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Oracle Magazine-May/June 1995

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The headline articles for the May/June edition of Oracle Magazine included one of the first articles on Data Centers,using the prebuilt packages in PL/SQL and how to use object-oriented programming techniques in Oracle Forms 4.5

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Other articles included:

Oracle 7 Internet Access Kit also called the Oracle World Wide Web Interface Kit. Developers could use this kit developers can create links between web servers and Oracle 7 databases. The Oracle WWW Interface Kit included:

  • Oracle’s Web-Oracle-Web (WOW) PL/SQL gateway to web servers
  • Oracle’s PL/SQL editor and development tool for creating dynamic PL/SQL
  • PERL, a freeware interpreting programming language
  • ORAPERL, an extension to PERL for use with Oracle 7 databases
  • ORAYWWW, a PERL gateway
  • WORA, a user-friendly database browser written in Pro*C
  • DECOUX, a post-processing gateway that inserts query results from a Oracle 7 database into HyperText Markup Language (HTML) documents
  • Navigator, a collection of PERL scripts and one Pro*C module that enables administrators to quickly configure HTML forms for end user queries
  • Text Search System (TSS), an indexing and free text search system
  • MORE, a collection of Pro*C gateways for maintaining an information repository
  • HotMetal, a HTML editor

Fee access to Oracle ConText. Oracle customers were offered an opportunity to try ConText before you buy. According the the article Oracle ConText is a revolutionary linguistic analysis program that automatically generates back-of-book indexes and reduces the volume of text to a summary.

Ken Jacobs gives the second part of his in-depth article on the latest release of Oracle 7.1 and Oracle 7.2 databases. Ken was vice president of Product Planning and has been working with Oracle since version 2 of the database.

Mike Ault has an article on using DBMS_PIPES PL/SQL package, how to access the shared pool using the DBMS_SHARED_POOL PL/SQL package and how to use the DBMS_OUTPUT procedure.

How big is your database ?  Oracle conducted a survey of all its customers to see what was the typical size of their databases and how many users each database would have. The following diagrams gives the results of this survey and compares the 1994 results with the results from 1993. We can see that there was a bit of a jump on the size of the databases but the number of users increased significantly

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So must customers had databases in the 2GB to 10GB. How things have changed. If the survey was conduced for 2012 what results would be get ?

In 1995, Oracle Open World took place in Yokohama, Japan between 18th and 19th January. It had 130 seminars and sessions.  In 2012 OOW will have over 500 sessions and will run over 5 days!

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.

This entry was posted in Oracle, Oracle Magazine, Oracle Technology Network, OTN, oug_ire.

How big was your Oracle Database in 1993 & 1994

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I’m in the middle of writing my summary of the May/June 1995 edition of Oracle Magazine (that blog post is coming soon). There was a one article about a survey that Oracle conducted of its customer on how big their databases were and the number of users for their databases.

The follow diagrams gives the summary results of these surveys.

We can see that there was a bit of a jump on the size of the databases but the number of users increased significantly

image_thumb[2]

image_thumb[4]

So must customers had databases in the 2GB to 10GB. How things have changed. If the survey was conduced for 2012 what results would be get ?

Does anyone know if Oracle has published similar survey results in the last few years ?

This entry was posted in database, Oracle, Oracle Magazine, OTN, oug_ire.

Oracle Magazine–March 1995

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In 1995 we have a change to the frequency of publication of Oracle Magazine. It is not published every 2 two months with 6 editions each year, as it is still the case.

The headline articles in the March/April 1994 edition of Oracle Magazine included Integrating Unstructured Information, Minimizing Client/Server Network Traffic with Oracle Forms 4.0, Relational Objects and how the Canadian Postal Service was using Oracle Technology to deliver mail on time.

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Other articles include:

Dynamic SQL Comes to PL/SQL: Introduces us to the DBMS_SQL package. A useful quick reference one pager is given giving the details of each of the 15 procedures and functions, including, BIND_VARIABLE, CLOSE_CURSOR, COLUMN_VALUE, DEFINE_COLUMN, EXECUTE, EXECUTE_AND_FETCH, FETCH_ROWS, IS_OPEN, LAST_ERROR_POSITION, LAST_ROW_COUNT, LAST_ROW_ID, LAST_SQL_FUNCTION_CODE, OPEN_CURSOR, PARSE, VARIABLE_VALUE.

Personal Oracle 7 for Windows gets released and it now has a graphical administration tool to allow us to manage the database, including users, backup and recovery managers along with export/import and SQL*Loader and Oracle Objects for OLE. The hardware requirements included 8Mb of RAM and less than 30Mb of hard-disk space. How things have changed!!!. It was capable of running on Window 3.1 and was Windows 95 ready.

