation is not accepted this time, please don't blame me :-) I said YES to your presentation, I really, really did. I fought so hard to have your presentation included. If your presentation is not accepted then the blame is down to the other committee members :-)

The conference will be held in Croke Park, and is a 15-20 minute taxi ride from the Airport.

You can follow the Conference and other OUG Ireland events using the twitter tag #oug_ire

OUG Ireland 2013 Agenda is now live

The agenda for the OUG Ireland 2013 event is now live. The event will be in the Dublin Convention Centre on the 12th March. There are lots of excellent sessions, across 7 tracks!!  So there will be something (or lots of things) for everyone who works in the Oracle world here in Ireland.

I’m sure the Oracle Database track will be very popular. I wonder why!!!

Agenda : http://www.ukoug.org/2013-events/oug-ireland-2013/agenda/

Remember registration is FREE. You don’t have to be a member of the User Group to come to this event. It is open to everyone and did I mention that it is FREE.  Registration is now open.

I’ll be there. Well I suppose I have to as I’ll be presenting

I hope to see you there.

Tom Kyte in Dublin 21st January 2013

Tom Kyte will be back in Dublin on the 21st January, 2013.  He will be giving a number of presentations covering some of his popular Oracle Open World sessions and will also include a AskTom session

It will be a full day, kicking off at 9am and finishing around 3:30pm.

There is no better way to kick off the new year with a full day of FREE Oracle training and up skilling with Tom Kyte.

To register for the event send an email to marketing-ie_ie@oracle.com

As they say places are limited, so book early,  I have so I’ll see you there.

OUG Ireland 2013–Call for Presentations

The call for presentations at the OUG Ireland Conference is now open. The conference will be on Tuesday 12th March in Dublin city centre.

It is hoped to have at a number of concurrent tracks covering all the main topic areas, including application development, database administration, business intelligence, applications, etc.

If you are interested in submitting a presentation then you need to fill in some of the detail at

OUG Ireland – Submit a Paper

Follow the OUG Ireland conversation on twitter using the tag  #oug_ire

Update on : Adding numbers between

Over the past few days I’ve had a number of emails and comments based on my previous post.  My previous post was called ‘Adding numbers between two values’. I included some PL/SQL code that can be used to add up the numbers between two values. I mentioned that this was a question that my pre-teen son (a few year pre-teen) had asked me.

There are two main solutions to the same problem. One involves just using a SELECT and the other involves using recursion. I will come back the these alternative solutions below.

But let me start off with a bit more detail and background to why I approached the problem the way that I did. The main reason is that my son is a pre-teen. Over the past couple of years he as expressed an interest in what his daddy does. We even have matching ORACLENERD t-shirts

When I was working through the problem with my son I wanted to show him how to take a problem and by breaking it down into its different parts we can work out an overall solution. We can then take each of these parts and translate them into code. In this case some PL/SQL, yes it is a bit nerdy and we do have the t-shirt. The code that I gave illustrates many different parts of the language and hopefully he will use some of these features as we continue on our learning experience.

It is good sometimes to break a problem down into smaller parts. That way we can understand it better, what works and what does not work, if something does not work then we will know what bit and also leads to easier maintenance. At a later point as you develop an in-depth knowledge of certain features of a language you can then rewrite what you have to be more efficient.

All part of the learning experience.

Ok lets take a look at the other ways to answer this problem. The first approach is to just use a single SELECT statement.

SELECT sum(rownum + &&Start_Number - 1)
FROM    dual
CONNECT by level <= &End_Number - &&Start_Number + 1;

An even simpler way is

SELECT sum(level)
FROM    dual
CONNECT BY level between &Start_Number and &End_Number;

These queries create a hierarchical query that produce all the numbers between the Start_Number parameter and the End_Number parameter. The SUM is needed to all all the numbers/rows produced.  This is nice and simple (but not that easy for by son at this point).

Thank you to everyone who contacted me about this. I really appreciated your feedback and please keep your comments coming for all my posts.

Oracle Open World Schedule

Oracle Open World is fast approaching. Over the past couple of weeks I have been using the schedule builder tool to work out what sessions I would like to attend.  Unfortunately there are LOTS of sessions I would love to attend but I haven’t worked out a way to be in 10 places at the same time.

When attending a conference I try to achieve a number of things. These are find out about new topics/features, benchmark my knowledge of existing topics, try some of the hands-on labs, try something new and do something completely different. This will be my challenge at Oracle Open World.

There are a number of other people from Ireland who will be attending OOW, and there are some plans to have an Ireland social event. Plus there is lots of meetings/catch-ups planned too with people I know from the virtual Oracle world.

