How big was your Oracle Database in 1993 & 1994

I’m in the middle of writing my summary of the May/June 1995 edition of Oracle Magazine (that blog post is coming soon). There was a one article about a survey that Oracle conducted of its customer on how big their databases were and the number of users for their databases.

The follow diagrams gives the summary results of these surveys.

We can see that there was a bit of a jump on the size of the databases but the number of users increased significantly

So must customers had databases in the 2GB to 10GB. How things have changed. If the survey was conduced for 2012 what results would be get ?

Does anyone know if Oracle has published similar survey results in the last few years ?

2 Day Oracle Data Miner course material

Last week I managed to get my hands on the training material for the 2 Day Oracle Data Miner course. This course is run by Oracle University.

Many thanks to Michael O’Callaghan who is a BI Sales person here in Ireland and Oracle University, for arranging this.

The 2 days are pretty packed with a mixture of lecture type material, lots of hands on exercises and some time for open discussions. In particular, day 2 will be very busy day.

Check out the course outline and published schedule – click here

You can have this course on site at your organisation. If this is something that interests you then contact your Oracle University account manager. There is also the traditional face-to-face delivery and the newer online delivery, where people from around the world come together for the online class.

Oracle Analytics Sessions at COLLABORATE12

There are a number of Oracle Advanced Analytics and related topics taking place this week at COLLABORATE12 in Las Vegas (http://collaborate12.com).

Date	Time	Presentation	Presenter
Sun 22nd	9:00-3pm	Oracle Business Intelligence Application Journey
Mon 23rd	9:45-10:45	Managing Unstructured Data using Hadoop, Oracle 11g and Oracle Exadata Database Machine	Jim Steiner
Mon 23rd	9:45-10:45	Environmental Data Management and Analytics-a Real World Perspective	Angela Miller
Mon 23rd	11-12	Public Safety and Environmental Real-Time Analytics using Oracle Business Intelligence	Raghav Venkat Therese Arguelles
Mon 23rd	11-12	BI is more than slice and dice	Peter Scott
Mon 23rd	14:30-15:30	In-Database Analytics: Predictive Analytics, Data Mining, Exadata & Business Intelligence	Jacek Myczkowski
Mon 23rd	15:45-16:45	Big Data Analytics, R you ready	Mark Hornick Shyam Nath
Tues 24th	10:45-11:45	BI Analytics and Oracle NoSQL. The Future of Now	Manish Khera
Wed. 25th	8:15-9:15	Oracle Data Mining – A Component of the Oracle Advanced Analytics Option-Hands-on Lab	Charlie Berger
Wed 25th	9:30-10:30	Oracle R Enterprise – A Component of the Oracle Advanced Analytics Option-Hands-on Lab	Mark Hornick

Here are the abstracts from the two main Oracle Advanced Analytics presentations by Charlie Berger and Mark Hornick

Oracle Data Mining – A Component of the Oracle Advanced Analytics Option

This Hands-on Lab provides an introduction to Oracle Data Mining and the Oracle Data Miner GUI.

Oracle Data Mining (ODM), now part of Oracle Advanced Analytics, provides an extensive set of in-database data mining algorithms that solve a wide range of business problems. It can predict customer behavior, detect fraud, analyze market baskets, segment customers, and mine text to extract sentiments. ODM provides powerful data mining algorithms that run as native SQL functions for in-database model building and model deployment. There is no need for the time delays and security risks of data movement.

The free Oracle Data Miner GUI is an extension to Oracle SQL Developer 3.1 that enables data analysts to work directly with data inside the database, explore the data graphically, build and evaluate multiple data mining models, apply ODM models to new data, and deploy ODM’s predictions and insights throughout the enterprise. Oracle Data Miner work flows capture and document the user's analytical methodology and can be saved and shared with others to automate advanced analytical methodologies.

Oracle R – A component of the Oracle Advanced Analytics Option

This Hands-on Lab provides an introduction to Oracle R Enterprise.

