August 2014 - TH TECHNOLOGYTH TECHNOLOGY

The ODTUG Technical Journal Corner currently spotlights our 2014 Editor’s Choice Award winning article NoSQL and Big Data for the Oracle Professional by Iggy Fernandez.

Find it odd that the ODTUG Editor’s Choice Award Winner focuses on NoSQL? Not really – NoSQL and relational database can coexist. If you haven’t paid attention to NoSQL yet, this article is an excellent read to learn how NoSQL and the relational model can actually complement each other. In Iggy’s words:

“…I claim that the NoSQL camp derides the relational model because it does not sufficiently understand it. I will go so far as to claim that the NoSQL camp does not fully understand its own innovations; it believes they are incompatible with the relational model and it therefore does not see the opportunity to strengthen the relational model, …”

Strong words? Iggy fully makes his case – he thoroughly supports this assertion in one of the best NoSQL vs Relation Database articles I have seen.

To access the full article, as all ODTUG Technical Journal Corner articles, you must be at least an Associate ODTUG Member (Free). And that gives you access to all Technical Journal content, plus all ODTUG Communities content. Check it out – there is lots there to absorb.

Watch here and the ODTUG Technical Journal Corner for another perspective on NoSQL and Oracle technology from PL/SQL Evangelist Steven Feuerstein, coming soon.

The ODTUG website in general contains material from all our past conferences, plus years of excellent material from our expert columnists in Business Intelligence, PL/SQL, Oracle Tools, Fusion MIddleware, Hyperion, Essbase and more. Watch for new authors Kevin McGinley on Business Intelligence topics, and a series of material from the Oracle Tools team.

Never ever suffer from Low T – stop by ODTUG.com and the Technical Journal Corner for a quick T-fix. For a bigger T boost, submit your article (or article ideas) to the ODTUG Technical Journal Corner – email kcannell@odtug.com for more info.

This presentation covers the Good, the Bad and the Ugly of APEX 5.0 Interactive Reports. In short, the good news is APEX 5.0 brings us multiple IR’s on a single page, plus some other enhancements like improved Group By and Pivot.

The Bad is, to do this, the APEX Team changed the guts – CSS and JavaScript / jQuery – so anything you may have built previously that does not use the standard APEX APIs will need to be refactored. Fortunately, I found the mapping between the old and the new quite easy to follow. While the changes are tedious to make and test, I was fairly quickly able to get my customized IRs back in working order on APEX 5.0.

The Ugly remains the default look and feel, and WYSIWYG printing options. In APEX 5.0 Theme Option will make applying consistent styles easier – all told less work to make you IRs match the rest of your application. As for WYSIWYG PDF output, so far there are no advances here. The best option I have found is to capture the as-is IR query (different APEX_IR_QUERY solutions for APEX 4.1 vs APEX 4.2, and again for APEX 5.0 – improvements each version) combined with a function that returns a table in the Report Query, combined with a custom Report Layout. One could use the generic layout, but since this does not allow for varying column widths or highlighting and other conditional formatting, for my case I needed a customized XLS-FO template. No worries, I found once I built the first few the process gets easier. I also used a generator for the first pass – a time-saver – then customized. That is a topic for it’s own post on another day. Any way you slice it, PDF output beyond the default generic for IRs is time-consuming and tedious.

See the full presentation here:

APEX 5 Interactive Reports: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: kcannell.GoodBadAPEXIR.presentation