Call for Papers : UKOUG Annual Conferences : Closes 4th June at 9am (UK)

The call for Papers (presentations) for the UKOUG Annual Conferences is open until 9am (UK time) on Monday 4th June.

Me: What are you waiting for? Go and submit a topic! Why not!

You: Humm, well..., (excuse, excuse, ...)

Me: What?

You: I couldn't do that! Present at a conference?

Me: Why not?

You: That is only for experts and I'm not one.

Me: Wrong! If you have a story to tell, then you can present.

You: But I've never presented before, it scares me, but one day I'd like to try.

Me: Go for it, do it. If you want you can co-present with me.

You: But, But, But .....

I'm sure you have experienced something like the above conversation before. You don't have to be an expert to present, you don't have to know everything about a product to present, you don't have to be using the latest and brightest technologies to present, you don't have to present about something complex, etc. (and the list goes on and on)

The main thing to remember is, if you have a story to tell then that is your presentation. Be it simple, complex, only you might be interested in it, it involves making lots of bits of technology work, you use a particular application in a certain way, you found something interesting, you used a new process, etc (and the list goes on and on)

I've talked to people who "ranted" for two hours about a certain topic (its was about Dates in Oracle), but when I said you should give a presentation on that, they say NO, I couldn't do that!. (If you are that person and you are reading this, then go on and submit that presentation).

If you don't want to present alone, then reach out to someone else and ask them if they are interested in co-presenting. Most experienced presenters would be very happy to do this.

You: But the topic area I'll talk about is not listed on the submission page?

Me: Good point, just submit it and pick the topic area that is closest.

You: But my topic would be of interest to the APPs and Tech conference, what do I do?

Me: Submit it to both, and let the agenda planners work out where it will fit.

I've presented at both APPs and Tech over the years and sometimess my Tech submission has been moved and accepted for the APPs conf, and vice versa.

Just do it!

UKOUG EPM & Hyperion Event 6th June, 2018

Come up really soon is the annual EPM and Hyperion event organised by the UKOUG. This year it will be on 6th June at Sandown Park Racecourse (Portsmouth Rd, Esher, KT10 9AJ).

If you have ever been to Sandown Park Racecourse you will know how fantastic a venue it is. And if you have been to a previous UKOUG EPM & Hyperion event before you will know how amazing it is.

Just go and book you place for this event now. If you are a UKOUG member this event could be free (depending on level of membership) but if you aren't a member, you can still go to this event. You can either become a UKOUG member and attend the event or pay the small event fee and attend the event.

From what I've heard a lot of people have already signed up to go, and I can see why. The agenda is jammed packed with end-user and customer case studies, as well as presentations from key people from Oracle people and and leading Oracle partners.

The exhibition space has been sold out! This will give you plenty of opportunities to get talking to various partners and service providers, and get your key questions answered at this event.

There will be a Panel Session at the end of the day. I love these panel sessions and gives everyone a chance to ask questions or to listen, or to join in with the discussion.

Lots and lots of value and learning to be had at this event. Go register now.

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.

Join the Oracle Scene Editorial Team

Are you a member of UKOUG?

How would you like to join the editorial team of Oracle Scene magazine as a deputy editor?

If you are interested we are looking to recruit 1 deputy editor to cover the Applications area and 2 deputy editors to cover the Tech area (DBA, Developer, BA, etc)

How much time is required? about 4 hours per edition, or maybe less.

What does a deputy editor do?

As part of the editorial team you will be expected to:

- Article Review

Articles submitted are uploaded to the review panel on Basecamp. During this time the editors should become familiar with the articles and have an idea of which ones would be appropriate for publication. Time approx 1.5hrs over a 2 week period.

- Editorial Call

After the review period has closed the editors come together for an editorial call (approx 1hr) to go through the feedback received on the articles, it is the editors job to validate any comments and select which articles should be chosen for publication. Time approx 1hr.

