UKOUG
OUG Ireland Meetup 11th May
The next OUG Ireland Meetup is happening on 11th May, in the Bank of Ireland Grand Canal Dock. This is a free event and is open to every one. You don’t have to be a member to attend.
Following on from a very successful 2 day OUG Ireland Conference with over 250 attendees, we have organised our next meetup. This was mentioned during the opening session of the conference.
We typically have 2 presentations at each Meetup and on 11th May we have:
1. Oracle Analytics Cloud Service.
Oralce Analytics Cloud Service was only released a few weeks ago and we some local people who have been working with the beta and early adopter releases. They will be giving us some insights on this new product and how it compares with other analytics products like Oracle Data Visualization and OBIEE.
Running Oracle DataGuard on RAC on Oracle 12c
The second presentation will be on using Oracle DataGuard on RAC on Oracle 12c. We have a very experienced DBA talking about his experiences of using these products how to workaround some key bugs and situations to be aware of for administration purposes. Lots of valuable information to be gained.
There will be some food and refreshments available for you to enjoy.
The Meetup will be in Bank of Ireland, Grand Canal Dock. This venue is a very popular locations for Meetups in Dublin.
Join the Oracle Scene Editorial Team
Are you a member of UKOUG?
How would you like to join the editorial team of Oracle Scene magazine as a deputy editor?
If you are interested we are looking to recruit 1 deputy editor to cover the Applications area and 2 deputy editors to cover the Tech area (DBA, Developer, BA, etc)
How much time is required? about 4 hours per edition, or maybe less.
What does a deputy editor do?
As part of the editorial team you will be expected to:
– Article Review
Articles submitted are uploaded to the review panel on Basecamp. During this time the editors should become familiar with the articles and have an idea of which ones would be appropriate for publication. Time approx 1.5hrs over a 2 week period.
– Editorial Call
After the review period has closed the editors come together for an editorial call (approx 1hr) to go through the feedback received on the articles, it is the editors job to validate any comments and select which articles should be chosen for publication. Time approx 1hr.
Some articles may need further rework by the authors and the editors provide comments & instructions as to the amends needed, in some cases the editors will take on the amends themselves or if they hold the relationship with the author they may wish to approach them direct. If any articles have been held over from the previous edition, the editors will relook at the articles and if any of the content needs to be updated they will advise. If we do not have articles submitted at this stage so the editors may need to source some additional content.
– Editorial Review
Once the selected articles are edited they are passed to the designer for layout, editors will then receive a first copy of the magazine where they will read the articles relevant to them (Apps or Tech) marking up on the pdf any errors in the text or images found. We try to build in time over a weekend for this with the comments due by 9am on the Monday. This is generally the last time the editors see the magazine, the next time being the digital version. Time approx 2hrs.
– Promotion
When the digital version is ready to be sent out – the editors & review panel are notified to help raise awareness of the magazine among their network.
– Article Sourcing
Call for articles is open all year as we will just hold those submitted in between the planning timeline over to the next edition. If there are particular topics that we feel would make good articles the editors are expected to help source potential authors and of course if they see good presentations again encourage those speakers to turn their presentation in to text.
– Flying the flag
Throughout the year the editors are expected to positively “fly the flag” of Oracle Scene, as a volunteer this will include, at the annual conference, taking part in the community networking to encourage future authors amongst the community.
If you are interested in a deputy editor role then submit your application now.
Check out UKOUG webpage for more details.
UKOUG Conference 1999 : Who was there & what they were talking about
Yes you read the title of this blog post correctly!
Recently I was doing a bit a clear out and I came across a CD of the UKOUG Conference proceedings from 1999. That was my second UKOUG conference and how times have changed.
The CD contained all the conference proceedings consisting of slides and papers.
Here are some familiar names from back in 1999 who you may find presenting at this years conference, some you might remember as being a regular presenter and some are still presenting but not at this years conference.
- Jonathan Lewis
- Carl Dudley
- Fiona Martin
- Peter Robson
- Duncan Mills
- Kent Graziano
- John King
- Toby Price
- Doug Burns
- Dan Hotka
- Joel Goodman
The 1999 Ralph Fiennes did the Keynote speech. I queued up afterwards to get a signed book but they ran out with three people ahead of me 😦
The agenda grid was a bit smaller back then compared to now.