Rollback segments in in Oracle 7 allows use to now effectively manage our transactions. It gave the following recommendations:

  • Create a separate tablespace for rollback segments for administrative and monitoring purposes
  • Se the size of the tablespace according to the number and storage parameters of the rollback segments
  • Place your rollback segment tablespace on a separate disk device, if possible. Consider total I/O activities and spread I/O over available disk devices
  • Create one rollback segment for every four concurrent transactions
  • Don’t create more than 50 rollback segments
  • Create smaller rollback segments for OLTP applications. This increases the likelihood that rollback segments will be cached in SGA according to the least recently used algorithm, resulting in performance gain
  • Create larger rollback segments for decision support or back processing applications
  • Set initial to you average transaction size, set OPTIMAL to four to eight times larger than INITIAL

Oracle Magazine goes digital and interactive with a CD-ROM containing every issue of published in the previous two years and also contained a map of Oracle offices worldwide.

To view the cover page and the table of contents click on the above image or click here.

My Oracle Magazine Collection can be found here. You will find links to my blog posts on previous editions.

This entry was posted in database, Oracle, Oracle Magazine, Oracle Technology Network, OTN, oug_ire.

Data Visualization Videos & Resources

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Here is a selection of videos and websites on Data Visualisations.

Hans Rosling videos of his TED talks

Other videos

Useful Websites

This entry was posted in data mining, database design, oracle big data, Oracle Data Miner, oracle data mining, Oracle Data Mining 11g R2, Oracle R Enterprise, oraclebigdata, oug_ire.

Oracle Advanced Analytics Video by Charlie Berger

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Charlie Berger (Sr. Director Product Management, Data Mining & Advanced Analytics) as produced a video based on a recent presentation called ‘Oracle Advanced Analytics: Oracle R Enterprise & Oracle Data Mining’.

This is a 1 hour video, including some demos, of product background, product features, recent developments and new additions, examples of how Oracle is including Oracle Data Mining into their fusion applications, etc.

Oracle has 2 data mining products, with main in-database Oracle Data Mining and the more recent extensions to R to give us Oracle R Enterprise.

Check out the video – Click here.

Check out Charlie’s blog at https://blogs.oracle.com/datamining/

Oracle University : 2 Day Oracle Data Mining training course

This entry was posted in data mining, data mining blog, Oracle, Oracle Advanced Analytics, oracle big data, Oracle Data Miner, oracle data mining, Oracle Data Mining 11g R2, Oracle R Enterprise, oraclebigdata, oug_ire.

OTN Workshop Days in Dublin 17-

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Oracle in Ireland have arranged a number of FREE Oracle Technology Network Hands on Workshops.

17th April : Database Firewall

18th April : Oracle Real Application Testing

19th April : Database 11g R2 New Features

20th April : Business Integration using Oracle SOA Suite 11g

All the workshops are in the Oracle offices in East Point, in Dublin.

To register for these events

http://www.oracle.com/us/dm/34862-splashpage-1438215.html

This entry was posted in database, Ireland, Oracle, Oracle Technology Network, OTN, oug_ire.

Tom Kyte is in Belfast 16th April

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The Oracle User Group has organised for Tom Kyte the famous Oracle evangelist to come Belfast to give a one day seminar.

The seminar will be in the Hilton in Belfast.

Some of the topics to be covered on the day include:

  • 5 things you probably didn’t know about SQL
  • 5 thing you probably didn’t know about PL/SQL
  • All about metadata: why telling the database about your schema matters
  • What is New and Improved and Coming in Oracle Application Development
  • All about Oracle Database Security.

All of this will followed by a 1 hour Ask Tom session, where you will have your chance to ask the man himself anything about the Oracle database.

This is a FREE event. What more could you ask for!

Check out the OUG website for more details and how to register for this event.

http://www.ukoug.org/events/tom-kyte-seminar-and-asktom-live/

Don’t forget to use the OUG Ireland twitter tag  #oug_ire

This entry was posted in database, Oracle, Oracle Magazine, oug_ire, Tom Kyte.

Oracle Scene Call for Articles-Due 18th April

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The Call for Articles is now open for the summer edition of Oracle Scene.

If you are interested in writing an article, now is the time to start working on writing it, as the deadline for submitting is 18th April.

Articles can be short (2 pages) or long 4 to 6 pages in MS Word.

All Oracle technical articles will be considered and can on one or more of the following areas:

  • CRM market and megatrends eg. Cloud, mobile, CX (Customer Experience Management), self service, social
  • Fusion CRM
  • Siebel
  • CRM on Demand
  • Other Oracle CRM products
  • e-commerce in Siebel
  • Mobile CRM solutions
  • RightNow
  • Upgrading
  • Project implementation
  • Applications & Fusion Applications
  • Fusion Middleware
  • BI
  • DBA
  • APEX
  • Server Technology
  • Java

In particular I would like to see more short (1/4 or 1/2 page) articles on what happened at the various SIG events so far in 2012 and your plans for the rest of the year.

Have you written and published a book recently or at some stage over the summer. If so would you like to publicise it by writing a short article about it and my to give a sign copy away in a draw?

If you have any questions about writing an article for Oracle Scene drop me an email and we can discuss.

Check out the following web link for submission guidelines and how to submit your article.

http://www.ukoug.org/what-we-offer/oracle-scene/article-submissions/

This entry was posted in Irish Oracle SIG, Oracle, Oracle Scene, Oracle Scene Magazine, oug_ire, UKOUG, ukoug_ire.

My OUG Ireland Conference Presentations

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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.

