Monthly Archives: September 2013

Art of the Conference Session

22 Sunday Sep 2013

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I am fortunate enough to work for a company who is prepared to fly its staff across the Atlantic to attend a conference – which means I’m at one of the biggest (maybe the biggest) IT conference in the world – Oracle Open World.

Day 1 is a bit of a precursor with all the sessions being driven by various user groups. With about 30 sessions running at anyone time today it’s a job just to work out which sessions to attend.

This gives me my 1st observation of the day – if session is a panel based then say in the title. I attended one session that was meant to cover the development ecosystem, with the expectation of either getting a better handle on tooling around development of things like PL/SQL or perhaps the adoption of more contemporary tooling such as Maven or Git. What happened we heard was a conversation between a couple of panelists which really left me thinking that a lot of Oracle development is still in the dark ages technically, didn’t really appreciate what Agile says about documentation and the world was either agile or waterfall – the fact that Oracle Unified Methodology (OUM) is a derivative of the iterative RUP model.

The second observation is, tell me something don’t just throw facts at me with just slides full of bullets, you won’t hold people’s attention. In fact one session resulted in people walking out in droves.

That said, we also saw some very good presentations, and in fact these tended to keep amount amount of slide content down, but there is a narrative, building and emphasising key points. The presenter spoke with an intonation that showed that they where presenting because it was a subject they cared about and wanted to share their understanding, not because they want kudos for appearing.

The last lesson, is declare whether slides etc will be made available, so you have people’s full attention, rather than them bashing at their mobile devices making unnecessary notes. Although this sounds counter intuitive to the previous point you can enrich the slides with notes, to support later slide review.

SQL Static Code analysis for MySQL

05 Thursday Sep 2013

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With MySQL now capable of features such as stored procedures and functions the need for tooling to support SQL code quality is greater than ever. A number of tools provide editors with syntax support and all the fancy features you’d expect from a modern IDE (see Toad as a leading product).

However the means to assess the quality of the procedures or scripts written for MySQL or the divergence from ISO standards doesn’t exist, although plenty of options exist for T-SQL (MS SQL Server), PL/SQL (Oracle) and even some tooling for DB2 and Informix.

The value of the static analysis tool means you can implement quality measures, controls and reporting through Continuous Integration tooling such as Jenkins, Sonar etc. All of which is a little ironic when you consider a lot of energy in CI (and Continuous Delivery appears to come from the open source community) which usually supports MySQL as one of the 1st options for databases.

Does this mean there is a gap in the market? Such capabilities dont seem to be in the MySQL WorkBench roadmap. Would love to know what people think?

Of course if you can support MySQL, then the offshoots such as MariaDB wouldn’t be too difficult.

The Waze Way

02 Monday Sep 2013

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I have recently been introduced to the Sat Nav app Waze with its social capabilities that users to update the maps with events such as traffic jams, accidents speed cameras and so on.

This weekend, we went away and as my wife has the family car, she tends to do the driving – great I can have a beer. But on the long motorway runs I get bored and nod off, much to my wife’s disatisfaction. So this time I elected to keep from nodding off by comparing my wife’s car built in Sat Nav (which has data feeds on accidents etc) and Waze with its social feed information and its routing algorithms.

In terms of routing – the car and Waze are as good as each other, Waze might even have a slight edge as when we had to divert to avoid an accident it took us around a town’s high street where as the car took straight through the middle of a town with its particularly slow traffic.

The car did at least give us earlier warning of events ahead on the route we where following, although Waze allowed us to get a better sense of the severity of the issue based on the number of traffic jam reports, how old they where and so on.

What really was amusing was as a passenger I could sit looking for problems and broken down vehicles etc etc to report and pickup points (given I told friends given I travel a lot more I’d have to outstrip them on the social scoring soon).

This got me to thinking, what stops something like Waze from being extended to keeping the children entertained with a ‘car bingo’ or ‘eye spy’ given that children could add information to Waze to allow additional information and it be shared in the same manner as the serious stuff.