The
NoCOUG Winter Conference was held on Thursday, February 19, 2004 at
Oracle in Redwood Shores.
Conference Description
The
Winter Conference had three parallel tracks of technical presentations covering topics such as
database administration, application development, and data warehousing.
Here
is the agenda, followed by session descriptions:
8:00 - 9:00
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- Registration and Continental Breakfast
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9:00 - 9:30
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- General Session and Vendor Introductions
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9:30 - 10:30
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- Keynote: Ken Jacobs, Oracle Corporation
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10:30 - 11:00
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- Break
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11:00 - 12:00
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- Parallel Session #1:
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12:00 - 1:00
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- Lunch
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1:00 - 2:00
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- Ask Oracle - Question and answer session with a panel of   engineers
from Oracle Corporation. Bring your questions!
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2:00
- 2:15
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- Break
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2:15
- 3:15
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- Parallel Session #2:
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3:15 - 3:45
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- Break and Raffle
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3:45 - 4:45
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- Parallel Session #3:
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4:45 - …
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- NoCOUG networking and happy hour at Mistral Restaurant and Bar, 370-6 Bridge Parkway, Redwood Shores (From the conference center, go right on Oracle Parkway, left on Marine World Parkway, and right on Bridge Parkway.)
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"Exploiting Data For the Benefit of the Business" The DBA role is part of a
larger function of data management, protecting and enhancing the
enterprise data asset for the benefit of the business. In the modern economic climate,
it is tempting for CIO’s or higher executives to seek savings by
outsourcing many IT functions (even database administration)
overseas. Thus, it is
important to help them to understand the nature of logical data
architecture, and the intimacy between the data and IT, and the core of
the business. This
presentation illuminates some of those issues.
We begin by considering a five-level model of IT (from
the business and its data down to the hardware infrastructure) and
evaluate the personality temperaments are which more inclined to move to
the two extremes of business interaction. Technically oriented positions are often occupied by
introverts, who are not always interested in the current business
problems.
We then explore the evolving nature of business data
architecture, and why commercial enterprises that hope to survive must
morph--including changing their business rules. To accommodate this morphing logical architecture,
applications and databases must also morph. Indeed, for survival the logical architecture must
accommodate the future structure of the business, and hence data
architects and the DBA must anticipate business needs. This requires constant
interaction with business decision-makers, and presence in the life of the
enterprise.
We survey some of the emerging ways for exploiting the
data asset to further benefit the enterprise and its success in new and
innovative ways. Enhancing
the quality of the data asset (and mining it for new insights) is one of
these techniques. Good
meta-data is another, along with tools to facilitate ease of read-access
to the data asset.
It is important to make your personal knowledge of the
data asset (and data quality) of benefit to the business users. They must not see you as an
obstacle, but look to you for help and advice. This requires cultivating a supportive relationship
with application managers and business process owners. We will look at ways that your
understanding of the data can aid in this.
"Making DW More Relevant to the Business" This presentation will address some advance
issues in data warehouse design.
We will look at staging strategies to break down the effort of
building the data warehouse, and how each stage is different. We will explore some of the
arguments for and against a more distributed data warehouse strategy, and
consider why a “staged” data warehouse strategy may be easier and of
greater use for the enterprise.
With these strategies, we can give business users more unfettered
(read-only) access to their data at each stage.
We will also look at some semantic and cultural issues
which, if ignored, can make the data warehouse less attractive (and
ultimately cause the project to be abandoned). These include expressing the data in the paradigms of
the business culture, such as cultural sequencers for dimensions. The presentation of the data, in
terms of the semantics of the business, can be crucial for the acceptance
of a data warehouse project by the business clients. If it isn’t easy for them to use,
they will ignore it.
Again, we will explore examples of data profiling, and
the anomalies which might be found, and how to bring those anomalies to
the attention to the business experts and process “owners” to help them
better understand their business.
Of course, this must be done in a non-threatening manner. The more you explore the
data, the more you become an expert on the business and its issues.
