YesSQL! Celebration

Uma excelente apresentação, com a participação dos 'históricos' Tom Kyte e Andy Mendelsohn, sobre a história e o contributo do SQL como elemento base dos modernos sistemas de informação, hoje e no futuro.

Oracle Linux 7: Optimizing Deployment Flexibility and Increasing ROI

Excelente White Paper sobre Oracle Linux 7: http://www.oracle.com/us/technologies/linux/oracle-linux-7-wp-2524153.pdf

Oracle is the only vendor in the industry that offers a complete Linux-based solution stack—applications, middleware, database, management tools, operating system and hardware—along with a single point of support. Customers that deploy Oracle Linux benefit greatly from the latest Linux innovations as well as rigorous testing with real world workloads.

As this paper describes, IT organizations that standardize on Oracle Linux have a number of deployment options from which to choose. With the advent of new advances in open source technologies, IT departments can deploy applications more quickly using lightweight Linux Containers and Docker images, or combine these approaches to improve application isolation, resource control, and rapid provisioning. Traditional virtualization using Oracle VM can
be an optimal approach for Tier 1 applications or when application requirements dictate the need for multiple operating systems. To deliver applications as private cloud services, Oracle OpenStack technology may be an ideal approach in conjunction with Oracle VM. 

OTN EMEA Tour 2015 - Lisboa, 21/Mai/15

Lisboa vai ser uma das 3 cidades escolhidas para receber o OTN EMEA Tour 2015. 

Trata-se de uma iniciativa conjunta dos dos vários Oracle User Groups locais da região EMEA, que, deste modo, conseguem trazer a estas geografias um evento que conta com a participação de especialistas Oracle credenciados, vindos de todas as partes do mundo. 

O evento de Lisboa, que conta com o apoio e a organização do Oracle User Group Portugal (OUGPT), terá lugar no próximo dia 21 de Maio, no auditório do Instituto Superior Técnico. 

A participação neste evento é totalmente gratuita, mas carece de inscrição prévia. 

Toda a informação relativa à agenda, aos speakers e ao processo de registo em http://otnemea.com 

Informação sobre o OUGPT em http://oug.pt

The Power of The Ksplice Feature of Oracle Linux (Video)

The Ksplice feature of Oracle Linux has enabled zero-downtime updates to the Linux kernel for many years, ensuring systems stay up to date and secure. 

Oracle Senior Vice President of Linux and Virtualization Wim Coekaerts sat down with Director of Product Management Michele Casey and Senior Development Manager Jamie Iles to talk about Ksplice. Join Oracle experts as they discuss how Ksplice can improve manageability and reduce downtime. 

In the video, they go into a lot of detail about why Ksplice is a production-ready tool for keeping systems up to date. A highlight for me is the discussion featuring a real world example of an Oracle Linux 6.2 system from 2011, and how a system like that can be patched over time with all the important CVEs and security updates without a single reboot -- no rebooting literally for years. For production systems, you can just keep the system up and running, and still be up to date. 

Click this screenshot to head on over to Oracle Media Network to watch the video:

Oracle OpenStack for Oracle Linux and Oracle VM - Hands-on Labs Available

Oracle OpenStack is cloud management software that provides customers an enterprise-grade solution to deploy and manage their entire IT environment. Customers can rapidly deploy Oracle and third-party applications across shared compute, network, and storage resources with ease, with end-to-end enterprise-class support. For more information, see here. 

Last year, Hands-on Lab events for OpenStack at Oracle Open World were completely sold out. People who have had no prior experience with OpenStack could not believe how easy it was for them to launch networks and instances and exercise many features of OpenStack. Given the overwhelming demand for the hands-on lab and the positive feedback from the participants, we are announcing its availability to you – all you need is a laptop to download the lab and the 21-page document using the below links in this blog. 

