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.

Peer-to-Peer in Oracle Magazine–September/October 2013

The latest edition of Oracle Magazine is now available online and can be viewed at http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/oramag/magazine/current-issue/index.html

I’ve been included in the Peer-to-Peer feature, along with two other Oracle ACEs. The Peer-to-Peer feature is a regular part in Oracle Magazine and typically gives a short profile of 3 Oracle ACEs or ACE Directors.

If you have subscribed to get a printed copy, we should be getting a copy of it in the post over the next couple of weeks.

Big Data videos by Oracle

Here are the links to the 2 different sets of Big Data videos that Oracle have produced over the past 12 months

Oracle Big Data Videos - Version 1

  Episode 1 - The Challenge

  Episode 2 - Gold Mine or Just Stuff

  Episode 3 - Big Data Speaks

  Episode 4 - Everything You Always Wanted to Know

  Episode 5 - Little Data

Oracle Big Data Videos - Version 2

   Episode 1 - Overview for the Boss

   Episode 2 - Hadoop

   Episode 3 - Acquiring Big Data

   Episode 4 - Organising Big Data

   Episode 5 - Analysing Big Data

Other videos include

  Developing a Big Data Strategy

Review of Oracle Magazine–November/December 1996

The headline articles for the November/December 1996 edition of Oracle Magazine were focused on VLDB with articles on scaling to petabyte sized databases, the latest and best hardware to use, what new exist features in 7.3 and 8 for VLDBS, what new tools exists to assist administrators with the scale of the database.

Other articles included:

• There was an article on what is a Operational Data Store (ODS) and it also highlights how and ODS is different to a Data Warehouse. Despite this article and many, many more like it in the wider press since 1996 there is still lots of confusion out in the IT world on what whey are and how they are different.
• A new Database Design tool has been added to the Oracle Designer/2000 suit. This new tool was supposed to be lightweight, etc.  Oracle Data Modeler is a much better tool.
• Oracle outlines their roadmap for making their database and certain tools available on Windows NT.
• IKEA has implemented and Oracle 7 DB on multiple platforms, including IBM MVS, Digital VMS, IBM AIX and other UNIX variants. Other tools used by IKEA included Developer/2000 and Designer/2000.
• How to manage multi-table joins to reduce the amount of processing. The article looked at how to use Nested Loops, Merger Joins and Hash Joins. The article also suggests that in some cases maybe you need to consider redesigning your tables/data model.
• Motorola implements multi-lingual Oracle Human Resources 10SC in 14 offices in 8 countries. There was a lot of use of NLS functionality in the database including NLS_LANG, NLS_NUMERIC_CHARACTERS, NLS_SORT and the translated _TL tables in Oracle Applications.
• We have the first Y2K related article, an much of the discussion focused on how Oracle Stores Dates in the database. Most of the fuss focused on if you captured and stored a two digit year or a four digit year. Oracle provided the RR format mask to minimise the amount of recoding that needed to be done to Many applications around the world.
• There was 6 pages of job adverts from Oracle Australia, Database Consultants Inc, ACT1, BPA, Profound Consulting, RHI Consulting, Ernst & Young, TransTech, Wilco, Information Alliance, Exor Technologies, The Consulting Team, InTimeSystems, May&Speh, Price Waterhouse. I wonder where some of those companies are now.

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 and a PDF for the very first Oracle Magazine from June 1987.

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.

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

Review of Oracle Magazine-September/October 1996

The headline articles for the September/October 1996 edition of Oracle Magazine was on Putting the Web to Work and focused how to build web based applications. Topics covered included the Web Server, Intranet vs Client/Server applications, what (Oracle) tools to use.

