Highlights of RMOUG SQL>Update Fall 2010 Newsletter

I received a copy of the Fall 2010 edition of the Rocky Mountain Oracle Users Group newsletter (RMOUG SQL>Update) this week and summarize some of its highlights here. The cover of this edition is perfect for a Fall/Autumn edition and features a photograph (by Lisa Collett) of aspen trees whose leaves have already turned yellow.

This edition of the RMOUG newsletter has several references to Training Days 2011. In her "From the President" column, RMOUG President Peggy King writes about the upcoming RMOUG Training Days 2011 and mentions that this conference will be held February 15-17, 2011, at the Colorado Convention Center. She states that there was an "overwhelming response to this year's call for papers" that "promises to continue the long standing RMOUG tradition of providing a conference packed full of exceptional presentations and numerous opportunities to share knowledge and hear the latest information about product development."  She adds, "So look for the Training Days 2011 Preliminary Conference agenda to be posted to the RMOUG website (www.rmoug.org) around the middle of November." Peggy states (and some advertisements in the newsletter reaffirm) that early registration for RMOUG Training Days 2011 will be available in early November.

RMOUG Training Days 2011 is also mentioned in Brad Blake's summary of Oracle OpenWorld 2010. He compares Oracle OpenWorld and RMOUG Training Days and concludes that RMOUG Training Days "is always a much better 'bang for the buck'!" in terms of providing "good, technical session[s]" that provide "actual hands-on tips and tricks of how to do things -- something you can take back to the office and USE."

There is more than one advertisement for Training Days 2011 in this edition, but the largest and most obvious is on the back cover. This advertisement includes the dates (15-17 February 2011) and the location (Colorado Convention Center in Denver, Colorado) and states that early registration will open November 4, 2010, and that early registration ends January 12, 2011.

RMOUG Training Days 2011 is not the only RMOUG training-related event coming up in the relatively near future. Page 5 of this Fall 2010 newsletter has an advertisement for the Fall Quarterly Education Workshop to be held on 19 November 2010. The advertisement on page 31 talks about the "next Quarterly Education Workshop in August at the Regis Science Ampitheatre," but it appears to me that that website should be checked for confirmation on the location.

In "MR Trace: An Interview with Cary Millsap of Method R," Cary Millsap answers a set of questions about Method R's offerings. Millsap talks about Method R Trace, a platform-independent Java-based extension of Oracle SQL Developer. Millsap describes this product's "purpose in life": "to completely eliminate all of the distractions associated with getting your hands on perfectly scoped Oracle extended SQL trace data." Millsap goes onto say that Method R Trace is designed for and targeted at software developers. He also references a 3-minute YouTube video on using this product and references his blog post on MR Trace's new file delete function. Finally, Millsap introduces "the best-kept secret in our company": MR Tools Suite. This suite includes three tools: mrls, mrnl, and mrskew. This article was unquestionably heavy on marketing and sales, but I did find it interesting that MR Trace is developer-focused and the tools do sound useful.

This edition of the newsletter continued two series of articles that began in the Summer 2010 edition of the newsletter. Jed Walker's "Quick Guide to Configuring Oracle 11gR2 Data Guard Physical Standby" had Part 2 covered in this Fall 2010 edition after having Part 1 covered in the Summer 2010 edition. Similarly, Dan Hotka continued his "Oracle Trace Facility" series: the Summer 2010 edition (Part I) focused on TOAD Trace File Analysis and the Fall 2010 edition (Part II) focused on Metalink SQL T (SQLTXPLAIN).

Other technical articles in the Summer 2010 edition of the RMOUG newsletter were Rama Balaji's "Flashback Logs Cleanup Without Downtime" and Kellyn Pedersen's "The CTAS, a.k.a. Processing Data The Jetson's Way." The other technical articles in the Fall 2010 edition of SQL>Update included Sue Harper's "Capture, Model, Design and Generate Using Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler."

The Fall 2010 edition of the RMOUG newsletter had its "RMOUG Board Focus" focused on Tim Gorman. His column is an interesting case study in how what's important is in the eye of the beholder and how we all seem to think whatever we do is most important. I have a difficult time arguing with him that data is extremely valuable. I'm just glad we all can find things we enjoy that are different so we're not all trying to do the same thing. I don't think I could be a DBA for more than a few days without the desperate need to throw myself off the tallest building I could find, but he probably feels similarly about software development. It's good that we don't all want to do the same job. I'm not arguing that data's not valuable; it's just not that interesting!

As I stated previously, the Fall 2010 edition had numerous references to RMOUG Training Days 2011 and the Preliminary Agenda is expected to be available in November.  Ken Lee has announced that his abstract has been accepted for "APEX-O-MATIC – In a Blender with APEX and Web Services."

I was excited to learn this week that the two abstracts I submitted have been accepted. I will be presenting "Groovier Java Scripting" and "A First Look at HTML5." The Groovy presentation will expand on what I presented last year at Training Days 2010 ("Applied Groovy: Scripting for Java Development") on Groovy and provide more concrete examples of scripting with Groovy. The HTML5 presentation will look at what HTML5 offers in several browsers already and promises to offer for future web development. I plan to post the actual abstracts and additional details about my plans for these two presentations in a future post.