Friday, April 30, 2010

Kicking a few tires

In case you didn't know, we've been doing some FREE hands on training in a few places.  The next one is at Disneyland . If your local, this is a great way to meet some folks from product development.  At the event is developers and product managers from Times Ten, XDM , Java, SQL Developer, SQL Developer Data Modeler, Application Express, JDeveloper, .NET, and I'm sure I'm missing someone.  The training is based on the Oracle By Examples which have a new home on Oracle.com here. You can try any of these OBEs online anytime.  To make things even easier we've made the first VirtualBox Appliance with everything pre-setup. Just download and run.

If you want to try out any of these technologies, it's easier than ever. Follow the 5 steps listed on the appliance page and you have a complete setup for running the Application Express and Database Development tracks.  This includes:
  • Oracle Enterprise Linux 5
  • Oracle Database 11g Release 2 Enterprise Edition
  • Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database Cache
  • Oracle XML DB
  • Oracle SQL Developer
  • Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler
  • Oracle Application Express
  • Hands-On-Labs (accessed via the Toolbar Menu in Firefox)
 The appliance is also running the latest Application Express Listener to try out.

http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/products/virtualbox/appliances/index.html

Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Yet Another APEX Listener EA - Better looking Admin

Another Listener EA was just posted. There's some fixes as well as some changes.  The biggest changes are the administration.

The biggest new thing is that the listner has 3 configuration/status URLs now.
1)  http://localhost/apex/listenerConfigure

    This is used for the first time setup only.  Once the listener is configured this URL it no longer accessible. Also there's a drop box to choose other connection choices like TNS and Advanced.  The on the Miscellaneous tab you can point to where your tns file is located.
  
2)  http://localhost/apex/listenerStatus

    This is used to view the status of the listener.  This includes how many connections are in the pool. How the cache is doing. What the response times are. Also what errors there are in the execution of the PL/SQL.

3)  http://localhost/apex/listenerAdmin

    This is the biggest change to what there was.  With the exception of the connection info, everything else is changable at runtime.  So if you want to try out some of the settings like security,cache,pre,port, or the jdbc pool itself you can change it without a restart.


Now to set these up there's security that needs to be enabled in the webserver which you have choosen.  We're working out a howto for all the webservers we'll support.  For now here's the tomcat instructions:

1) Edit tomcat-users.xml
2) Add these ( with more secure passwords! )
  <role rolename="Manager"/>
  <role rolename="Admin"/>
  <user username="apexStatus" password="status" roles="Manager"/>
  <user username="apexAdmin" password="admin" roles="Admin"/>





SQL Developer Webast tomorrow

There is a public webcast tomorrow with development showing the new things in SQL Developer 2.1. If you are interested and can't make a conference, this is a great way to catch up on what's new.  Normally, Sue would be doing these webcast however she was attending the Norway OUG last week and is now trying to get home.  This mean I'll be doing the one this time.  Here's an outline of what I'll be showing.


Agenda:
  • Introducing the new webcast series
  • Oracle SQL Developer product update
  • Product Overview Demonstration, focusing on SQl Developer 2.1 New Features.
  • Unit Testing
  • New Worksheet
  • Version Control
  • Navigation Filtering
  • and a few other things
  • Q&A
Date and Time:
21 April 2010
09:00 PST | 12:00 EST | 17:00 UCT | 18:00 CET



Dialin and web conference details are here : http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/database/sql_developer/files/sqldev_announce_ext.html