NZOUG 2013 Conference: Agenda online - register while Earlybird Pricing still here!

The New Zealand Oracle Users Group - NZOUG Conference 2013 is open for registrations and Earlybird pricing is still available! The agenda is now available.

NZOUG 2013 is being held in Wellington at the iconic Te Papa Museum on the beautiful waterfront on the 18th and 19th of March, with an additional Workshop Day on the 20th March.

The conference will see a wealth of brilliant speakers from around the world, including Tom Kyte, Graham Wood, Andrew Holdsworth, John Schiff and Nadia Bendjedou and of course top speakers from Middle Earth (NZ) as well. Tom, Andrew and Graham will be presenting their Real World Performance show, which will be a highlight of the conference.

Topics being covered cross a wide range of Oracle solutions, with tracks for Development, DBA, Cloud Computing, Oracle E-Business Suite, a full dedicated JD Edwards Day, Fusion Applications, EPM/BI, Middleware, Management, Infrastructure, Security, Hardware and Professional Development.

I'll be co-presenting one paper on utilizing the Oracle E-Business Suite Integrated SOA Gateway, tips, tricks and a demo, not too much this time around so that I can head along to as many of the other presentations as I can. Drop me an email if you want to catch up at the conference!

So, if you're around New Zealand in mid-March, perhaps following on from the NZ - England Cricket Test, and if you like getting out and networking often with fun consequences, then make sure you come to the New Zealand Oracle event of the year, not to be missed!

Catch ya!

Gareth

This is a post from Gareth's blog at http://garethroberts.blogspot.com

References

• NZOUG
• NZOUG2013
• NZOUG on Twitter, conference hashtag #NZOUG2013
• NZOUG on LinkedIn

OpenWorld 2009 done - back to Windy Wellington

With OpenWorld 2009 all done plus a few highly enjoyable days in the Valley I'm now back at home. I had a fantastic time once again, second time around was much less daunting - I went for less sessions, more unconference and more shopping!

The first couple of days of OpenWorld this year seemed very light on attendees, but with a flurry of activity in the last few days and a fantastic appreciation event - an awesome performance from Aerosmith - things really picked up. Very few product announcements of essence from the Oracle team so the real highlights for me were catching up with a variety of people/groups at a number of events:

• Australia/New Zealand Dinner
• Rittman Mead BI Meetup
• Bloggers Meetup
• Oracle APEX Meetup
• Catching up with the BI Publisher crew and meeting Ike
• Hanging out with Michael, Greg and Mike - cheers guys.

A huge thanks to all the above for the hospitality.

So only a few notes this year that took my interest to note them down. It seems a bit light especially on the eBusiness Suite side so if I have missed anything major, please post a comment.

Larry's Keynote Announcements:

• Linux update - survey (was it by HP?) reported 65% of Oracle Database customers run Oracle Enterprise Linux beneath the database. Interestingly high percentage.
• Review of Exadata "v2" (Sun Oracle Database Machine) with statistics showing results twice as fast as "v1".
• Product Support System in the works including on site data mining for analyzing system configuration and auto-advising bugs/patches needing to be addressed.
• Fusion Applications related:
  • Commitment for support of, and new functionality in eBusiness Suite, Peoplesoft, JD Edwards and Siebel applications for the next decade in addition to Fusion Applications
  • "Version 1" of Fusion Applications in Testing.
  • Fusion Applications are "SaaS ready" and deployed on SOA, BI standards based middleware.

Just the one product release announcement related to my areas of work:

• Business Intelligence Applications OBIA 7.9.6.1 Release available

A number of interesting things up and coming, but most set for calendar year 2010.

OBI 11g - yet to be released, but demo'd, with my notes:

• Common UI Components across the BI and Fusion product suites
• Online BI Publisher Template Builder
• A variety of excellent new features addons such as Answers Groups, Selection Steps, Visualizations
• Extensions to current fuctionality such as Action Framework
• Additional features such as Scorecards

Oracle APEX 4.0

• The whole APEX community is getting ready and excited about the APEX 4.0 release due 2010.
• It's great to see the new APEX Listener pre-production release out and getting plenty of feedback.

E-Business Suite:

• 12.1.1 to include a new hompage / navigator + Web 2.0 style components therein
• 12.1.1+ Integrated SOA Gateway (as an alternative to the EBS Adaptor which is part of SOA Suite).
• Enterprise Manager pack addons for Health checks including online Patch and technology component Version comparison and recommendation tools.

