Brendan Tierney
Oracle Magazine Collection
Are you going to Oracle Open World & have old Oracle Magazines.
I’ve been working in the Oracle World for 20 years now. During that time I’ve been collecting the print editions of Oracle Magazine since 1992.
I have all the Oracle Magazines from 1998, but I’m missing some of the editions prior to 1998.
Can you help me complete my collection ? (I promise that you wont find them on ebay!!)
What I would really like to do is to have a print copy of every Oracle Magazine going back to the very first one in June 1987. To see the electronic version of the first edition, which was very kindly made available by Cary Milsap, click here. 
So in the run up to Oracle Open World could you have a look to see if you have any of my missing editions or any of the early editions. I can collect them off you are Oracle Open World.
If you have a look through my blog you will see that I’ve been posting a review of some of the early editions of Oracle Magazine. Ideally at some time in the future I will have a review of all the Oracle Magazines available.
Oracle Open World Schedule
Oracle Open World is fast approaching. Over the past couple of weeks I have been using the schedule builder tool to work out what sessions I would like to attend. Unfortunately there are LOTS of sessions I would love to attend but I haven’t worked out a way to be in 10 places at the same time.
When attending a conference I try to achieve a number of things. These are find out about new topics/features, benchmark my knowledge of existing topics, try some of the hands-on labs, try something new and do something completely different. This will be my challenge at Oracle Open World.
There are a number of other people from Ireland who will be attending OOW, and there are some plans to have an Ireland social event. Plus there is lots of meetings/catch-ups planned too with people I know from the virtual Oracle world.
There will be some people from AIB who will be presenting at OOW. Their presentation will be on the Tuesday morning 10:15-11:00. I’ll be there.
Other social things that are on include the Oracle ACE dinner, the Oracle Music festival, with Kings of Leon playing support to Pearl Jam on the Wednesdays night.
It is going to be a busy week, an enjoyable week, a week of learning new things and finding out lots of what the 12c database will be like.
Will I get time to go to everything ? The simple answer is NO. So I will just have to try to get to another Oracle Open World soon.
Review Oracle Magazine–Sept/Oct 2006- 20th Anniversary
The Sept/Oct Oracle Magazine from 2006 was the 20th Anniversary edition.
The main articles were focused on Security, Unstructured Data, Using Ajax, Partitioning (this is a regular topic), Application Express and there was the regular articles from Tom Kyte and Steven Feuerstein
There was only one article focusing o the 20th Anniversary of Oracle Magazine, written by Jeff Spicer and gave a brief overview of how the magazine has progress and the main technologies. The highlights included
- Oracle Magazine emerged in 1987 from the original newsletter that was issued every quarter
- In the 1990’s the magazine grew in size and was primarily focus on how Oracle customer were using the products
- By the late 1990 the magazine evolved into have a number of distinct sections focusing on the wide range of products that Oracle now owned
- Then into the 2000 Oracle magazine stated to introduce more user focused features. With this we get more user group news and features on community members.
- Tom Kyte joins with a regular column in 2000
- Back in 2006 Oracle magazine has a readership of nearly 1 million.
In the November/December 2011 Oracle Magazine, Tom Haunert give an brief history of Oracle Magazine, over its 25 year history
To view the cover page and the table of contents click on the image at the top of this post or click here.
My Oracle Magazine Collection can be found here. You will find links to my blog posts on previous editions and a PDF for the very first Oracle Magazine from June 1987.
Peer-to-Peer in Oracle Magazine–September/October 2013
The latest edition of Oracle Magazine is now available online and can be viewed at http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/oramag/magazine/current-issue/index.html
I’ve been included in the Peer-to-Peer feature, along with two other Oracle ACEs. The Peer-to-Peer feature is a regular part in Oracle Magazine and typically gives a short profile of 3 Oracle ACEs or ACE Directors.
If you have subscribed to get a printed copy, we should be getting a copy of it in the post over the next couple of weeks.
Review of Oracle Magazine–November/December 1996
The headline articles for the November/December 1996 edition of Oracle Magazine were focused on VLDB with articles on scaling to petabyte sized databases, the latest and best hardware to use, what new exist features in 7.3 and 8 for VLDBS, what new tools exists to assist administrators with the scale of the database.