There will be some people from AIB who will be presenting at OOW. Their presentation will be on the Tuesday morning 10:15-11:00.  I’ll be there.

Other social things that are on include the Oracle ACE dinner, the Oracle Music festival, with Kings of Leon playing support to Pearl Jam on the Wednesdays night.

It is going to be a busy week, an enjoyable week, a week of learning new things and finding out lots of what the 12c database will be like. 

Will I get time to go to everything ?  The simple answer is NO.  So I will just have to try to get to another Oracle Open World soon.

Events for Oracle Users in Ireland–Winter 2012

Over the next couple months there are a number of events happening for Oracle Users in Ireland.

There are a number of OUG Ireland SIG meetings happening. These are:

11th September : Joint SIG meeting of the BI & EPM SIG and the first Tech SIG meeting

12th September : HCM SIG meeting

20th November : BI & EPM SIG.  This will be a full day SIG event.

3rd-5th December : The annual UKOUG Conference in Birmingham. There is usually a good attendance from Ireland at this conference. On the Monday night there will be the focus pubs. Join me at the Ireland table.

Oracle and the Oracle User Group have arrange to have Tom Kyte come to Dublin on 19th September, to give a number of presentations. Check out this link for more details and how to register.

Oracle will be having an Oracle Technology Day in Dublin on 15th November in the Croke Park Conference Centre. They will be talking about Cloud Computing, Mobile Computing, Social Media and Big Data. They are also hoping to include some of the updates and product news that will be announced at Oracle Open World in early October. You will need to register for this event.

Summary of Dates & Events to add to your diary.

11th September : OUG Ireland BI & EPM and Tech SIG meeting

12th September : OUG Ireland HCM SIG meeting

19th September : Tom Kyte in Dublin

15th November : Oracle Technology Day

3rd- 5th December : UKOUG Conference in Birmingham.

Tom Kyte Seminar–Dublin 19th September 2012

Calling all Oracle users in Ireland.

Tom Kyte will be back in Dublin on Wednesday 19th September for a half day seminar.

The event is is being organised by the Ireland OUG and Oracle.

It will be in the Gibson Hotel beside the Point village.

This is a FREE event for everyone, so share the news and get to see Tom Kyte present for a 4 hours.

As they say spaces are limited, so book your place today. I have.

To register for the event – click here.

Oracle Technology Day in Dublin 15th November

Calling all Oracle users in Ireland.

Oracle is hosting a Technology day in Dublin on Thursday 15th November. This one day event will be held in the Croke Park Conference Centre.

They will be talking about Cloud Computing, Mobile Computing, Social Media and Big Data.

They are also hoping to include some of the updates and product news that will be announced at Oracle Open World in early October.

As this is not an Oracle User Group event, you should expect a certain amount of marketing and sales pitches at this event.

To register for this event got to – Register Now

OUG Ireland SIG Meetings 26th June

The next Oracle User Group in Ireland SIG meetings will be on Tuesday 26th June.

This will be a full day event and will comprise 2 SIGs, the BI& EPM and Applications.

The BI & EPM SIG presentations will be in the morning and the Applications SIG presentations will be in the afternoon.

A lot of work has been put into planning this full day event to come up with an agenda that people from both communities may be interested in.

Check out the full agenda page – click here.

To register for the event – click here.

OTN Developer Days–Dublin 12th to 14 June

The OTN Developer Days events return to the Oracle Dublin office in East Point this month from the 12th to the 14th.

These are free events, but places are limited, and allow you to get some hands-on training with these tools. Depending on the day and the topic there is a mixture of lecture and workshop, to just being a hands-on workshop.

12th June – Golden Gate 11g, Oracle Data Integrator 11g and Enterprise Data Quality (full day : 9:45-17:00)

13th June – Partitioning and Advanced Compression (9:45-13:00)

14th June – Unlocking the value of Oracle Database 11g Core Features (9:45-15:00)

These are free events and you will even get a free lunch from Oracle.

OTN Workshop Days in Dublin 17-

Oracle in Ireland have arranged a number of FREE Oracle Technology Network Hands on Workshops.

17th April : Database Firewall

18th April : Oracle Real Application Testing

19th April : Database 11g R2 New Features

20th April : Business Integration using Oracle SOA Suite 11g

All the workshops are in the Oracle offices in East Point, in Dublin.

To register for these events

http://www.oracle.com/us/dm/34862-splashpage-1438215.html

My OUG Ireland Conference Presentations

Wednesday 21st March an important for the OUG Ireland as it is the annual conference. This year we are in a new venue, the Dublin Convention Centre, on the river Liffey.