I’ll see you again in Birmingham this year, in a few days time 🙂
My presentations at UKOUG 2015
Video Posted on Updated on
The annual conferences of the UKOUG are coming up soon and I just wanted to give you a quick overview of the 3 presentations I will be giving at these conferences in Birmingham between Sunday 6th and Wednesday 9th December.
I’ll be making references to 50 Shades of Gray and Lord of the Rings in some of these presentations. Come along to find out why.
It all kicks off on the Sunday (12:30-14:20) with an almost 2 hour presentation titled ‘Predictive Analytics in Oracle: Mining the Gold & Creating Valuable Products’. We have being hearing about Predictive Analytics for a few years now. But most people are still unsure of what it really means and how it could be used in their company. This presentations aims to simplify what Predictive Analytics means and to illustrate how various companies from a wide range of industries have been using Predictive Analytics to gain deeper, valuable and actionable insights of their data. A number of case studies will be presented, based on some of my recent projects, illustrating how predictive analytics has been used to generate significant benefits for each company. These case studies will include examples from Banking, Telecommunications, Financial Fraud Detection, Retail and Merchandising. The second half of this seminar will look at what functionality is available from Oracle that allows you to build and deploy Predictive Analytics in your applications. We will at what you can do with SQL, PL/SQL, Oracle Data Miner, Oracle R Enterprise and Real-Time Decisions. We will then look at how you can build these features and tools into your front end applications. In the final section of the seminar we will look at what you need to do to get started with Predictive Analytics and how you can avoid some of the typical pitfalls.
On Monday 7th, I have a presentation between 9:00 and 9:50 titled ‘Is Oracle SQL the Best Language for Statistics?’. Did you know that Oracle comes with over 280+ statistical functions? and that these statistical functions are available in all versions of the Database? Most people do not seem to know this.When we hear about people performing statistical analytics we can hear them talking about Excel and R. But what if we could do statistical analysis in the database, without having to extract any data onto client machines. That would be really good and just think of the possible data security issues with using Excel, R and other tools.This presentation will explore the various statistical areas available in SQL and I will give a number of demonstrations on some of the more commonly used statistical techniques. With the introduction of Big Data SQL we can now use these same 280+ Oracle statistical functions on all our data including Hadoop and NoSQL. We can also greatly expand our statistical capabilities by using Oracle R Enterprise using the embedded capabilities in SQL.
My final presentation will on Wednesday (14:30-15:20) titled ‘Automating Predictive Analytics in Your Applications’. What does your Oracle DBA and Oracle Developer need to know to implement Data Mining? How can the Oracle DBA and Oracle Developer use Data Mining. This presentation will look at what the Oracle DBA and Oracle Developer needs to know to deploying, implementing and integrating the predictive models produced by the Data Miner. These predictive models can be used in multiple databases and across their many applications. Examples will be given of the typical tasks data mining task for the DBA and for the Oracle Developer. These examples will include SQL, PL/SQL and embedded Oracle R Enterprise. I will show how easy it is to build automated Predictive Analytics into, not only your Dashboards, but your everyday applications.
Here is a short video that gives an overview of my presentations for TECH15.
UKOUG 2015 Conferences
The UKOUG annual conferences commence on Sunday 7th December and run until Wednesday 10th.
Like previous years there are two conferences, one called TECH15 and the other is called APPS15. You might guess what each conference is about!!.
This year these conferences are being held at the same time and in the same venue. But they are separate conferences!.
This year I’ve been very lucky (or very unlucky) to have 3 presentations at these conferences. Two of these will on part of the TECH15 conference and one will be part of the APPS15 conference.
Just in case you interested in what I’m presenting about and you might want to attend them, here is the list with the room numbers.