Other articles included:
- There was an article on what is a Operational Data Store (ODS) and it also highlights how and ODS is different to a Data Warehouse. Despite this article and many, many more like it in the wider press since 1996 there is still lots of confusion out in the IT world on what whey are and how they are different.
- A new Database Design tool has been added to the Oracle Designer/2000 suit. This new tool was supposed to be lightweight, etc. Oracle Data Modeler is a much better tool.
- Oracle outlines their roadmap for making their database and certain tools available on Windows NT.
- IKEA has implemented and Oracle 7 DB on multiple platforms, including IBM MVS, Digital VMS, IBM AIX and other UNIX variants. Other tools used by IKEA included Developer/2000 and Designer/2000.
- How to manage multi-table joins to reduce the amount of processing. The article looked at how to use Nested Loops, Merger Joins and Hash Joins. The article also suggests that in some cases maybe you need to consider redesigning your tables/data model.
- Motorola implements multi-lingual Oracle Human Resources 10SC in 14 offices in 8 countries. There was a lot of use of NLS functionality in the database including NLS_LANG, NLS_NUMERIC_CHARACTERS, NLS_SORT and the translated _TL tables in Oracle Applications.
- We have the first Y2K related article, an much of the discussion focused on how Oracle Stores Dates in the database. Most of the fuss focused on if you captured and stored a two digit year or a four digit year. Oracle provided the RR format mask to minimise the amount of recoding that needed to be done to Many applications around the world.
- There was 6 pages of job adverts from Oracle Australia, Database Consultants Inc, ACT1, BPA, Profound Consulting, RHI Consulting, Ernst & Young, TransTech, Wilco, Information Alliance, Exor Technologies, The Consulting Team, InTimeSystems, May&Speh, Price Waterhouse. I wonder where some of those companies are now.
To view the cover page and the table of contents click on the image at the top of this post or click here.
My Oracle Magazine Collection can be found here. You will find links to my blog posts on previous editions and a PDF for the very first Oracle Magazine from June 1987.
Review of Oracle Magazine-September/October 1996
The headline articles for the September/October 1996 edition of Oracle Magazine was on Putting the Web to Work and focused how to build web based applications. Topics covered included the Web Server, Intranet vs Client/Server applications, what (Oracle) tools to use.
Oracle articles included:
- There was an interesting advertisement from Sun. It consisted on one page that contained the following text, “when your intranet is protected with Solstice by Sun, unauthorized users see your information quite differently,. For a free demonstration, turn the page” The next two pages are blank!
- Oracle publishing will be launching Oracle Applications Magazine in November 1996. The new magazine will be targeted at top line-of-business managers and will offer executives and other qualified Oracle Applications users in-depth industry analysis and technology and business overviews of topics critical to managers looking for technology solutions to business problems.
- Euro Star train service that covers UK and France, and has trains running under the the English Chanel, has implemented the Oracle Financials Application suite. One of the main features is its ability to handle multiple currencies and companies and the flexibility of running processes and period-end routines.
- Oracle announces that Wells Fargo has negotiated that the largest enterprise database licence agreement in the financial industry and will be implementing Oracle Universal Server, Oracle DB 7.3 as well as DB options such as data warehousing and electronic commerce. This new environment will need to support 25,00 users and the gathering of 80 gigabytes of data each month.
- Oracle has released a number of its applications for the web.
- Using partitioning for a Data Warehouse and how it compares to using Clustering.
- How to build business rules using triggers in Oracle 7 and how to ensure consistency in the data.
- A summary of a number of SQL Functions were given with examples. These included Numeric, Character, Data, Conversion and Group By functions.
- A listing of a procedure and some other scripts was given for sizing tables and indexes in Oracle 7.
To view the cover page and the table of contents click on the image at the top of this post or click here.
My Oracle Magazine Collection can be found here. You will find links to my blog posts on previous editions and a PDF for the very first Oracle Magazine from June 1987.