Oracle R Enterprise, a part of the Oracle Advanced Analytics Option, makes the open source R statistical programming language and environment ready for the enterprise by integrating R with Oracle Database. R users can interactively and transparently execute R scripts for statistical and graphical analyses on data stored in Oracle Database. R scripts can be executed in Oracle Database using potentially multiple database-managed R engines - resulting in data parallel execution. ORE also provides a rich set of statistical functions and advanced analytics techniques.

In this lab, attendees will be introduced to Oracle's strategy for R, including the Oracle R Distribution, Oracle R Enterprise (ORE), and Oracle R Connector for Hadoop (ORCH). We will focus on Oracle R Enterprise with hands-on exercises exploring the transparency layer, embedded R execution, and statistics engine.

Book Case

I finally got round to finishing a 5 foot high, by 4 foot wide, book case. It is made out of Sycamore wood with Mahogany wedges

Sycamore is a Very hard wood and can splinter easily.

One of the things that I like about this wood is when you apply danish oil you get variances in the colouration of the wood. I’ve ended up with some darker patches and some light patches. So you don’t get a consistent coloured finished.

This is one of the joys of working with natural solid wood rather than manufactured wood or veneered wood.

This is why I like it working with natural wood. It has lots of character. Plus the colouring will vary over the coming months.

When I moved book case into its new home in the dining room I discovered that the floor in not level. The book case was leaning away from the wall This was easily fixed with a very small wedge placed under each end piece. This is not ideal.

Oracle Magazine–March 1995

In 1995 we have a change to the frequency of publication of Oracle Magazine. It is not published every 2 two months with 6 editions each year, as it is still the case.

The headline articles in the March/April 1994 edition of Oracle Magazine included Integrating Unstructured Information, Minimizing Client/Server Network Traffic with Oracle Forms 4.0, Relational Objects and how the Canadian Postal Service was using Oracle Technology to deliver mail on time.

Other articles include:

Dynamic SQL Comes to PL/SQL: Introduces us to the DBMS_SQL package. A useful quick reference one pager is given giving the details of each of the 15 procedures and functions, including, BIND_VARIABLE, CLOSE_CURSOR, COLUMN_VALUE, DEFINE_COLUMN, EXECUTE, EXECUTE_AND_FETCH, FETCH_ROWS, IS_OPEN, LAST_ERROR_POSITION, LAST_ROW_COUNT, LAST_ROW_ID, LAST_SQL_FUNCTION_CODE, OPEN_CURSOR, PARSE, VARIABLE_VALUE.

Personal Oracle 7 for Windows gets released and it now has a graphical administration tool to allow us to manage the database, including users, backup and recovery managers along with export/import and SQL*Loader and Oracle Objects for OLE. The hardware requirements included 8Mb of RAM and less than 30Mb of hard-disk space. How things have changed!!!. It was capable of running on Window 3.1 and was Windows 95 ready.

Rollback segments in in Oracle 7 allows use to now effectively manage our transactions. It gave the following recommendations:

• Create a separate tablespace for rollback segments for administrative and monitoring purposes
• Se the size of the tablespace according to the number and storage parameters of the rollback segments
• Place your rollback segment tablespace on a separate disk device, if possible. Consider total I/O activities and spread I/O over available disk devices
• Create one rollback segment for every four concurrent transactions
• Don’t create more than 50 rollback segments
• Create smaller rollback segments for OLTP applications. This increases the likelihood that rollback segments will be cached in SGA according to the least recently used algorithm, resulting in performance gain
• Create larger rollback segments for decision support or back processing applications
• Set initial to you average transaction size, set OPTIMAL to four to eight times larger than INITIAL

Oracle Magazine goes digital and interactive with a CD-ROM containing every issue of published in the previous two years and also contained a map of Oracle offices worldwide.

To view the cover page and the table of contents click on the above image or click here.

My Oracle Magazine Collection can be found here. You will find links to my blog posts on previous editions.

Data Visualization Videos & Resources

Here is a selection of videos and websites on Data Visualisations.