Monday
10:30-11:20 : Oracle Advanced Analytics in Oracle Fusion Apps & Beyond (Apps) (Room : Ex1)
11:30-12:20 : Predictive Queries in Oracle 12c (TECH) (Room : Hall 6)
Wednesday
11:30-12:20 : What are they thinking? With APEX and Oracle Data Miner. (TECH) (Room : Ex4)
(this is a joint presentation with Roel Hartman)
Yes on the Monday I have 2 back-to-back presentation with a 10 minute gap to get from one side of the conference centre to the other side 😦 I’m not looking forward to that transition, but I’m sure it will be fine.
Articles wanted for Oracle Scene–Spring 2013
The Call for Articles is now open for the Spring edition of Oracle Scene magazine. This is a publication of the UKOUG.
We are looking for technical articles covering all product offerings from Oracle.
Typically articles will range from 3 pages to 8 pages (MS Word format). These will convert into 2 to 5 page articles in Oracle Scene.
Check out the Article Formatting Guidelines before submitting.
All pictures and images should be 300dpi.
Include a 100(max) word Bio and your photo
Email your article and images to
For more details about submitting an article, check out
http://www.ukoug.org/what-we-offer/oracle-scene/article-submissions/
UKOUG 2012-What is it all about
The annual showcase conference of the UKOUG is coming up soon, actually it is just a week away now.
I attended my first UKOUG conference back in 1998 and I’ve been attending it on and off every since. Over the past few years I’ve been very luck to be able to attend it every year and during most of those I’ve presented at too.
This year will be no different as I will be co-presenting with Antony Heljula on using Oracle Data Miner and OBIEE to get some insight of on your data.
The core part of the conference runs over 3 days Monday to Wednesday, with many, many streams of excellent content for each area that the user group covers. The real problem I have when I attend this conferences is that my interests typically span two if not three of the streams, so I’m typically seen running between presentation.
This year there are two pre-conference events. The first of these is the Oaktable Sunday, where there are two streams of presentations from members of the OakTable networks, who are a bunch of hardcore DBA types. So if you are one of those or would like to be one of those then try to get along to those session on the Sunday.
Also on the Sunday there is a Middleware event. This is being organised by Simon Haslam and Jacco Landlust. Like the OakTable event you will find some hardcode middleware experts sharing some of the work, their discoveries and offering lots of useful advice.
During the main conference look out for the Un-conference sessions where you will have the opportunity to give a short 10 minute plus, no powerpoint talk and some topic or issues you want to discuss. Whether you want to lead a discussion or to just sit in on one then these are a not to be missed. Check out the schedule near the exhibition hall.
The Oracle User Experience team will be at the conference this year to talk to you about your experiences of using the products. In addition they will be setting up a UX lab to get some feedback on their designs.
There will be more talks by members of the OakTable network during the lunch times. These will be shorter than the Sunday talks and again there will be no powerpoint.
You will have the opportunity to get hands-on experience building an Oracle RAC database using virtual machines on your own laptop with help from the experts from the IOUG RAC SIG and Pythian.
In addition to all of this there will be roundtable discussions, master classes and hands on labs.
You may have noticed that I haven’t talked about the actual streams that are running over the 3 days of the conference. There is so much going on at this conference that you will learn so much your boss will be sending you back next year. This conference is the most cost effective training you will ever receive.
I better get packing for a busy few days of learning, networking and having fun at the same time.
I’m going to make another blog post on what what my plans are for the conference, what presentations I will be going to, what events, etc.
Oh and don’t forget my advice in the latest Oracle Scene online or have a read of your free copy if you are attending the conference.
Oh I forgot to mention the social event. Tut Tut. There are lots of social and network events too so when you are finished with the presentations for a day, you can enjoy a free drink.
Update on : Adding numbers between
Over the past few days I’ve had a number of emails and comments based on my previous post. My previous post was called ‘Adding numbers between two values’. I included some PL/SQL code that can be used to add up the numbers between two values. I mentioned that this was a question that my pre-teen son (a few year pre-teen) had asked me.
There are two main solutions to the same problem. One involves just using a SELECT and the other involves using recursion. I will come back the these alternative solutions below.