My OUG Ireland Conference Presentations
Wednesday 21st March an important for the OUG Ireland as it is the annual conference. This year we are in a new venue, the Dublin Convention Centre, on the river Liffey.
After many, many years of being an attendee of my local conference, this year I will be presenting 2 presentations. Actually, I’ll be presenting one and co-presenting another.
My first presentation, will be an introduction to Oracle Data Miner, which is now part of SQL Developer. I will be talking about the new features and some features that be part of a future presentation. Most of the presentation time will be taken up with a Demonstration of using Oracle Data Miner (ODMr). I will step through a the main steps of data mining using the ODMr tool. The data set that I will be using is based on a University in the UK who wanted to look at how data mining could be used to help them manage student retention/churn.
The second presentation will be lead by Antony Heljula, of Peak Indications, with me co-presenting or butting in on some topics. This presentation will be at a much higher level. This presentation will be aimed at analysts and managers who are looking at data mining and what it can do for them.We will look at what it can be used for, who are the main people, some sample case studies/application areas, data quality issues, etc. There will be a demonstration on how you can incorporate the data mining model, developed in the first presentation, into OBIEE Dashboards. We will be using the same UK University scenario here and we will show how data mining has helped to identify specific types students that could not be identified using other means.
Check out the full conference agenda – here
There are plenty of excellent presentations, with lots of Oracle ACE’s and Oracle ACE Directors.
Some of my other activities on the day will be:
- Talking to people about writing articles for the Oracle Scene, the user group manage. I’m the deputy editor of Oracle Scene.
- I’m also deputy chair of the Irish BI & EPM SIG, so I’ll be trying to persuade people take part in and present at future meetings.
- Finally and perhaps most importantly, I will be meeting other people in the Oracle world here in Ireland. Some of these people I know for 20+ years. Because of busy schedules sometimes the only time we get to catch-up is at the annual conference.
If you would like to talk to me about the topics covered in the presentations or about any of the about activities, look out for me during the day. I will be at the (free) drinks reception at the end of the day, so you can talk to me then. If that does not suit, then drop me an email and we can arrange to meet up.
Rewards received in the Post today
Today I arrived home from work to find that I had received 2 parcels.
In the first parcel was
Thank you Oracle ACE Programme and OTN.
In the second parcel was an IOUG Select Contributors T-shirt. I received this because I had an article in the Q1 2012 edition of IOUG Select, on Oracle Data Miner. Thank you IOUG.
ODM 11gR2–Attribute Importance
I had a previous blog post on Data Exploration using Oracle Data Miner 11gR2. This blog post builds on the steps illustrated in that blog post.
After we have explored the data we can identity some attributes/features that have just one value or mainly one value, etc. In most of these cases we know that these attributes will not contribute to the model build process.
In our example data set we have a small number of attributes. So it is easy to work through the data and get a good understanding of some of the underlying information that exists in the data. Some of these were pointed out in my previous blog post.
The reality is that our data sets can have a large number of attributes/features. So it will be very difficult or nearly impossible to work through all of these to get a good understanding of what is a good attribute to use, and keep in our data set, or what attribute does not contribute and should be removed from the data set.
Plus as our data evolves over time, the importance of the attributes will evolve with some becoming less important and some becoming more important.
The Attribute Importance node in Oracle Data Miner allows use to automate this work for us and can save us many hours or even days, in our work on this task.
The Attribute Importance node using the Minimum Description Length algorithm.
The following steps, builds on our work in my previous post, and shows how we can perform Attribute Importance on our data.
1. In the Component Palette, select Filter Columns from the Transforms list
2. Click on the workflow beside the data node.
3. Link the Data Node to the Filter Columns node. Righ-click on the data node, select Connect, move the mouse to the Filter Columns node and click. the link will be created
4. Now we can configure the Attribute Importance settings.Click on the Filter Columns node. In the Property Inspector, click on the Filters tab.
– Click on the Attribute Importance Checkbox
– Set the Target Attribute from the drop down list. In our data set this is Affinity Card
5. Right click the Filter Columns node and select Run from the menu
After everything has run, we get the little green box with the tick mark on the Filter Column node. To view the results we right clicking on the Filter Columns node and select View Data from the menu. We get the list of attributes listed in order of importance and their Importance measure.