Hans Rosling videos of his TED talks

• World Population Growth
• Global Population Growth (TED) 
• Asia’s Rise – How and When
• HIV: New facts and stunning data visuals
• Video for the BBC

Other videos

• Journalism in the Age of Data
• Make Data More Human
• The Beauty of Data Visualization

Useful Websites

• Visual Analytics
• Solving Problems with Visual Analytics book
• IBM Many Eyes
• Top 15 Data Visualization Tips
• Visualizing.org

Oracle Advanced Analytics Video by Charlie Berger

Charlie Berger (Sr. Director Product Management, Data Mining & Advanced Analytics) as produced a video based on a recent presentation called ‘Oracle Advanced Analytics: Oracle R Enterprise & Oracle Data Mining’.

This is a 1 hour video, including some demos, of product background, product features, recent developments and new additions, examples of how Oracle is including Oracle Data Mining into their fusion applications, etc.

Oracle has 2 data mining products, with main in-database Oracle Data Mining and the more recent extensions to R to give us Oracle R Enterprise.

Check out the video – Click here.

Check out Charlie’s blog at https://blogs.oracle.com/datamining/

Oracle University : 2 Day Oracle Data Mining training course

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

Tom Kyte is in Belfast 16th April

The Oracle User Group has organised for Tom Kyte the famous Oracle evangelist to come Belfast to give a one day seminar.

The seminar will be in the Hilton in Belfast.

Some of the topics to be covered on the day include:

• 5 things you probably didn’t know about SQL
• 5 thing you probably didn’t know about PL/SQL
• All about metadata: why telling the database about your schema matters
• What is New and Improved and Coming in Oracle Application Development
• All about Oracle Database Security.

All of this will followed by a 1 hour Ask Tom session, where you will have your chance to ask the man himself anything about the Oracle database.

This is a FREE event. What more could you ask for!

Check out the OUG website for more details and how to register for this event.

http://www.ukoug.org/events/tom-kyte-seminar-and-asktom-live/

Don’t forget to use the OUG Ireland twitter tag  #oug_ire

Oracle Magazine–Summer 1994

The headline articles in the Summer 1994 edition of Oracle Magazine included Objects in Motion on how to reap the benefits of OO technology, building a business case for Objects, working with Objects and some basics of OO programming.

As part of the articles on Objects, there was an interview with Steve Jobs who was an Object Evangelist at NeXT.

Apart from the articles on Objects we also had articles on:

• System Level Roles in Oracle 7: Going beyond Connect, Resource and DBA. In Oracle 7 the DBA can not create role groups.
• Customising Oracle Reports with PL/SQL: This article explores the different triggers that now exist in Oracle Report, where we can now use PL/SQL to perform pre-processing of data before it is displayed in the report output. The triggers included Before Runtime Parameter Form, Parameter Validation, After Runtime Parameter Form, Before Report (executes), Object level triggers, Between Each Page and After Report
• How Nintendo is using Oracle 7 client/server to stay ahead with providing faster and easier access to sales and marketing information.

To view the cover page and the table of contents click on the above image or click here.

My Oracle Magazine Collection can be found here. You will find links to my blog posts on previous editions.

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/

2 Day Oracle Data Miner training course by Oracle University

In the past few days Oracle University has advertised a new 2 Day instructor led training course on Oracle Data Miner.

There are no advertised dates or locations for this course yet. I suppose it will depend on the level of interest in the product.

There is the overview from the Oracle University webpage

“In this course, students review the basic concepts of data mining and learn how leverage the predictive analytical power of the Oracle Database Data Mining option by using Oracle Data Miner 11g Release 2. The Oracle Data Miner GUI is an extension to Oracle SQL Developer 3.0 that enables data analysts to work directly with data inside the database.

The Data Miner GUI provides intuitive tools that help you to explore the data graphically, build and evaluate multiple data mining models, apply Oracle Data Mining models to new data, and deploy Oracle Data Mining's predictions and insights throughout the enterprise. Oracle Data Miner's SQL APIs automatically mine Oracle data and deploy results in real-time. Because the data, models, and results remain in the Oracle Database, data movement is eliminated, security is maximized and information latency is minimized”

Click on the following link to access the details of the training course

http://education.oracle.com/pls/web_prod-plq-dad/db_pages.getCourseDesc?dc=D73528GC10

To view a PDF of the course details – click here