This lab takes you through installing and exercising OpenStack. It goes through basic operations, network, storage and guest communication. OpenStack has many more features you can explore using this setup. The lab also shows you how to transfer information in the guest. This is very important when creating templates or when trying to automate deployment process. As we had stated that our goal is to help make OpenStack an enterprise grade solution. The Hands-on Lab gives you a very quick and easy way to learn how to tranfer any key information about your own application  tempate in the guest – a key step in the real world deployment. 

We encourage users to go ahead and use this setup to test more OpenStack features. OpenStack is not simple to deal with and usually requires high levels of skill but with this virtual box VM users can try out almost every feature. 

Getting started with the Hands-on Lab document is now available to you in following websites: 

 - Landing page:

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/openstack/linux/downloads/index.html

- Users can download a pre-installed VirtualBox VM for testing and demo purposes:

Please visit the landing page above to accept the license agreement then download either short or long version. 

Hands-on lab - OpenStack in virtual box (html)

Instructions on how to use the OpenStack VirtualBox image

Download Oracle VM VirtualBox

If you have any questions, please go to the OpenStack Community Forum.

Oracle anuncia Application Express 5

O Oracle Application Express (APEX) é um framework de desenvolvimento de aplicações Web que vem incluído, sem custo de utilização, com as várias versões de base de dados Oracle. 

O facto de se tratar de uma ferramenta de utilização gratuita explica o facto de este framework não ser alvo de uma promoção activa por parte da Oracle, e passar, por isso, despercebido para uma grande maioria dos clientes da Oracle. No entanto, a riqueza da sua funcionalidade e a sua grande facilidade de utilização justificam uma análise mais atenta deste produto por parte dos parceiros Oracle. 

O artigo seguinte anuncia a nova versão Application Express 5. 


Oracle Application Express 5 is now generally available! The result of a two and a half year engineering effort, it represents the greatest advancement of Oracle Application Express (APEX) in its 10 year history.  Oracle Application Express 5 enables customers to develop, design and deploy elegant, responsive, database-driven desktop and mobile applications using only a browser. 

"Oracle APEX 5 is the largest and most important release in the history of Oracle Application Express" said Michael J. Hichwa, Vice President of Oracle Database Tools.  "Universal Theme in Oracle APEX 5 dramatically improves how quickly and easily SQL-savvy developers can build Web apps that are both responsive and accessible. Universal Theme enables developers, like myself, to build a robust customized UI without the help of a CSS/HTML guru." 

The marquee features of Oracle Application Express 5 include:

Universal Theme: A Better UI for Your Apps

Universal Theme is an all-new user interface (UI) for your applications. It is engineered from the ground up for Application Express 5. It is simpler yet more capable than previous themes, and can enable effortless customization. Universal Theme can empower developers to build modern, responsive, sophisticated applications without requiring expert knowledge of HTML, CSS, or JavaScript.

With Universal Theme, there are also several enhancements to the handling of Themes and Templates. This release features: Theme Subscriptions, Template Options, Theme Styles, List-based hierarchical Navigation Menus and much finer control over templates and the HTML emitted by the Application Express engine. It is now easier than ever to control the UI of your application.

Page Designer:  The New Intuitive Browser-Based IDE

Page Designer is a new IDE designed to greatly enhance developer productivity for prototyping, design, development and maintenance of Application Express applications. Page Designer offers a visual presentation, including an on-the-fly, intuitive drag and drop interface for rapid development of application pages. The enhanced code editor provides SQL and PL/SQL validation with inline errors, auto completion, syntax highlighting, search and replace with regex support, complete with undo and redo support.

New Application Builder Design

In addition to the new Application Builder UI being designed for easy navigation, simplicity of access for visual design and reduced clutter, it includes a new color palette, icons for easy, visual identification, intuitive workflow-based menus, and improved keyboard and accessibility support.

Mobile Reporting

The new mobile reporting capability allows developers to build reports that can display on nearly all mobile devices. For small devices with limited screen displays, intelligent Column Toggle and Reflow Table Wrap features allow developers to specify the display of important data and hide less important information for easy viewing.

Modal Dialogs

Modal and Non-Modal dialogs enable developers to rapidly define dialogs using standard Application Express pages. To use Modal Dialogs, developers simply select the display type and template of the page, and Application Express completes the process of rendering the page appropriately.