Some articles may need further rework by the authors and the editors provide comments & instructions as to the amends needed, in some cases the editors will take on the amends themselves or if they hold the relationship with the author they may wish to approach them direct. If any articles have been held over from the previous edition, the editors will relook at the articles and if any of the content needs to be updated they will advise. If we do not have articles submitted at this stage so the editors may need to source some additional content.

- Editorial Review

Once the selected articles are edited they are passed to the designer for layout, editors will then receive a first copy of the magazine where they will read the articles relevant to them (Apps or Tech) marking up on the pdf any errors in the text or images found. We try to build in time over a weekend for this with the comments due by 9am on the Monday. This is generally the last time the editors see the magazine, the next time being the digital version. Time approx 2hrs.

- Promotion

When the digital version is ready to be sent out – the editors & review panel are notified to help raise awareness of the magazine among their network.

- Article Sourcing

Call for articles is open all year as we will just hold those submitted in between the planning timeline over to the next edition. If there are particular topics that we feel would make good articles the editors are expected to help source potential authors and of course if they see good presentations again encourage those speakers to turn their presentation in to text.

- Flying the flag

Throughout the year the editors are expected to positively “fly the flag” of Oracle Scene, as a volunteer this will include, at the annual conference, taking part in the community networking to encourage future authors amongst the community.

If you are interested in a deputy editor role then submit your application now.

Check out UKOUG webpage for more details.

UKOUG Conference 1999 : Who was there & what they were talking about

Yes you read the title of this blog post correctly!

Recently I was doing a bit a clear out and I came across a CD of the UKOUG Conference proceedings from 1999. That was my second UKOUG conference and how times have changed.

The CD contained all the conference proceedings consisting of slides and papers.

Here are some familiar names from back in 1999 who you may find presenting at this years conference, some you might remember as being a regular presenter and some are still presenting but not at this years conference.

• Jonathan Lewis
• Carl Dudley
• Fiona Martin
• Peter Robson
• Duncan Mills
• Kent Graziano
• John King
• Toby Price
• Doug Burns
• Dan Hotka
• Joel Goodman

The 1999 Ralph Fiennes did the Keynote speech. I queued up afterwards to get a signed book but they ran out with three people ahead of me :-(

The agenda grid was a bit smaller back then compared to now.

I'll see you again in Birmingham this year, in a few days time :-)

I'll be presenting during the Super Sunday and then again on the Tuesday.

When you are at the UKOUG Conference, addend some sessions that are not in your area. You never know what you might learn. Also get out and about, and explore the Christmas market just outside the conference venue.

My presentations at UKOUG 2015

The annual conferences of the UKOUG are coming up soon and I just wanted to give you a quick overview of the 3 presentations I will be giving at these conferences in Birmingham between Sunday 6th and Wednesday 9th December.

I'll be making references to 50 Shades of Gray and Lord of the Rings in some of these presentations. Come along to find out why.

It all kicks off on the Sunday (12:30-14:20) with an almost 2 hour presentation titled 'Predictive Analytics in Oracle: Mining the Gold & Creating Valuable Products'. We have being hearing about Predictive Analytics for a few years now. But most people are still unsure of what it really means and how it could be used in their company. This presentations aims to simplify what Predictive Analytics means and to illustrate how various companies from a wide range of industries have been using Predictive Analytics to gain deeper, valuable and actionable insights of their data. A number of case studies will be presented, based on some of my recent projects, illustrating how predictive analytics has been used to generate significant benefits for each company. These case studies will include examples from Banking, Telecommunications, Financial Fraud Detection, Retail and Merchandising. The second half of this seminar will look at what functionality is available from Oracle that allows you to build and deploy Predictive Analytics in your applications. We will at what you can do with SQL, PL/SQL, Oracle Data Miner, Oracle R Enterprise and Real-Time Decisions. We will then look at how you can build these features and tools into your front end applications. In the final section of the seminar we will look at what you need to do to get started with Predictive Analytics and how you can avoid some of the typical pitfalls.

