The NoCOUG Fall Conference was held on Thursday, November 21, 2002 at Pacific Gas and Electric headquarters in downtown San Francisco. Some of the presentations from the meeting are available for download. Meeting Description The Fall Conference had parallel sessions on the topics of database administration, application development, and data warehousing. Here is the agenda, followed by session descriptions: 08:00 - Registration opens 08:00 - 09:30 Continental breakfast and vendor exhibits 09:30 - 10:00 General Session 10:00 - 10:30 Welcome from our host with Roger Gray, VP and CIO ISTS, and Bob Glynn III, Manager, ADS ISTS, Pacific Gas and Electric 10:30 - 11:15 Keynote: "The New Knowledge Era - Making Knowledge Management Work for the Knowledge Economy in Asia" with Dr. Kuan-Tsae Huang, Chairman, Taskco 11:15 - 11:45 Morning Break 11:45 - 12:45 Parallel Session #1: DBA Application Development Data Warehousing "Applying patches for Oracle Applications 11.x Dreyer’s Grand Ice Cream case study" by Ramkumar Srinivasan, DBA, Dreyer's Grand Ice Cream Inc. Level: Intermediate "Index Strategies for Optimal Performance" by Claudia Fernandez, Technical Services Manager, LECCO Technologies, Inc Level: Intermediate "Assessing your Data Asset for Quality and Meaning". Michael Scofield, Consultant and Author Part One   Level: All 12:45 - 01:45 Lunch Break 01:45 - 02:25 DBA and Developer Roundtable Discussions 02:30 - 03:30 Parallel Session #2: DBA Application Development Data Warehousing "Oracle Database Consolidation" by Noel Yuhanna, Exodus, a Cable & Wireless Company Level: Intermediate "J2EE and Oracle9i JDeveloper" by Peter Koletzke, Technical Director, Quovera   Level: Beginner "Assessing your Data Asset for Quality And Meaning". Michael Scofield, Consultant and Author Part Two Level: All 03:30 - 04:00 Afternoon Break and Raffle 04:00 - 05:00 Parallel Session #3: DBA Application Development Data Warehousing "Using Statspack in Oracle8i and 9i to Identify Problems" by Ian Jones, Senior Consultant, Database Specialists, Inc. Level: Advanced "Learn how to Partition in Oracle9i Release 2" by Eric Yen - Senior Systems Consultant, Quest Software, Inc. Level: All "Customer Experience: Building an Oracle Data Warehouse" Saqib Mausoof and Raimundo Reyes, Argonaut Insurance Level: Intermediate 05:15 - ??? NoCOUG Networking and Happy Hour at Beale Street Bar & Grill, 133 Beale Street "Applying patches for Oracle Applications 11.x Dreyer’s Grand Ice Cream case study" In this presentation, we will detail the techniques used and offer real-life experiences while applying the interoperability patch for Oracle Applications 11.0.3. We will also review our experience while installing patches in Oracle 8i on HPUX running Oracle application 11.0.3 with server partitioning (Oracle 8.0.6.3). We will also offer a detailed explanation of installing Oracle 8i, adpatch and how to use adpatch, adctrl and adadmin Oracle application utilities. "Oracle Database Consolidation" Currently the trend has been to reduce cost, so a lot of corporations are looking into consolidation. The advantages of consolidation go beyond reducing cost--consolidation helps provide better availability and scalability, better ensuring that SLAs are being met. We will look at how to consolidate Oracle databases and what approach to follow. We will also look at the Oracle Database Resource Manager and steps involved in using it to manage resource allocation. Finally, we will look at some of the guidelines for performing a successful database consolidation. "Using Statspack in Oracle8i and 9i to Identify Problems" This presentation will cover the Oracle-provided Statspack utility. Statspack provides an easy way to identify performance problems and understand performance bottlenecks. We will explain how to install Statspack, collect and analyze data, and describe some real-world situations where use of Statspack led to timely solutions. If time allows, we will also use Statspack to illustrate some of the new Oracle9i features. "Learn how to Partition in Oracle9i Release 2" Oracle9i Release 2 provides DBAs with new partitioning methods. This presentation covers them and offers a brief review of partitioning methods from previous releases of Oracle. The session includes the following topics: Partitioning defined, when to partition, different methods of partitioning, partitioning of tables, and partitioning of indexes Examples are provided and dissected so that you can implement partitioning immediately. "J2EE and Oracle9 JDeveloper" Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition (J2EE) is an industry standard that is gaining more and more ground every day. There are a dizzying number of alternatives architectures described by this standard. Oracle developers who are accustomed to traditional architectures can become confused by all of the buzzwords. Oracle offers a development tool, JDeveloper, that assists in navigating the J2EE maze but it too has many parts and works very differently from legacy development tools such as Forms and Reports. The challenge is in understanding the types of applications supported by J2EE and how they are created in JDeveloper. -- This paper provides an overview of J2EE for the developer who is familiar with applications written in PL/SQL and Developer Forms. It explains how Business Components for Java (BC4J) assist Java developers in accessing database objects. The paper describes two of the development and deployment alternatives offered by J2EE -- Java client (Java applications and applets) and JavaServer Pages (JSPs). It compares the benefits and drawbacks of each style and explains how to create them in JDeveloper. The presentation will demonstrate these techniques and show basic development operations using JDeveloper. "Index strategies for optimal performance" Learn how to take maximum advantage of Oracle 8i and 9i indexing options to achieve optimal performance. This presentation will demonstrate which index strategies are appropriate for particular requirements. Understand how indexes impact performance of a SQL statement and the overall database system. "Assessing your data asset for quality and meaning" Most enterprises have more data than they realize. We will explore techniques of surveying the data asset, answering the following questions: How much data do we have? What is its meaning? (logical architecture gives part of the meaning) What is its quality, scope, and completeness? What heretofore unknown quality errors are lurking in there? How do we communicate this knowledge to other users of data? We will explore the fundamentals of data architecture, data profiling, data quality assessment, and how this new knowledge of data behavior becomes a form of meta-data, and should be captured and managed as such. This presentation will include vivid examples of garbage discovered in production databases. "Customer Experience: Building an Oracle Data Warehouse" Argonaut Insurance has built a data warehouse using Oracle 9i technologies. We have designed the warehouse in Designer 6i, extracted mainframe data through Oracle Pure Extract MVS Gateway, and performed transformation and mapping through Warehouse Builder. The target schema is in Oracle 9i where we have used some of the new warehouse and OLAP features, and the reporting is through Discoverer 4i (desktop and web version using Oracle 9iAS technology). All in all, an end to end Oracle warehouse solution. In this session we describe our experience and the pros and cons of using the above mentioned technologies. 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