After many, many years of being an attendee of my local conference, this year I will be presenting 2 presentations. Actually, I’ll be presenting one and co-presenting another.

My first presentation, will be an introduction to Oracle Data Miner, which is now part of SQL Developer. I will be talking about the new features and some features that be part of a future presentation. Most of the presentation time will be taken up with a Demonstration of using Oracle Data Miner (ODMr). I will step through a the main steps of data mining using the ODMr tool. The data set that I will be using is based on a University in the UK who wanted to look at how data mining could be used to help them manage student retention/churn.

The second presentation will be lead by Antony Heljula, of Peak Indications, with me co-presenting or butting in on some topics. This presentation will be at a much higher level. This presentation will be aimed at analysts and managers who are looking at data mining and what it can do for them.We will look at what it can be used for, who are the main people, some sample case studies/application areas, data quality issues, etc. There will be a demonstration on how you can incorporate the data mining model, developed in the first presentation, into OBIEE Dashboards. We will be using the same UK University scenario here and we will show how data mining has helped to identify specific types students that could not be identified using other means.

Check out the full conference agenda – here

There are plenty of excellent presentations, with lots of Oracle ACE’s and Oracle ACE Directors.

Some of my other activities on the day will be:

• Talking to people about writing articles for the Oracle Scene, the user group manage. I’m the deputy editor of Oracle Scene.
• I’m also deputy chair of the Irish BI & EPM SIG, so I’ll be trying to persuade people take part in and present at future meetings.
• Finally and perhaps most importantly, I will be meeting other people in the Oracle world here in Ireland. Some of these people I know for 20+ years. Because of busy schedules sometimes the only time we get to catch-up is at the annual conference.

If you would like to talk to me about the topics covered in the presentations or about any of the about activities, look out for me during the day. I will be at the (free) drinks reception at the end of the day, so you can talk to me then. If that does not suit, then drop me an email and we can arrange to meet up.

Oracle Ireland Security Seminar–Dublin 8th March 2012

Oracle Ireland will be hosting an security event on Thursday 8th March, between 9:30-13:30, in their East Point offices.

The seminar is titled Defending Against Hackers and Hacking.

There will be a couple of demos what show some of the simple and not so simple techniques that hack and compromise your systems. This can lead to loss of confidential information.

To register for the event go to

http://www.oracle.com/webapps/events/ns/EventsDetail.jsp?p_eventId=143168&src=7302155&src=7302155&Act=58

OUG Ireland 2012 Conference & Re-launching the SIGs in Ireland

The schedule of presentations for the 2012 Oracle User Group Ireland conference has just been released.

This year the conference will be in the Dublin Convention Centre.

There are 5 parallel streams with sessions running all day. Key notes presentations will be given by Eileen O’Mara from Oracle Ireland (given in the morning) and the key note at the end of the day will be given by Mogen Norgaard from Miracle AS in Denmark and founder of the OakTable Network.

There will be 7 Oracle ACE Directors and 3 Oracle ACEs presenting at the conference in addition to other speakers from Ireland, UK and Netherlands. Here is the full list of Oracle ACEs that are presenting

Debra Lilley, ACE Director
Mark Rittman, ACE Director
Roel Hartman, ACE Director
Simon Haslam, ACE Director
Frits Hoogland, ACE Director
Mogens Norgaard, ACE Director
Lonneke Dikmans, ACE Director
Brendan Tierney, ACE
Marcin Przepiorowski, ACE
Grant Ronald, ACE

It is also FREE to attend. So go ahead an book yourself a place for a full day Oracle training.

To register your place – Click here

The agenda for the conference can be found here – Click here

There are a few important web and social media links that might be of interest for all Oracle people in Ireland.

Web :       www.oug.og/ireland
Twitter :   @oug_ire
                @oug_ire2012 For the 2012 conference related tweets
LinkedIn : http://www.linkedin.com/groups?home=&gid=3441701

Re-launching the SIGS in Ireland

Over the past few years the User Group SIGs have been a bit quiet here in Ireland. Except for the BI (&EPM) SIG, which has been getting a good attendance since it launched back in 2009.

In particular the Oracle Technology SIG basically ceased to exist over the past 5 or 6 years, since the days when John Knox and Tagdh Cashman were running it.

At the conference it is hoped that to get some people to volunteer to get this SIG back up and running again. Maybe we could get 3 SIG events each year.  What do you think ?

Drop me an email if you have any questions regarding the SIGs in Ireland (I’m deputy chair of the BI & EPM SIG).Hopefully

I’ll see you there on the 21st March.