Oracle Magazine May/June 2012 Collector Editions

The good people at Oracle Magazine have produced a number of collectors editions (six) of the current edition (May/June 2012) .

I received my copy of the magazine in the post yesterday and the one that I received is the following

I’ve been collecting Oracle Magazine for over 20 year and I have almost the entire collection.

I would like to add all 6 special editions to my collection.

If you would like to donate your Oracle Magazine and help me complete the collection, add a comment to the blog or email me directly. I will be able to let you know what special editions I’m still missing

Oracle Magazine-May/June 1995

The headline articles for the May/June edition of Oracle Magazine included one of the first articles on Data Centers,using the prebuilt packages in PL/SQL and how to use object-oriented programming techniques in Oracle Forms 4.5

Other articles included:

Oracle 7 Internet Access Kit also called the Oracle World Wide Web Interface Kit. Developers could use this kit developers can create links between web servers and Oracle 7 databases. The Oracle WWW Interface Kit included:

• Oracle’s Web-Oracle-Web (WOW) PL/SQL gateway to web servers
• Oracle’s PL/SQL editor and development tool for creating dynamic PL/SQL
• PERL, a freeware interpreting programming language
• ORAPERL, an extension to PERL for use with Oracle 7 databases
• ORAYWWW, a PERL gateway
• WORA, a user-friendly database browser written in Pro*C
• DECOUX, a post-processing gateway that inserts query results from a Oracle 7 database into HyperText Markup Language (HTML) documents
• Navigator, a collection of PERL scripts and one Pro*C module that enables administrators to quickly configure HTML forms for end user queries
• Text Search System (TSS), an indexing and free text search system
• MORE, a collection of Pro*C gateways for maintaining an information repository
• HotMetal, a HTML editor

Fee access to Oracle ConText. Oracle customers were offered an opportunity to try ConText before you buy. According the the article Oracle ConText is a revolutionary linguistic analysis program that automatically generates back-of-book indexes and reduces the volume of text to a summary.

Ken Jacobs gives the second part of his in-depth article on the latest release of Oracle 7.1 and Oracle 7.2 databases. Ken was vice president of Product Planning and has been working with Oracle since version 2 of the database.

Mike Ault has an article on using DBMS_PIPES PL/SQL package, how to access the shared pool using the DBMS_SHARED_POOL PL/SQL package and how to use the DBMS_OUTPUT procedure.

How big is your database ?  Oracle conducted a survey of all its customers to see what was the typical size of their databases and how many users each database would have. The following diagrams gives the results of this survey and compares the 1994 results with the results from 1993. 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 ?

In 1995, Oracle Open World took place in Yokohama, Japan between 18th and 19th January. It had 130 seminars and sessions.  In 2012 OOW will have over 500 sessions and will run over 5 days!

To view the cover page and the table of contents click on the image at the top of this post or click here.

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

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.