Oracle articles included:

• There was an interesting advertisement from Sun. It consisted on one page that contained the following text, “when your intranet is protected with Solstice by Sun, unauthorized users see your information quite differently,. For a free demonstration, turn the page” The next two pages are blank!
• Oracle publishing will be launching Oracle Applications Magazine in November 1996. The new magazine will be targeted at top line-of-business managers and will offer executives and other qualified Oracle Applications users in-depth industry analysis and technology and business overviews of topics critical to managers looking for technology solutions to business problems.
• Euro Star train service that covers UK and France, and has trains running under the the English Chanel, has implemented the Oracle Financials Application suite. One of the main features is its ability to handle multiple currencies and companies and the flexibility of running processes and period-end routines.
• Oracle announces that Wells Fargo has negotiated that the largest enterprise database licence agreement in the financial industry and will be implementing Oracle Universal Server, Oracle DB 7.3 as well as DB options such as data warehousing and electronic commerce. This new environment will need to support 25,00 users and the gathering of 80 gigabytes of data each month.
• Oracle has released a number of its applications for the web.
• Using partitioning for a Data Warehouse and how it compares to using Clustering.
• How to build business rules using triggers in Oracle 7 and how to ensure consistency in the data.
• A summary of a number of SQL Functions were given with examples. These included Numeric, Character, Data, Conversion and Group By functions.
• A listing of a procedure and some other scripts was given for sizing tables and indexes in Oracle 7.

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 and a PDF for the very first Oracle Magazine from June 1987.

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

Review of Oracle Magazine–July/August 1996

The headline articles for the July/August1996 edition of Oracle Magazine was on how to balance security and communication in a distributed world, extending Oracle power objects applications and automating Oracle tuning

Oracle articles included:

• Oracle released three of its products on the web. These included Oracle Web Customers, Oracle Web Suppliers and Oracle Web Employees. They aimed to help make it possible for companies to conduct secure business transactions over the internet and corporate intranets. They also shipped Oracle Workflow to help support the implementation of these new products
• Oracle Express Analyzer, an object-oriented reporting and analysis tool had its second release
• UBS Bank implements the Oracle based operational accounting system, with over 800,000 input records daily and over 3,000 cost centre reports that needed different levels of summarisation. The new application allows the executives to view information in virtually any format choosing from 120,000 multi-level, multi-view reports.
• The Egyptian Stock Exchange and Capital Market Authority implements a new trading system build on Oracle
• Don Burleson in his article on Automating Oracle Tuning gives a number of scripts that would assist the DBA in finding out what is going on in the database. So instead of purchasing some expensive tools, all you needs was these scripts UTKBSTAT/UTLESTAT.

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 and a PDF for the very first Oracle Magazine from June 1987.

Analytics Sessions at Oracle Open World 2012

The content catalog for Oracle Open World 2012 was made public during the week. OOW is on between 30th September and 4th October.

The following table gives a list of most of the Data Analytics type sessions that are currently scheduled.

Why did I pick these sessions? If I was able to go to OOW then these are the sessions I would like to attend. Yes there would be many more sessions I would like to attend on the core DB technology and Development streams.

Session Title	Presenters
CON6640 - Database Data Mining: Practical Enterprise R and Oracle Advanced Analytics	Husnu Sensoy
CON8688 - Customer Perspectives: Oracle Data Integrator	Gurcan Orhan - Software Architect & Senior Developer, Turkcell Technology R&D Julien Testut - Product Manager, Oracle
HOL10089 - Oracle Big Data Analytics and R	George Lumpkin - Vice President, Product Management, Oracle
CON8655 - Tackling Big Data Analytics with Oracle Data Integrator	Mala Narasimharajan - Senior Product Marketing Manager, Oracle Michael Eisterer - Principal Product Manager, Oracle
CON8436 - Data Warehousing and Big Data with the Latest Generation of Database Technology	George Lumpkin - Vice President, Product Management, Oracle
CON8424 - Oracle’s Big Data Platform: Settling the Debate	Martin Gubar - Director, Oracle Kuassi Mensah - Director Product Management, Oracle
CON8423 - Finding Gold in Your Data Warehouse: Oracle Advanced Analytics	Charles Berger - Senior Director, Product Management, Data Mining and Advanced Analytics, Oracle
CON8764 - Analytics for Oracle Fusion Applications: Overview and Strategy	Florian Schouten - Senior Director, Product Management/Strategy, Oracle
CON8330 - Implementing Big Data Solutions: From Theory to Practice	Josef Pugh - , Oracle
CON8524 - Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database for Oracle Exalytics: Overview	Tirthankar Lahiri - Senior Director, Oracle
CON9510 - Oracle BI Analytics and Reporting: Where to Start?	Mauricio Alvarado - Principal Product Manager, Oracle
CON8438 - Scalable Statistics and Advanced Analytics: Using R in the Enterprise	Marcos Arancibia Coddou - Product Manager, Oracle Advanced Analytics, Oracle
CON4951 - Southwestern Energy’s Creation of the Analytical Enterprise	Jim Vick - , Southwestern Energy Richard Solari - Specialist Leader, Deloitte Consulting LLP
CON8311 - Mining Big Data with Semantic Web Technology: Discovering What You Didn’t Know	Zhe Wu - Consultant Member of Tech Staff, Oracle Xavier Lopez - Director, Product Management, Oracle
CON8428 - Analyze This! Analytical Power in SQL, More Than You Ever Dreamt Of	Hermann Baer - Director Product Management, Oracle Andrew Witkowski - Architect, Oracle
CON6143 - Big Data in Financial Services: Technologies, Use Cases, and Implications	Omer Trajman - , Cloudera Ambreesh Khanna - Industry Vice President, Oracle Sunil Mathew - Senior Director, Financial Services Industry Technology, Oracle
CON8425 - Big Data: The Big Story	Jean-Pierre Dijcks - Sr. Principal Product Manager, Oracle
CON10327 - Recommendations in R: Scaling from Small to Big Data	Mark Hornick - Senior Manager, Oracle

