Oracle news you may have missed

During my time off I noted a bunch of information to dig into later, and I thought I'd make some notes as I go - see if you missed any interesting news.

I'll do a separate post for noteable blog posts.

Oracle REST Data Services

As Dimitri announced here, Oracle has another product "formerly known as" - this time it's the APEX Listener. Now known by what I think is a name that may also be confusing to some, though after reading this wiki on REST it's not as bad as I originally thought when I posted my comment on Dimitri's blog. Another good discussion can be found at Kris' blog.
Most importantly, it now get its own cool little logo.

Time to upgrade

This post from Dimitri was back in December, but it's more than relevant now. Just to get to the bar, you should be looking at APEX 4.2.x.
The sooner you're away from APEX 3.x or an earlier v4, the sooner you'll be ready to face APEX 5.
If you're using SQL Developer or GlassFish, those versions should also start with a 4. As mentioned, the APEX Listener/REST Data Services is already one up from his diagram.
If you have any say in your database, apparently 12c is all the rage - hopefully this year I can really start exploring the developer features.

Oracle Developer Day

I did attend one work event in my month off, giving my wife some practice without me home to help. Oracle held a Developer Day in Perth and as usual I learnt a zillion things about 12c new features from Connor McDonald. Reading the massive slide deck will never do the talk any justice, but he does show great examples describing why certain features are awesome and long awaited.

I didn't get to see Penny talk about APEX, though she guarantees I knew her content already. It was also interesting to get ADF workhorse Chris Muir's perspective on mobile development.

SQL Challenge

Congrats to Tony Winn & Scott Wesley on their perf in SQLChallenge, keeping the Aussie dream alive :) @swesley_perth @stevefeuerstein
— Jeffrey Kemp (@jeffreykemp) February 17, 2014

I'm not sure what Jeff meant with 'keeping the Aussie dream alive' but I did afford myself half an hour to take the first annual SQL challenge at Steven Feuerstein's PL/SQL Challenge website. As the rankings show, I came a respectable 12th out of 39. If you look closely, I did this in the 2nd lowest total time. This isn't because I knew everything, rather I had baby-induced tiredness and I thought I'd fire though the questions as quickly as I could. Some of them were quite tricky, and some required some 12c nouse - but I made some educated guesses and learnt some things.

If you don't know, the PL/SQL challenge not only holds daily (5/week) quizzes on PL/SQL, but also weekly quizzes on SQL, Database design and Logic puzzles. The design quizzes are mostly written by Chris Saxon and are worth a shot.

SQL Quiz

Speaking of quizzes, I see this tweet and of course had to accept the challenge.

Reddit seems to like my blog post: Result of a simple SQL indexing quiz: 60% fail http://t.co/Sc257BCy1U
— Markus Winand (@MarkusWinand) February 20, 2014

They were the perfect selection of 5 questions on general SQL tuning. They were Oracle based, though vendor specific questions were available for other DB technologies. There is a great write-up of the results here - but it'll only take a minute to try first - give him some more data.

APEX Certification BETA

David Peake announces we have until mid-May to take a BETA version of a new APEX 4 certification exam. Amazingly there is a testing centre within 10 minutes drive of my place - I think it might be worth looking into.

ODTUG APEX Theming Competition 2014

Reading through the submission guidelines, this sounds like it would a brilliant learning exercise - but as much as I'd like to give this a crack I might have to pass this time. Besides, I haven't worn a watch since last millenium! Though I would love to attend (and speak at) KScope - maybe when it's back at New Orleans ;-)

APEX 5.0 (EA)

Who could miss this? Well, me so far.. Having babies & all, I haven't had a chance to play with this yet - I've even held back reading much about it before I can really dive deep.
Dimitri once again has a great overview, but I'll be sure to post some myself

Evolution of APEX Evangelists

This sounds like an interesting enterprise, I look forward to seeing where it leads.

Please let me know if I missed any other cool announcements.

In the meantime, enjoy this short history of UX design.