UTOUG Recap – 2 Full Days of Education

Back in the office from Utah and catching up with various emails etc… We didn’t have a lot of time in Salt Lake City, but we tried to make the best of it. In addition to checking out the Bingham Canyon Mine, our hotel was right across from Temple Square. We strolled over there after the conference concluded on Thursday and was able to check out the grounds and the inside of the Tabernacle. Would have liked to have spent more time exploring, but needed to grab some dinner and head to the airport.

UTOUG runs a great show, not only did I get to present 2 sessions on DataZing and BI Publisher, I learned a great deal from their all star cast of presenters.

Tom Kyte gave us his top 11 features in the Oracle 11gR2 Database. One of the features was Edition Based Redefinition. This feature allows you to run multiple versions of your application at the same. This allows you to test, run user acceptance, etc… the new application while everyone else is running the old application. It also reduces downtime as you can switch users to the new application on the fly. Cool stuff… now, if we can get all of our customers to all upgrade to 11gR2, we’ll get this in the codebase! :>

Steven Feuerstein also gave a great presentation on High Performance PL/SQL. I’ve been able to catch Steven at a lot of the conferences, I always learn some new things. The amount of material he has available is amazing. A couple things I’d like to check out are his Quest CodeGen Utility and Quest Error Manager. I think that we could benefit from both!