This entry was posted in Brendan Tierney, Ireland, Irish BI SIW, Irish Oracle SIG, Oracle, oug_ire, ukoug_ire.

Rewards received in the Post today

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Today I arrived home from work to find that I had received 2 parcels.

In the first parcel was

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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.

This entry was posted in Brendan Tierney, Oracle, Oracle Technology Network, OTN, oug_ire.

Oracle Magazine–Winter 1993

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The lead articles in the first Oracle Magazine of 1993 (winter) were about how the Oracle database was being used in the Toronto Stock Exchange and in the Municipio de Panama of Panama City.

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Other articles of interest included

  • Cary Millsap on the Optimal Flexible Architecture. Was this Cary’s first article in Oracle Magazine ? OFA provided a set of guidelines on how to install Oracle so that performance is not affected as your database environment grows. Cary gives 3 basic rules for creating and ODA compliant Oracle database (the full set is in the article).
    1. Establish and orderly operating system directory structure in which any database file can be stored on any disk resources (applicable to operating systems with hierarchical directory structures only).
    2. Separate groups of segments with different behavior into different tablespaces.
    3. Maximize database reliability and performance by separating database components across disk resources
  • There was 2 articles that looked at OODBMS. Oracle made their first purchase of an OODBMS company in 1994 and were trying to release their first OODBMS product in 1995. This never happened and their reverted to integrating some OODBMS features into the database instead.
  • Oracle Glue is released. This product has gone through a number of name changes since. What is it called now ?
  • There was a couple of articles discussing using UNIX or ALPHA server machines, when VLDBs were considered extremely large at 32GB. I remember there was one Bank who had the largest database in Ireland in 1993 and it was 4GB. I wonder what it is now.
  • Business Object announces the release of their DOS and Windows end user data access tool for relational database tool.
  • There was a number of adverts from companies providing tools and support for converting your Oracle Forms Version 2 to Forms 3

 

Click on the image above to view the PDF of the table of contents page.

My Oracle Magazine Collection can be found here.

This entry was posted in Oracle, Oracle Magazine, Oracle Technology Network, OTN, oug_ire.

ODM–Attribute Importance using PL/SQL API

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In a previous blog post I explained what attribute importance is and how it can be used in the Oracle Data Miner tool (click here to see blog post).

In this post I want to show you how to perform the same task using the ODM PL/SQL API.

The ODM tool makes extensive use of the Automatic Data Preparation (ADP) function. ADP performs some data transformations such as binning, normalization and outlier treatment of the data based on the requirements of each of the data mining algorithms. In addition to these transformations we can specify our own transformations.  We do this by creating a setting tables which will contain the settings and transformations we can the data mining algorithm to perform on the data.

ADP is automatically turned on when using the ODM tool in SQL Developer. This is not the case when using the ODM PL/SQL API. So before we can run the Attribute Importance function we need to turn on ADP.

Step 1 – Create the setting table

CREATE TABLE Att_Import_Mode_Settings (
  setting_name  VARCHAR2(30),
  setting_value VARCHAR2(30));

Step 2 – Turn on Automatic Data Preparation

BEGIN
   INSERT INTO Att_Import_Mode_Settings (setting_name, setting_value)
   VALUES (dbms_data_mining.prep_auto,dbms_data_mining.prep_auto_on);
  COMMIT;
END;

Step 3 – Run Attribute Importance

BEGIN
  DBMS_DATA_MINING.CREATE_MODEL(
    model_name => ‘Attribute_Importance_Test’,
    mining_function  => DBMS_DATA_MINING.ATTRIBUTE_IMPORTANCE,
    data_table_name  > ‘mining_data_build_v’,
    case_id_column_name => ‘cust_id’,
    target_column_name  => ‘affinity_card’,
    settings_table_name => ‘Att_Import_Mode_Settings’);
END;

Step 4 – Select Attribute Importance results

SELECT *
FROM TABLE(DBMS_DATA_MINING.GET_MODEL_DETAILS_AI(‘Attribute_Importance_Test’))
ORDER BY RANK;

ATTRIBUTE_NAME       IMPORTANCE_VALUE       RANK
——————– —————- ———-
HOUSEHOLD_SIZE             .158945397          1
CUST_MARITAL_STATUS        .158165841          2
YRS_RESIDENCE              .094052102          3
EDUCATION                  .086260794          4
AGE                        .084903512          5
OCCUPATION                 .075209339          6
Y_BOX_GAMES                .063039952          7
HOME_THEATER_PACKAGE       .056458722          8
CUST_GENDER                .035264741          9
BOOKKEEPING_APPLICAT       .019204751         10
ION

CUST_INCOME_LEVEL                   0         11
BULK_PACK_DISKETTES                 0         11
OS_DOC_SET_KANJI                    0         11
PRINTER_SUPPLIES                    0         11
COUNTRY_NAME                        0         11
FLAT_PANEL_MONITOR                  0         11

This entry was posted in data mining, data mining blog, database, ODM 11g R2, Oracle, oracle big data, Oracle Data Miner, oracle data mining, Oracle Data Mining 11g R2, oracle open world, oraclebigdata, oug_ire.