R resources

 

Download R : http://www.r-project.org/

R installation instructions : http://star-www.st-andrews.ac.uk/cran/

Oracle R Enterprise

R-Uni (A List of 85+ Free R Tutorials and Resources in Universities webpages)

R programming for those coming from other languages

Understanding big data analysis with the R language

Introduction to R for Data Mining from Revolution Analytics

Part 2 of the Leaning Tower of Pisa problem in ODM

In previous post I gave the details of how you can use Regression in Oracle Data Miner to predict/forecast the lean of the tower in future years. This was based on building a regression model in ODM using the known lean/tilt of the tower for a range of years.

In this post I will show you how you can do the same tasks using the Oracle Data Miner functions in SQL and PL/SQL.

Step 1 – Create the table and data

The easiest way to do this is to make a copy of the PISA table we created in the previous blog post. If you haven’t completed this, then go to the blog post and complete step 1 and step 2.

create table PISA_2
as select * from PISA;

Step 2 – Create the ODM Settings table

We need to create a ‘settings’ table before we can use the ODM API’s in PL/SQL. The purpose of this table is to store all the configuration parameters needed for the algorithm to work. In our case we only need to set two parameters.

BEGIN
delete from pisa_2_settings;
INSERT INTO PISA_2_settings (setting_name, setting_value) VALUES
(dbms_data_mining.algo_name, dbms_data_mining.ALGO_GENERALIZED_LINEAR_MODEL);
INSERT INTO PISA_2_settings (setting_name, setting_value) VALUES
(dbms_data_mining.prep_auto,dbms_data_mining.prep_auto_off );
COMMIT;
END;

Step 3 – Build the Regression Model

To build the regression model we need to use the CREATE_MODEL function that is part of the DBMS_DATA_MINING package. When calling this function we need to pass in the name of the model, the algorithm to use, the source data, the setting table and the target column we are interested in.

BEGIN
      DBMS_DATA_MINING.CREATE_MODEL(
        model_name          => 'PISA_REG_2',
        mining_function     => dbms_data_mining.regression,
        data_table_name     => 'pisa_2_build_v',
        case_id_column_name => null,
        target_column_name  => 'tilt',
        settings_table_name => 'pisa_2_settings');
END;

After this we should have our regression model.

Step 4 – Query the Regression Model details

To find out what was produced as in the previous step we can query the data dictionary.

SELECT model_name, 
       mining_function,
       algorithm,
       build_duration,
       model_size
from USER_MINING_MODELS
where model_name like 'P%';

select setting_name, 
       setting_value,
       setting_type
from all_mining_model_settings
where model_name like 'P%';

Step 5 – Apply the Regression Model to new data

Our final step would be to apply it to our new data i.e. the years that we want to know what the lean/tilt would be.

SELECT year_measured, prediction(pisa_reg_2 using *)
FROM   pisa_2_apply_v;