On Monday 7th, I have a presentation between 9:00 and 9:50 titled 'Is Oracle SQL the Best Language for Statistics?'. Did you know that Oracle comes with over 280+ statistical functions? and that these statistical functions are available in all versions of the Database? Most people do not seem to know this.When we hear about people performing statistical analytics we can hear them talking about Excel and R. But what if we could do statistical analysis in the database, without having to extract any data onto client machines. That would be really good and just think of the possible data security issues with using Excel, R and other tools.This presentation will explore the various statistical areas available in SQL and I will give a number of demonstrations on some of the more commonly used statistical techniques. With the introduction of Big Data SQL we can now use these same 280+ Oracle statistical functions on all our data including Hadoop and NoSQL. We can also greatly expand our statistical capabilities by using Oracle R Enterprise using the embedded capabilities in SQL.

My final presentation will on Wednesday (14:30-15:20) titled 'Automating Predictive Analytics in Your Applications'. What does your Oracle DBA and Oracle Developer need to know to implement Data Mining? How can the Oracle DBA and Oracle Developer use Data Mining. This presentation will look at what the Oracle DBA and Oracle Developer needs to know to deploying, implementing and integrating the predictive models produced by the Data Miner. These predictive models can be used in multiple databases and across their many applications. Examples will be given of the typical tasks data mining task for the DBA and for the Oracle Developer. These examples will include SQL, PL/SQL and embedded Oracle R Enterprise. I will show how easy it is to build automated Predictive Analytics into, not only your Dashboards, but your everyday applications. Here is a short video that gives an overview of my presentations for TECH15.

UKOUG Tech 15 : Acceptances & Agenda

Just over a week ago the Acceptance emails started to go out for the UKOUG TECH15 and APPS15 conferences. Also at this time the rejection emails started to go out too :-(

I was on the receiving end of both of these type of emails.

But I was delighted with the news that I received.

My topic areas crosses the TECH and APPs topics and also crosses the Business Analytics stream which looks to bridge this divide in the world of Business Intelligence.

So in December I will be giving the following presentations.

Sunday 6th : Super Sunday event : Business Analytics Stream

12:30 - 14:30 : (2 hours) : Predictive Analytics in Oracle: Mining the Gold & Creating Valuable Products

I'll be giving away a copy of my book on Oralce Data Mining to one lucky attendee at this Super Sunday session.

Monday 7th : 9:00-9:50 : Analytics Stream

Is Oracle the Best Language for Statistics

Wednesday 9th : 14:30-15:20 : Big Data & Data Warehousing Stream (TECH 15 & APPS15)

Automating Predictive Analytics in Your Applications

Check out the full agendas for TECH 15 and APPS15 by clicking on appropriate image below.

Go Register for these events now!

UKOUG 2015 Conferences

The UKOUG annual conferences commence on Sunday 7th December and run until Wednesday 10th.

Like previous years there are two conferences, one called TECH15 and the other is called APPS15. You might guess what each conference is about!!.

This year these conferences are being held at the same time and in the same venue. But they are separate conferences!.

This year I've been very lucky (or very unlucky) to have 3 presentations at these conferences. Two of these will on part of the TECH15 conference and one will be part of the APPS15 conference.

Just in case you interested in what I'm presenting about and you might want to attend them, here is the list with the room numbers.

Monday

10:30-11:20 : Oracle Advanced Analytics in Oracle Fusion Apps & Beyond (Apps) (Room : Ex1)

11:30-12:20 : Predictive Queries in Oracle 12c (TECH) (Room : Hall 6)

Wednesday

11:30-12:20 : What are they thinking? With APEX and Oracle Data Miner. (TECH) (Room : Ex4)

(this is a joint presentation with Roel Hartman)

Yes on the Monday I have 2 back-to-back presentation with a 10 minute gap to get from one side of the conference centre to the other side :-( I'm not looking forward to that transition, but I'm sure it will be fine.