We see that there are a number of attributes that have a zero value. It algorithm has worked out that these attributes would not be used in the model build step. If we look back to the previous blog post, some of the attributes we identified in it have also been listed here with a zero value.
Update on Exalytics Pricing
In my previous blog post (Exalytics : How much will it cost me ?) I gave an outline of the pricing you might expect for an Exalytics machine.
The final pricing that I gave of approx $3+M was based on the per processor licencing.
Yesterday (24th Jan) the Oracle Business Intelligence blog by Manan, included the pricing based on the per user licences.
The following is a breakdown of the Exalytics pricing based on the minimum 100 user licencing.
Licence Costs (100 users)
Exalytics machine = $135,000
TimesTen = $300 x 100 users = $30,000
BI Foundation Suite = $3,675 x 100 users = $367,500
Giving a grand total of $532,500.
Support Costs (100 users)
But we need to add the annual support costs to this.
Exalytics machine support = $29,700.
TimesTen support = $66 x 100 users = $6,600
BI Foundations suite = $809 x 100 users = $80,900
Total support costs (100 users) = $116,500
First year & on-going costs costs
Total first year cost for an Exalytics machine = $532,500 + $117,200 = $649,700
Plus on going annual support costs of $117,200 in year 2 and subsequent years.
Discounted Costs
If you are one of the lucky customer who can If I use the same discounts, as I did in my previous blog post, of 25% discount on hardware and 60% discount on the software, we get:
Year 1 cost of : ($135,000*0.75) + ($397,500*0.40) = $260,250
So it might be possible to get an Exalytics machine for $260+K, plus annual support costs.
Exalytics : How much will it cost me ?
Over the past couple of weeks the costing for the Oracle Exalytics machine has been made public by Oracle and there has been a number of articles. What I’ve done in this blog post is to collate this information. I give what I understand to be the cost of purchasing an Exalytic machine and to get setup and running.
The pricing structure starts at
Exalytics machine + cost of BI Foundation Suite + TimesTen licences
Exalytics machine = $135,000
TimesTen = $34,500 per processor licence or $300 per named user(min 100 users)
BI Foundation Suite = $450,000 per processor licence or $3,675 per named user (same number of users as for TimesTen = min 100 users)
Annual Support Costs
Exalytics machine = $29,700
TimesTen = 22% of software licence – $7,590 per processor licence or $66 per named user (min 100 users)
BI Foundation Suite = $99,000 per processor licence or $809 per named user(min 100 users)
The Exalytics machine consists of a single server with 1TB of RAM and 4 Intel Xeon E7-4800 processors, with 10 cores each.
So the total cost of an Exalytics machine based on the processor licence will be something towards the $10M. Now this is before the discounts that you can negotiate. There are reports of discounts ranging up to 25% on hardware and 60% on software. The size of the discount is depended on your size etc. So this initial $10M cost could be reduced to $3M+.
Please note that I may have gotten some or all of this pricing wrong. If I have then forgive me and let me know what is wrong. I can correct it to ensure that we have the correct costs.
New additions to my Oracle Magazine Collection
I put out a call a few months ago looking for help in completing my Oracle Magazine collection. I also had a letter in the Nov/Dec 2011 edition of Oracle Magazine looking for help.
The following people contacted me in December offering to send me some of my missing editions.
Lisa Dobson – Oracle DBA at Durham University and Vice President of UKOUG
Debra Lilley – President of UKOUG
Christian Antognini – Trivadis AG, Switzerland
Dan Vlamis – Vlamis Software Solutions, MO, USA
Many thanks for your donations.
It seems that people don’t keep their Oracle Magazines!
I’m now just missing a very small number of editions since 1992. Can anyone else help ?
Does anyone have any Oracle Magazines from before 1992 ?
The following table gives the current collection (printed editions). The grey boxes are the editions that I’m still missing, and keep an eye on my Oracle Magazine page for updates.
Ora-lytics 
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