Some other interesting tidbits that I noted:

• Trial Usage of Advanced Compression on Oracle internal E-Business Suite top 100 objects reduced space usage on average by 3 times. Gotta see how Vision instances go with compression.
• BI Publisher Data Template builder in the works (still), along with the demo'd BI Publisher Online Layout Template editor (demo'd as noted above).

Wrap-Up

So another excellent OpenWorld over - thanks to Oracle for putting on another flawless event and appreciate the Bloggers Pass. Even the weather made me feel at home ;-)

Next major event on my calendar is the NZOUG Conference 2010, Rotorua, New Zealand, March 15-16 2010 - looking forward to it. Hope to see some of you there!

PS. On a side note, from a New Zealand perspective, interesting that an IBM data center should fail around OpenWorld given Larry's consistent reiteration about the redundancies in the Oracle Database Machine and lack thereof in IBM's ex TPC-C beating solution! Even more than a week later seems like things are not quite back to the usual high Air New Zealand standards - following pic snapped 20-Oct-09.

Related Posts

• Oracle OpenWorld 2009: From Silicon Welly to Silicon Valley Again
• A Look Ahead to 2009 - Oracle eBusiness Suite and Happy New Year!
• OpenWorld 2008 Posts

 

Freeview TV via wok without the black bars anyone?

Well, it's definitely an active time for TV ... and the internet, for a bit of fun here's my New Zealand twist on some of it.

On May the 2nd we had the Freeview launch, only problem is you should spend about $700 for an accredited setup ... not including your time to arrange getting the set-top box, dish setup. Hey, why would u go bleeding-edge and spend that up front capex $$ when u can ring up and get Sky digital for $99 and Start Up $47.73 per month - with a whole bunch of additional channels and upgrade capabilities available now? I may be biased since I already have Sky.

Still, my DIY tendencies and attractions to "free" stuff are making me very itchy to try Freeview out. Now, where did I put that spare wok.

Then there was a bit of noise, definitely noise, coz that's what we're gonna face over the next number of years, when TV3 started broadcasting in widescreen on 11 April. Always a good source of info: geekzone. Expect more when TVNZ switches on July 31st. Maybe it's about time I switched my aspect ratio from 4:3 to 16:9 ... me no complain about a couple of black bars on the Simpsons as long as Dancing with the Stars is okay ;-)

From an internet perspective but with a slant on TV there was the announcement of an undersea cable between Asia and the US which is great news. What sparked my interest in this was the statement

...capacity of up to 1.92 terabits per second ... the new system can support 130,000 high definition television signals simultaneously...

Hmmm. should be able to get a few more concurrent signals than that, isn't HDTV about 55Mbps? It'd be a bit of a bummer if everyone in Asia started watching US HDTV at the same time ey? Also begs the question: what is high definition and what is high quality? The likes of Joost look fantastic, but the mainstream progress towards low end quality data must be a real bugbare for those at the high end. Compare MP3 vs CD (or higher quality) music. Compare "High Quality" internet TV vs. DVD or HDTV.

Give me Burger Fuel over MacDonalds any day of the week.

Windows Vista Content Protection and Digital Rights Management

A tad technical and a bit of a slog to read the whole thing, but a very enlightened and seemingly matter of fact view all the same.
Plus some great perspectives on technical detail vs tech titans control & PR propaganda.
Nice that it's out of New Zealand as well!

Check it out:
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html

PS. I didn't read the whole thing :-o

PPS. Go the $50 chinese device and muslix64 ;-)

PPPS. My favourite paragraphs:

1. Appeals to my experience and knowledge of encryption:
"In the case of premium content, whether video can play back smoothly when using regular AES with uncompressed video will be a function of the resolution of the uncompressed video and the power of the processor. It is unlikely to work well in 2006 for uncompressed HD premium content" from Microsoft document.

2. Appeals to the real-world implications of this sort of technical idiocy and what consumers will face:
Sure enough, the movie won't play because while the video card supports HDCP content protection, the [24" LCD] monitor doesn't. It plays if I connect an old 14″ VGA CRT using a DVI-to-VGA connector" — Roger Strong.

3. Relates to my musings of current LCD and Plasma vs CRT technologies:
"Use the CRT monitor for awhile, then switch to the LCD monitor for a minute or two. When you go back to the CRT monitor, does it seem faulty? Did you notice this before you looked over at the LCD monitor?"

4. Appeals to how "let's consider this" technical ideas turn into questionable real world scenarios:
"I can not only say that the idea [of tilt bits] is basically insane, but I can also see hardware manufacturers refusing to implement tilt bits, or more likely, faking their functionality" — Dave Walker.