Articles wanted for Oracle Scene–Spring 2013

The Call for Articles is now open for the Spring edition of Oracle Scene magazine. This is a publication of the UKOUG.

We are looking for technical articles covering all product offerings from Oracle. 

Typically articles will range from 3 pages to 8 pages (MS Word format). These will convert into 2 to 5 page articles in Oracle Scene.

Check out the Article Formatting Guidelines before submitting.
All pictures and images should be 300dpi.
Include a 100(max) word Bio and your photo
Email your article and images to

articles@ukoug.org.uk

For more details about submitting an article, check out
http://www.ukoug.org/what-we-offer/oracle-scene/article-submissions/

UKOUG 2012-What is it all about

The annual showcase conference of the UKOUG is coming up soon, actually it is just a week away now.

I attended my first UKOUG conference back in 1998 and I’ve been attending it on and off every since. Over the past few years I’ve been very luck to be able to attend it every year and during most of those I’ve presented at too.

This year will be no different as I will be co-presenting with Antony Heljula on using Oracle Data Miner and OBIEE to get some insight of on your data.

The core part of the conference runs over 3 days Monday to Wednesday, with many, many streams of excellent content for each area that the user group covers.  The real problem I have when I attend this conferences is that my interests typically span two if not three of the streams, so I’m typically seen running between presentation.

This year there are two pre-conference events. The first of these is the Oaktable Sunday, where there are two streams of presentations from members of the OakTable networks, who are a bunch of hardcore DBA types. So if you are one of those or would like to be one of those then try to get along to those session on the Sunday.

Also on the Sunday there is a Middleware event. This is being organised by Simon Haslam and Jacco Landlust. Like the OakTable event you will find some hardcode middleware experts sharing some of the work, their discoveries and offering lots of useful advice.

During the main conference look out for the Un-conference sessions where you will have the opportunity to give a short 10 minute plus, no powerpoint talk and some topic or issues you want to discuss. Whether you want to lead a discussion or to just sit in on one then these are a not to be missed. Check out the schedule near the exhibition hall.

The Oracle User Experience team will be at the conference this year to talk to you about your experiences of using the products. In addition they will be setting up a UX lab to get some feedback on their designs.

There will be more talks by members of the OakTable network during the lunch times. These will be shorter than the Sunday talks and again there will be no powerpoint.

You will have the opportunity to get hands-on experience building an Oracle RAC database using virtual machines on your own laptop with help from the experts from the IOUG RAC SIG and Pythian.

In addition to all of this there will be roundtable discussions, master classes and hands on labs.

You may have noticed that I haven’t talked about the actual streams that are running over the 3 days of the conference. There is so much going on at this conference that you will learn so much your boss will be sending you back next year. This conference is the most cost effective training you will ever receive.

I better get packing for a busy few days of learning, networking and having fun at the same time.

I’m going to make another blog post on what what my plans are for the conference, what presentations I will be going to, what events, etc.

Oh and don’t forget my advice in the latest Oracle Scene online or have a read of your free copy if you are attending the conference.

Oh I forgot to mention the social event.  Tut Tut.  There are lots of social and network events too so when you are finished with the presentations for a day, you can enjoy a free drink.

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.

Events for Oracle Users in Ireland-November 2012

November (2012) is going to be a busy month for Oracle users in Ireland. There is a mixture of Oracle User Group events, with Oracle Day and the OTN Developer Days. To round off the year we have the UKOUG Conference during the first week in December.

Here are the dates and web links for each event.

Oracle User Group

The BI & EPM SIG will be having their next meeting on the Tuesday 20th November. This is almost a full day event, with presentations from End Users, Partners and Oracle product management. The main focus of the day will be on EPM, but will also be of interest to BI people.

As with all SIG meetings, this SIG will be held in the Oracle office in East Point (Block H). Things kick off at 9am and are due to finish around 4pm with plenty of tea/coffee and a free lunch too.

