AUSOUG Connect 2016 Presentations

Another conference series over and many new lessons are still churning around somewhere in the back of my brain.

Our Australian conferences still seem a little subdued compared to years gone by, but the thicker community bonds held strong while the economy decides what to do.

The other problem we have is getting all those people out there we know are using Oracle technology out from their cubicles and at these fun events!

My Presentations

I did 2 and a half this year, and I have plenty more ideas for next year. Some of which got cut out of my 5.1 Charts session, which really didn't end up what I intended it to be. In part because APEX 5.1 is still in early adopter, though I hear that there will be no EA3 and it will head straight into apex.oracle.com as UAT. Just not sure when...

Mastering Dynamic Actions - demonstrating 3 useful patterns I use daily. Certainly my favourite topic at the moment.
https://prezi.com/lko3dxsbzr3i/mastering-dynamic-actions/

APEX 5.1 Charts with OracleJET - more to come on this topic, and I think I'm going to find myself digging into JET over the summer.

https://prezi.com/misgwk4trqhc/apex-51-charts-with-oraclejet/

The Perfect Trigger - this is the 'half', well, only 10 minutes. I shared a slot with Penny & Ray who talked about some of their favourite things.
https://prezi.com/g0cew4clllzk/the-perfect-trigger/
Bonus slide at the end for the Melbourne crowd where I just mentioned some sites people might like but may have missed.

Conference notes

Here are some thoughts from my scratchy notes, included here to help reiterate my learning, and some of you might find something interesting.

Basheer Khan described "Extensibility" as a required feature of a good UX. APEX has that nailed, affirming some of what I was going to say about plugins in my OracleJET session.

Basheer' design philosphy for mobile was: glance, scan, commit. Which translated into workflows of only 3 levels deep. Glancing at choices, scanning results, commiting to action. I think we do a decent job of that already, and so does the documentation. I always feel only 3 clicks away from the information I need.

The final thing from Basheer I have to look up is: UX RDK.

This is not me. I'd never play for Melbourne...

Mark Lancaster gave me something that may help the penny drop with an issue regarding tabular forms, not that I use them often. I'm certainly looking forward to learning all about Interactive Grids.

Connor smashed out some good feels about 12.2 where it seems some good features that weren't quite finished get the treatment they need. Well, almost.

LISTAGG now has features to elegantly handle problems the concatenated string becomes large, but there is still no 'distinct' option.

Validate_conversion sounds like a very useful datatype validation device, but it might has well behave like LNNVL.
Column level collation sounded interesting, but I didn't make enough notes. Connor speaks pretty fast. Case insensitive columns will solve a few issues, but come with caveats.

I love the look of the deprecated pragma. PL/SQL warnings in general I would like to revisit.

External table alterations on the fly complete the picture for the true flexibility of external tables. And doing things on the fly seems to be a bit of a trend with 12.2

JSON generation is a biggy, not just features for reading. It's a shame the ability to read and write came out at the same time, but again, it completes the picture in regard to the JSON lifecycle.

So many other goodies to come in 12.2, including approx_count_distinct() which works in a very interesting manner to help make histogram analysis quicker on large data.

Analytical Views seem like a massive feature attempting to solve the problems with rollup and grouping, but I wonder if it will be a another spruce goose.

Melbourne was also a blast. Trent Schafer showed me how much I really don't know about APEX administration, and Ubuntu for that matter. I've really stalled in my use, and speculating whether I made the right decision. Let's see how I go with my exploration of Atom.

Lino's session on Stripe was a good demonstration on how web services make APEX applications become easily extensible. It also gave me another presentation idea.

And all this is a drop in the ocean to what I hear is coming out of some European conferences right now. Information overload. I feel like those people who know an awful lot about one thing and do it really well... an 'expert', right? One who knows a lot about a little.

Scott.