Nominations are open for the ODTUG Innovation Award 2019 – again, I ask you, our ODTUG members – to show us, let us know about the WOW! things you discovered – or built yourself – in the past year. To nominate for this year, read more here: https://www.odtug.com/p/bl/et/blogaid=882&source=1
To get you revved up, consider last year’s winner, Stewart Bryson of Red Pill Analytics for his product Checkmate. An awesome tool – full product, a full IDE really – to control and automate your Oracle Analytics development and lifecycle. Read more about Check Mate here – http://redpillanalytics.com/checkmate/
Explore Checkmate to facilitate your Oracle Analytics development – and remember to give Stewart Bryson a hand when you next see him.
Now back to this year’s Innovation Award:
To make a nomination for the award, you must be an ODTUG member (Associate or Full). If you are not a member, join now.
Nomination Criteria
Nominees may be individuals or teams.
Nominees do not need to be ODTUG members, but they must work with a tool that supports at least one of our communities (Analytics, APEX, Database, and EPM).
Open-source and/or collaborative efforts are eligible.
Nomination Deadline
Nominations open: Tuesday, April 23, 2019.
Nominations close: Monday, May 13, 2019 11:59 p.m. EDT.
A recent upload to APEX 18.2 meant a need to revisit our Data Load application, as we expect because we have customized the out-of-the-box Data Upload pages to meet our requirements. (Our customization: Load XLS and XLSX files, do our own set of validations/transforms with logging – read more about our Data Load Customization here )
no data found
This upgrade the showstopper was a “no data found” error on Next from the column mapping page. This customized data load applicaiton that has been working for years – since the first version w the DL wizard – 4.2? With 5.1 we adjusted for a new element and all was fine. With the upgrade to APEX 18.2, the no data found error was a dead end. So I started digging …
Turns out it is indeed a bug – given a Data Load Definition with 3 unique columns, and, upload data set does not include the 3rd unique column OR one sets that 3rd unique column to Do Not Load, one gets a quick “no data found” error. I suspect there may be variations of this, but this was our case.
Skip Validations
The workaround, for me, is to use the new (perhaps it was there before and I missed it, or did not need it? ) Skip Validations setting on the Data Load Definition, By default this is No. Setting Skip Validations to Yes, all loads OK.
I do not have any transforms or checks on this data load definition – those happen as part of our customization to the DL pages – so Skip Validations works just fine for me.
Skip Validations causes the DL Wizard to NOT perform any defined transforms or lookups. So clearly this workaround is not for everyone. Your mileage may vary. Try it to find out.
Another option, if Skip Validations needs to be No for you – that is, you have defined transforms and/or lookups that need to be done on data load – is to use the DL Wizard to load data to a staging table, then add a custom PL/SQL process to load data from the staging table into the real table. Not ideal, but gets the data in, the main goal.
A request to the Oracle APEX team : Please update the DL Wizard to accept true XLS or XLSX files, much like SQL Developer allows. Maybe the SQL Dev team will share their packages :). This would be a nice addition. When you have free spare time … Thank you!
Show Advanced Option
Another new option in the Data Load pages – new to me, at least, is the Show Advanced Options checkbox. The shows/hides the Use Application Date Format and Use Custom Date Formats options. If you do not have any date columns, or all incoming data is already formatted properly, you can use the default of Use Application Date Format (and make sure one is set!). If you have no date columns, no worries