Remember to follow OUG Ireland on twitter using  #oug_ire

Oracle Day

Oracle will be having their Oracle Day 2012, on Thursday 15th, in Croke Park. Here is some of the blurb about the event,  “…to learn how Oracle simplifies IT, whether it’s by engineering hardware and software to work together or making new technologies work for the modern enterprise. Sessions and keynotes feature an elite roster of Oracle solutions experts, partners and business associates, as well as fascinating user case studies and live demos.”

This is a full day event from 9am to 5pm with 3 parallel streams focusing on Big Data, Enterprise Applications and the Cloud.

Click here to register for this event.

Click here for the full details and agenda.

OTN Developer Days

Oracle run their developer days about 3 times a year in Dublin. These events are run like a Hands-on Lab. So most of the work during the day is by yourself. You are provided with a workbook, a laptop and a virtual machine configured for the hands-on lab. This November we have the following developers days in the Oracle office in East Point, Dublin.

Tuesday 27th November (9:45-15:00) : Real Application Testing

Wednesday 28th November (9:00-14:00) : Partitioning/Advanced Compression

Thursday 29th November (9:15-13:30) : Database Security

Friday 30th November (9:45-16:00) : Business Process Management Using BPM Suite 11g

As you can see we have almost a full week of FREE training from Oracle. So there is no reason not to sign up for these days.

UKOUG Conference – in Birmingham

In December we have the annual UKOUG Conference. This is the largest Oracle User Group conference in Europe and the largest outside of the USA. At this conference you will have some of the main speakers and presentations from Oracle Open World, along with a range of speakers from all over the work.

In keeping with previous years there will be the OakTable Sunday and new this year there will be a Middleware Sunday. You need to register separately for these events. Here are the links

OakTable Sunday

Middleware Sunday

The main conference kicks off on the Monday morning with a very full agenda for Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. There are a number of social events on the Monday and Tuesday, so come well rested.

On the Monday evening there is the focus pubs. This year it seems to have an Irish Pub theme. At the focus pub event there will be table for each of the user group SIGs. 

Come and join me at the Ireland table on the Monday evening.

The full agenda in now live and you can get all the details here.

I will be giving a presentation on the Tuesday afternoon titled Getting Real Business Value from Predictive Analytics (OBIEE and Oracle Data Mining). This is a joint presentation with Antony Heljula of Peak Indicators.

Oracle Scene (Autumn 2012) now available

The Autumn 2012 edition of Oracle Magazine (I’m the deputy editor) is now available online. Like in other editions recently there is a bumper online edition.

Here is the marketing release with the details of the contents.

Welcome to Issue 48 of Oracle Scene

In this digital edition find out why you should attend this year's UKOUG conference - Brendan Tierney tells us why he has been attending since 1998. Read about one organisation's success story from System Integration to Employee Self-Service, what the new release of Oracle BI Applications 11g has to offer and how it has been improved. Find out about training opportunities in the fastest-changing profession in the world, and Tim Poynter sheds some light on UPK Professional. Plus, Jonathan Lewis outlines how to apply a new strategy for Star Transformation. 
Click here to view the digital edition

The articles in this edition: Discuss the essential ingredient of Oracle Gold Partner, Prōject, transformation Explore the ABC of ADF and why it may matter to you Look at Oracle Fusion Middleware and summarise the most common products Explore solutions for space management of database and file system Outline optimal Oracle configuration for efficient table scanning Click here to view the digital edition

And there’s more... How to raise a Service Request with Oracle Support for Exadata Introduction to Data Vault Modeling Next Generation Service Patterns using Oracle Fusion Middleware HR Platform - the changes and how to implement it successfully Winners of the UKOUG 2012 Partner of the Year Awards We hope you enjoy a good read. Click here to view the digital edition

The deadline for submitting an article for the Spring 2013 edition will be in early January.