All New Calendar

The new calendar component comes with built-in support for Month, Week, Day, and Agenda views and is much easier to customize. The calendar is based on the popular FullCalendar library and supports drag and drop and time-based events.

Packaged Applications 

Oracle Application Express 5 includes a broad collection of Packaged Applications. These are Application Express applications that can be used out-of-the-box and are supported by Oracle. Examples include Project Tracking, Survey Builder, Meeting Minutes, and Group Calendar. There are 19 Packaged Applications in all. Additionally, there are 16 sample applications which are used to showcase the features of Oracle Application Express, from Sample Charts to Sample Data Loading. There's even a sample application demonstrating the powerful spatial capabilities in the Oracle Database.

"An interesting dimension of the Oracle APEX technology is how cloud-friendly it is.  Oracle APEX is browser-based, making developer and deployment access seamless (never leave your browser). Oracle APEX is available in multiple Oracle Database Cloud service offerings today. Oracle APEX is one of the rare database tools you can use equally well on the cloud, your company's server, and your laptop," added Hichwa.

Additional Information

To learn more about Oracle Application Express, visit apex.oracle.com.
To learn more about Oracle Database Cloud, visit cloud.oracle.com/database.

Oracle OpenWorld 2015 - Call for Proposals

Está aberto o período de Call for Proposals para o Oracle OpenWorld (e JavaOne) San Francisco 2015. Partilhe os seus conhecimentos e experiência Oracle e ganhe um passe de apresentador grátis. 

Mais informação em https://www.oracle.com/openworld/call-for-proposals.html

Oracle Forms 12c e o futuro

On Tuesday March 24 2015, in a webinar organized by an Oracle partner, Michael Ferrante, the Oracle Forms Product Manager, presented the roadmap of Oracle Forms 12c and beyond. Although his talk was protected by a “Safe Harbour” statement, some interesting topics were mentioned. Of course, it’s always possible that not all of these features will be included in the final release. 

Current and future support 

The first subject was “Current and Future Support”. Extended support for the current version 11g R2 is expected to end in 2017. The release date of Oracle Forms 12c is still to be determined, but Oracle is aiming for a 2015 release. 12c will be supported for at least 5 years after release, meaning at least until 2020, with an option to extend for an additional 3 years. 

Some time was spent on explaining features in the current version (11g R2) of Oracle Forms. This included the use of styling in the application, integration with other applications using Javascript and helpful functionality to modify triggers. This functionality includes splitting the trigger code and opening multiple PL/SQL editors. Splitting the code can be achieved by dragging the button next to the scroll bars as highlighted in red within the image below. Other PL/SQL editors can be opened by using the Shift-key and double-clicking on the image next to the trigger name.

Finally, the new features that were presented included:

• Improved Single sign-on Integration
  A user only needs to login once with the login session being used across multiple applications. This means that the Forms application can be more easily integrated into a heterogeneous environment.
• Browserless modeA browser is not required anymore. Oracle Forms can use its own browser to avoid any browser incompatibility issues.
• Integration of Forms2XML
  Before, the Forms2XML application was available as a stand-alone command line application. In 12c, it will be integrated in the Forms builder.
• Improved usability of the Forms BuilderThe user is able to drag and resize items within the canvas with increased flexibility.

As mentioned above, the Oracle Forms 12c release date is as of yet unkown. Oracle will publish the webinar online in the near future.

Michael Ferrante was also recently interviewed during an Oracle Development Tools User Group (ODTUG) meeting. Of course the hot topic was the future of Forms. When asked about this Michael responded:

“I’m smiling because I hear that [Forms is dead] a lot as well. I don’t know where that rumor started from. Some time ago when we [Oracle] made the decision years ago to start developing with ADF, I think at that point ADF became so popular that Forms seemed to fade away, when really we were still hard at work at it [Forms]. We have a really big community and hopefully we get to continue for years to come. Right now we’ve got the current release, which is 11, release 2 and it’s supported through 2016. And we’re working on the next version, which hopefully will be out sometime in 2015.”