“Building a Poor Performing
J2EE Application is Not Your Developer’s Fault” While it is a known
fact that your developers will write buggy code going into the project,
most project plans include very little resources for addressing this from
the onset of development.
When do you address quality assurance?
By building an automated and repeatable application
testing harness, you can put your J2EE application builds through a
battery of functional and performance tests as often as every night. Developers could come to their
desks each day with a complete analysis of how the commits they made the
previous day changed the features and responsiveness of their
application. Extending this
harness becomes a logical part of developing each new feature of the app.
The end result is a better J2EE application that requires orders of
magnitude less effort to debug and enhance. In this session, we’ll discuss in detail the tactical
steps you can take to realize this approach with your next project.
"Forms to J2EE, Not
Java": Architectural Challenges and Strategies for Migration of
Oracle Forms to J2EE" The J2EE architecture presents as many
technology, skill, adoption, and management challenges as it does
benefits to open, standards-based, freedom-of-choice computing. In this session, proven patterns
of client/server frameworks, such as Oracle Forms, will be reviewed for
effective N-tier J2EE design.
"Securing an Oracle Database" Database security has become increasingly important to
enterprises as hackers continue to gain access to critical and data
sensitive databases, disrupting business operations. A comprehensive DBMS
security architecture should include database hardening, secure
administration processes and strong approach to data protection. This
presentation looks at various Oracle security features including VPD,
Label Security, Fine-grained Auditing, Identity Management, log miner,
Database Encryption and how to use OEM for managing database
security. It also walks
through step-by-step on how to implement a secure database including
encrypting data, deploying VPD and using log Miner. Besides the features, it
also looks at some of the industry best practices around database
security. The
presentation will also touch upon some of the latest Oracle 10g security
features.
"Information Lifecycle
Management Strategies for Oracle Applications Data" This session
describes Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) as a best practice and
how it enables companies to manage explosive data growth in a manner that
supports corporate compliance objectives. Particular focus will be on defining archiving
policies that put into practice ILM's principles.
"Enterprise Manager (EM) 10g Grid
Control" The emergence of Oracle's Grid
computing allows businesses to deliver end-user services and applications
more easily and cost-effectively than ever before. To realize the full
benefits of grid computing, data centers need the right management tools
to monitor, administer and provision the sets of systems within the Grid
and applications that run on those systems. Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g
Grid Control delivers bottom-line IT savings through tools that provide
end-to-end application management, rich system performance monitoring and
enterprise-wide task automation for the complete Grid environment.
"Recent enhancements in query processing in
Oracle." Oracle continuously
evolves its query processing technology. Enhancements include new features, such as new
compression and partitioning techniques, new algorithmic improvements to
current processing methods, as well as enhancements to the query
optimizer to increase its space of options and make it more accurate in
its choices of plans. In addition, Oracle10g introduced various features
for query tuning that can significantly improve performance while
simplifying the life of a DBA. We will discuss some of the latest
enhancements and how they may affect DBAs and application developers.
"Oracle 10g Manageability" Management is one of the largest
contributors to the overall cost of ownership for software systems. One of the major value
propositions of Oracle Database 10g is the significant reduction in the
management cost of deploying and maintaining an Oracle-based
solution. Oracle Database
10g has taken a major step in simplifying and automating all the tasks in
the life cycle of database management including automatic performance diagnosis
and tuning.
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Directions to the Oracle Conference Center
Address: 350 Oracle Parkway, Redwood Shores, California.
Phone: 650-633-8300 Fax: 650-633-8399
Southbound- Take Highway 101 South (toward San Jose) to the Ralston Ave./Marine
World Parkway exit. Take Marine World Parkway east which will loop you
back over the freeway. Make a left at the first light onto Oracle
Parkway. 350 Oracle Parkway will be on the right.
Northbound- Take Highway 101 North (toward San Francisco) to the Ralston
Ave./Marine World Parkway exit. Take the first exit ramp onto Marine
World Parkway. Make a left at the first light onto Oracle Parkway. 350
Oracle Parkway will be on the right.