Many thanks to Brigit Wells and the other member of the UKOUG office who have worked on getting this edition and every edition out to print and online. Also a thank you to Geoff Swaffer who is the editor, and myself who is the deputy editor

Extracting the rules from an ODM Decision Tree model

One of the most interesting of important aspects of a Decision Model is that we as a user can get to see what rules the machine learning algorithm has generated for our data.

I’ve give a number of examples in various blog posts over the past few years on how to generate a number of classification models. An example of the workflow is below.

In the Class Build node we get four models being generated. These include a Generalised Linear Model, Support Vector Machine, Naive Bayes and a Decision Tree model.

We can explore the Decision Tree model by right clicking on the Class Build Node, selecting View Models and then the Decision Tree model, which will be labelled with a ‘DT’ in the name.

As we explore the nodes and branches of the Decision Tree we can see the rule that was generated for a node in the lower pane of the applications. So by clicking on each node we get a different rule appearing in this pane

Sometimes there is a need to extract this rules so that they can be presented to a number of different types of users, to explain to them what is going on.

How can we extract the Decision Tree rules?

To do this, you will need to complete the following steps:

• From the Models section of the Component Palette select the Model Details node.
• Click on the Workflow pane and the Model Details node will be created
• Connect the Class Build node to the Model Details node. To do this right click on the Class Build node and select Connect. Then move the mouse to the Model Details node and click. The two nodes should now be connected.
• Edit the Model Details node, uncheck the Auto Settings, select Model Type to be Decision Tree, Output to be Full Tree and all the columns.

• Run the Model Details node. Right click on the node and select run. When complete you you will have the little green box with a tick mark, on the top right hand corner.
• To view the details produced, right click on the Model Details node and select View Data
• The rules for each node will now be displayed. You will need to scroll to the right of this pane to get to the rules and you will need to expand the columns for the rules to see the full details

Scott/Tiger in Oracle

Almost everyone starting out with Oracle have come across the schema SCOTT.

So who was SCOTT?

Bruce Scott was employee number 4 at Oracle back in the 1970s and was part of the team responsible for architecting and writing version 1, 2 and 3 of the Oracle Database.

So he set up the first schema for testing and demo-ing how to use SQL in the Oracle Database. The EMP and DEPT tables and the data that we still see in this schema is still based on the original data that he created.

How did he come up with the TIGER password ?  Tiger was the name of his cat!!!

Sten Vesterli of Scott/Tiger Group

Bruce co-founded Gupta Technology (now known as Centura Software) in 1984 with Umang Gupta, and later became CEO and founder of PointBase, Inc.

Call for paper for Oracle Scene-Winter 2012 Edition

The call for papers is now open for Oracle technical papers for publication in the UKOUG Oracle Scene magazine.

The submission date for completed papers is 24th August. 

To get more information of paper guidelines and submission details go to,

http://www.ukoug.org/what-we-offer/oracle-scene/

The Winter edition will be published online and in print format around the end of October. This will be in time for the EPM & Hyperion, JDE and UKOUG 2012 conferences. So this is a chance to get your message across to these communities.

Did you get a presentation accepted for the UKOUG annual conference or were you disappointed ?  Maybe you could consider writing a paper based on your presentation and submit it for consideration.

How about advertising in Oracle Scene. Over the past couple of editions we have had a significant increase in readership, with readership from countries around the world.

Over the past few years Oracle Scene has moved from being a regional User Group magazine to having a readership in 30+ countries around the world.

Why am I writing this post ?  I’m a deputy editor of Oracle Scene

UKOUG Conference-Submissions Deadline is 1st June

The call for presentations for Europe’s largest Oracle conference is currently open, but the deadline for submissions is approaching fast. The submission deadline is 1st June.

If you are interested in presenting there are a couple of things you need to do. The first step is that you need to register as a speaker. This just involves you registering your interest in being a speaker. The second step is to submit your presentation abstracts.

The conference will be in Birmingham between 3rd and 5th December. There are multiple streams including BI, Technology, Fusion, Middleware, Development, MySQL, Infrastructure, eBusiness Suite, Core Database, etc.