But let me start off with a bit more detail and background to why I approached the problem the way that I did. The main reason is that my son is a pre-teen. Over the past couple of years he as expressed an interest in what his daddy does. We even have matching ORACLENERD t-shirts 
When I was working through the problem with my son I wanted to show him how to take a problem and by breaking it down into its different parts we can work out an overall solution. We can then take each of these parts and translate them into code. In this case some PL/SQL, yes it is a bit nerdy and we do have the t-shirt. The code that I gave illustrates many different parts of the language and hopefully he will use some of these features as we continue on our learning experience.
It is good sometimes to break a problem down into smaller parts. That way we can understand it better, what works and what does not work, if something does not work then we will know what bit and also leads to easier maintenance. At a later point as you develop an in-depth knowledge of certain features of a language you can then rewrite what you have to be more efficient.
All part of the learning experience.
Ok lets take a look at the other ways to answer this problem. The first approach is to just use a single SELECT statement.
SELECT sum(rownum + &&Start_Number – 1)
FROM dual
CONNECT by level <= &End_Number – &&Start_Number + 1;
An even simpler way is
SELECT sum(level)
FROM dual
CONNECT BY level between &Start_Number and &End_Number;
These queries create a hierarchical query that produce all the numbers between the Start_Number parameter and the End_Number parameter. The SUM is needed to all all the numbers/rows produced. This is nice and simple (but not that easy for by son at this point).
Thank you to everyone who contacted me about this. I really appreciated your feedback and please keep your comments coming for all my posts.
Events for Oracle Users in Ireland-November 2012
November (2012) is going to be a busy month for Oracle users in Ireland. There is a mixture of Oracle User Group events, with Oracle Day and the OTN Developer Days. To round off the year we have the UKOUG Conference during the first week in December.
Here are the dates and web links for each event.
Oracle User Group
The BI & EPM SIG will be having their next meeting on the Tuesday 20th November. This is almost a full day event, with presentations from End Users, Partners and Oracle product management. The main focus of the day will be on EPM, but will also be of interest to BI people.
As with all SIG meetings, this SIG will be held in the Oracle office in East Point (Block H). Things kick off at 9am and are due to finish around 4pm with plenty of tea/coffee and a free lunch too.
Remember to follow OUG Ireland on twitter using #oug_ire
Oracle Day
Oracle will be having their Oracle Day 2012, on Thursday 15th, in Croke Park. Here is some of the blurb about the event, “…to learn how Oracle simplifies IT, whether it’s by engineering hardware and software to work together or making new technologies work for the modern enterprise. Sessions and keynotes feature an elite roster of Oracle solutions experts, partners and business associates, as well as fascinating user case studies and live demos.”
This is a full day event from 9am to 5pm with 3 parallel streams focusing on Big Data, Enterprise Applications and the Cloud.
Click here to register for this event.
Click here for the full details and agenda.
OTN Developer Days
Oracle run their developer days about 3 times a year in Dublin. These events are run like a Hands-on Lab. So most of the work during the day is by yourself. You are provided with a workbook, a laptop and a virtual machine configured for the hands-on lab. This November we have the following developers days in the Oracle office in East Point, Dublin.
Tuesday 27th November (9:45-15:00) : Real Application Testing
Wednesday 28th November (9:00-14:00) : Partitioning/Advanced Compression
Thursday 29th November (9:15-13:30) : Database Security
Friday 30th November (9:45-16:00) : Business Process Management Using BPM Suite 11g
As you can see we have almost a full week of FREE training from Oracle. So there is no reason not to sign up for these days.
UKOUG Conference – in Birmingham
In December we have the annual UKOUG Conference. This is the largest Oracle User Group conference in Europe and the largest outside of the USA. At this conference you will have some of the main speakers and presentations from Oracle Open World, along with a range of speakers from all over the work.
In keeping with previous years there will be the OakTable Sunday and new this year there will be a Middleware Sunday. You need to register separately for these events. Here are the links
The main conference kicks off on the Monday morning with a very full agenda for Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. There are a number of social events on the Monday and Tuesday, so come well rested.
On the Monday evening there is the focus pubs. This year it seems to have an Irish Pub theme. At the focus pub event there will be table for each of the user group SIGs.
Come and join me at the Ireland table on the Monday evening.
The full agenda in now live and you can get all the details here.