When asked what customers can do to prepare for the latest version Michael mentioned that many customers are still running very old versions of Forms. In order to take advantage of the new version that will be released in 2015 these customers need to update to 11. If you make the move to version 11 today it will make updating to 12, when it is released, very easy. 

Hearing all of this promising news directly from Michael should be music to any Oracle Forms user’s ears. You can watch the full video here.

Oracle Database 12c certificada pela SAP

SAP has announced it has certified its products on Oracle Database 12c.

“More than two-thirds of all SAP customers run their SAP applications on the Oracle Database today. There is a strong overlap,” said Sohan DeMel, vice president, Product Strategy and Business Development, Oracle. “These joint customers are looking to leverage Oracle’s best database technology.”

All SAP products based on SAP NetWeaver 7.x, including SAP Business Suite 7, are now certified and supported on Oracle Database 12c. "SAP customers can now use Oracle Database 12c, Grid Infrastructure 12c, Real Application Clusters 12c, Advanced Compression, Active Data Guard Far Sync, ACFS on Exadata, online Partition capabilities and more," according to a new post on the Oracle Insider Blog by Andy Mendelsohn, executive vice president, Database Server Technologies, Oracle. In addition, he said, SAP also certified Exadata X5 in January.

The new certifications between SAP products and Oracle Database have “happened more aggressively” and represent a departure from past practices, DeMel explained. The accelerated certification is in direct response to the demand from the companies’ mutual customer base to run SAP applications on the Oracle 12c Database, DeMel said.

For more information, see SAP Note 2133079.

Oracle's Virtual Compute Appliance: Benefit from a Simple Converged Infrastructure

With closely integrated software and hardware components, Oracle's engineered systems are designed to reduce both IT cost and complexity—two key concerns for growing companies. In particular, Oracle's Virtual Compute Appliance hits the price/performance sweet spot for midsize companies. By radically simplifying how customers install, deploy, and manage converged infrastructures for any Linux, Oracle Solaris, or Microsoft Windows application, the next-generation Virtual Compute Appliance X5 delivers unique value in performance, features, cost savings, and ease of use. 

Virtual Compute Appliance has the power to put midsize companies in a more agile, responsive position by delivering storage, networking, virtualization, operating system, and application capabilities all on one system. And with one vendor to turn to for assistance and support, it also dramatically reduces complexity.

But don't simply take our word for it. Watch a short video featuring the Chief Technology Officer of Secure-24 as he explains the benefits of Virtual Compute Appliance in a midsize company.

Four Key Reasons It's Right for Midsize Companies
When organizations have to integrate compute, network, and storage infrastructure from several vendors, lengthy provisioning and configuration requirements make it difficult to successfully address today's quickly emerging business opportunities. Virtual Compute Appliance X5 helps companies reduce infrastructure complexity by as much as 70 percent, deploy applications 7x faster, and cut capital expenditures by as much as 50 percent.

• Fast deployment. The technology requires minimal implementation time to launch Oracle and third-party applications or services.

• Management ease. Enterprises can consolidate Oracle Solaris, Oracle Linux and other Linux distributions, as well as Microsoft Windows applications, onto one platform with Virtual Compute Appliance. Organizations can then centrally manage all the hardware and software components using Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c.

• Performance at half the cost. Compared to Cisco UCS plus EMC, Virtual Compute Appliance is 50 percent cheaper and easier to deploy.

• Preconfigured for high availability. All hardware components come in pairs for system redundancy, and Oracle VM supports live migration of workloads to keep operations running in case of a component failure.

"No other vendor delivers this kind of value—they only deliver piece parts and basic virtual machines that require mounds and mounds of integration," says Oracle President Mark Hurd.

Get the latest update on Virtual Compute Appliance—watch a replay of the Virtual Compute Appliance X5 launch webcast. For demos, e-books, white papers, data sheets, and more, visit the Virtual Compute Appliance resources page on oracle.com.