I gave my very first presentation at the annual UKOUG Conference a few years ago and I’ve presented a few times since. I would encourage everyone to give it a go. Pick a topic or topics that you have been working on over the past 12 months or more, or if you used a particular technique on a recent project, or you have discovered a particular work around, etc. submit a presentation on it.

I’ve submitted a few presentations, all of which are about data mining and the advanced analytics option in the Oracle Database. Two of these presentations will be co-presented with Antony Heljula, Peak Indicators. The presentations will be on including and using Oracle Data Mining models in OBIEE and on how we went about developing the Oracle Data Mining models for our project. Will they get accepted, I hope so, but the presentation selection is based on user voting. Everyone can get involved in the judging and voting of presentations.

Notifications of Acceptances or Rejections typically come out around the end of July or early August.

I’ve already booked by flight to Birmingham in December, so if my presentations get accepted or not, I’ll be there. It is a great conference.

Oracle Scene Call for Articles-Due 18th April

The Call for Articles is now open for the summer edition of Oracle Scene.

If you are interested in writing an article, now is the time to start working on writing it, as the deadline for submitting is 18th April.

Articles can be short (2 pages) or long 4 to 6 pages in MS Word.

All Oracle technical articles will be considered and can on one or more of the following areas:

• CRM market and megatrends eg. Cloud, mobile, CX (Customer Experience Management), self service, social
• Fusion CRM
• Siebel
• CRM on Demand
• Other Oracle CRM products
• e-commerce in Siebel
• Mobile CRM solutions
• RightNow
• Upgrading
• Project implementation
• Applications & Fusion Applications
• Fusion Middleware
• BI
• DBA
• APEX
• Server Technology
• Java

In particular I would like to see more short (1/4 or 1/2 page) articles on what happened at the various SIG events so far in 2012 and your plans for the rest of the year.

Have you written and published a book recently or at some stage over the summer. If so would you like to publicise it by writing a short article about it and my to give a sign copy away in a draw?

If you have any questions about writing an article for Oracle Scene drop me an email and we can discuss.

Check out the following web link for submission guidelines and how to submit your article.

http://www.ukoug.org/what-we-offer/oracle-scene/article-submissions/

New additions to my Oracle Magazine Collection

I put out a call a few months ago looking for help in completing my Oracle Magazine collection. I also had a letter in the Nov/Dec 2011 edition of Oracle Magazine looking for help.

The following people contacted me in December offering to send me some of my missing editions.

Lisa Dobson - Oracle DBA at Durham University and Vice President of UKOUG
Debra Lilley - President of UKOUG
Christian Antognini - Trivadis AG, Switzerland
Dan Vlamis - Vlamis Software Solutions, MO, USA

Many thanks for your donations.

It seems that people don’t keep their Oracle Magazines!

I’m now just missing a very small number of editions since 1992.  Can anyone else help ?

Does anyone have any Oracle Magazines from before 1992 ?

The following table gives the current collection (printed editions). The grey boxes are the editions that I’m still missing, and keep an eye on my Oracle Magazine page for updates.

Article for Oracle Scene–Due 13th Jan

As we approach Christmas, many of us will be looking forward to a few days holidays/vacation. During this period we may start thinking about some techniques or methods that we discovered over the past 12 months or about things we need to find out more on, over the coming months.

One thing to consider is to write an article on these techniques or methods, for Oracle Scene.  The next due date for submitting articles is 13th January.

http://www.ukoug.org/what-we-offer/oracle-scene/editorial-calendar/

For more details and ideas check out my webpage Oracle Scene

Make sure you check out the Article Guidelines and Submission Details

http://www.ukoug.org/what-we-offer/oracle-scene/article-submissions/

I hope to write an article based on the presentation I gave at the UKOUG Conference in Birmingham.

The most common question that I get asked is ‘how long should it be?’.  The length of an article can be anything from half a page, up to 4 or 5 pages long.