I will be giving a presentation on the Tuesday afternoon titled Getting Real Business Value from Predictive Analytics (OBIEE and Oracle Data Mining). This is a joint presentation with Antony Heljula of Peak Indicators.
Oracle Scene (Autumn 2012) now available
The Autumn 2012 edition of Oracle Magazine (I’m the deputy editor) is now available online. Like in other editions recently there is a bumper online edition.
Here is the marketing release with the details of the contents.
Welcome to Issue 48 of Oracle Scene
In this digital edition find out why you should attend this year’s UKOUG conference – Brendan Tierney tells us why he has been attending since 1998. Read about one organisation’s success story from System Integration to Employee Self-Service, what the new release of Oracle BI Applications 11g has to offer and how it has been improved. Find out about training opportunities in the fastest-changing profession in the world, and Tim Poynter sheds some light on UPK Professional. Plus, Jonathan Lewis outlines how to apply a new strategy for Star Transformation.
Click here to view the digital edition
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The articles in this edition: Discuss the essential ingredient of Oracle Gold Partner, Prōject, transformation Explore the ABC of ADF and why it may matter to you Look at Oracle Fusion Middleware and summarise the most common products Explore solutions for space management of database and file system Outline optimal Oracle configuration for efficient table scanning |
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And there’s more… How to raise a Service Request with Oracle Support for Exadata Introduction to Data Vault Modeling Next Generation Service Patterns using Oracle Fusion Middleware HR Platform – the changes and how to implement it successfully Winners of the UKOUG 2012 Partner of the Year Awards We hope you enjoy a good read. |
The deadline for submitting an article for the Spring 2013 edition will be in early January.
Many thanks to Brigit Wells and the other member of the UKOUG office who have worked on getting this edition and every edition out to print and online. Also a thank you to Geoff Swaffer who is the editor, and myself who is the deputy editor 
Extracting the rules from an ODM Decision Tree model
One of the most interesting of important aspects of a Decision Model is that we as a user can get to see what rules the machine learning algorithm has generated for our data.
I’ve give a number of examples in various blog posts over the past few years on how to generate a number of classification models. An example of the workflow is below.
In the Class Build node we get four models being generated. These include a Generalised Linear Model, Support Vector Machine, Naive Bayes and a Decision Tree model.
We can explore the Decision Tree model by right clicking on the Class Build Node, selecting View Models and then the Decision Tree model, which will be labelled with a ‘DT’ in the name.
As we explore the nodes and branches of the Decision Tree we can see the rule that was generated for a node in the lower pane of the applications. So by clicking on each node we get a different rule appearing in this pane
Sometimes there is a need to extract this rules so that they can be presented to a number of different types of users, to explain to them what is going on.
How can we extract the Decision Tree rules?
To do this, you will need to complete the following steps:
- From the Models section of the Component Palette select the Model Details node.
- Click on the Workflow pane and the Model Details node will be created
- Connect the Class Build node to the Model Details node. To do this right click on the Class Build node and select Connect. Then move the mouse to the Model Details node and click. The two nodes should now be connected.
- Edit the Model Details node, uncheck the Auto Settings, select Model Type to be Decision Tree, Output to be Full Tree and all the columns.
- Run the Model Details node. Right click on the node and select run. When complete you you will have the little green box with a tick mark, on the top right hand corner.
- To view the details produced, right click on the Model Details node and select View Data
- The rules for each node will now be displayed. You will need to scroll to the right of this pane to get to the rules and you will need to expand the columns for the rules to see the full details
Scott/Tiger in Oracle
Almost everyone starting out with Oracle have come across the schema SCOTT.
So who was SCOTT?
Bruce Scott was employee number 4 at Oracle back in the 1970s and was part of the team responsible for architecting and writing version 1, 2 and 3 of the Oracle Database.
So he set up the first schema for testing and demo-ing how to use SQL in the Oracle Database. The EMP and DEPT tables and the data that we still see in this schema is still based on the original data that he created.
How did he come up with the TIGER password ? Tiger was the name of his cat!!!
Sten Vesterli of Scott/Tiger Group
Bruce co-founded Gupta Technology (now known as Centura Software) in 1984 with Umang Gupta, and later became CEO and founder of PointBase, Inc.
Oralytics 
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