Scott Spendolini's Blog

I can't believe that another year has gone by already!  It's time to head out to San Francisco and spend a week with 40,000 other Oracle developers, DBA, managers, vendors and all of the people who work hard behind the scenes to make it all happen! All of the Sumneva folks will be busy this year, too, as we have quite an aggressive presentation schedule.  You can have a look at it here - we did update some of the Unconference times & locations. From the sounds of all of the Oracle Ace Directors , it seems like there will be many interesting announcements over the next few days. And if you will be in San Francisco, don't forget about the APEX meetup on Tuesday evening.

Just posted a new Tip over on sumneva.com that deals with quickly creating a package that can manage all DML transactions against a table or tables. I came across this feature in the days of APEX 4.0 EA1.  I immediately thought that it was a new APEX 4.0 feature - until I checked 3.2, and it was there too.  Basically, this allows you to easily create a table API which can be used to replace the built-in APEX DML processes. Why would you do this? If you wanted to create a more secure architecture, you may want to have a tableless schema - thus, the built in processes will do you little good.  This API can live in a separate schema, and facilitate all DML calls used to manage your data. Since it's in a PL/SQL package, you can easily add additional security or data integrity checks before performing any of the DML transactions - another major reason to consider this approach.

Looks like Mark Hurd's unemployment stint is coming to a close, as it was announced that he would be joining Oracle this past weekend.  He will be replacing Charles Philips, who has since resigned his position.  It seems that Phillips had been looking to leave for some time , but had decided to stay through the Sun acquisition. Sure, there was a lot of controversy surrounding his departure, but even HP itself concluded that it could find no hard evidence of wrongdoing.  And as for the falsified expense reports, I think that Larry Ellison summed it up quite simply when he said that no CEO fills out his own expense reports, so if there was fraud, it was done by someone else. All issues aside, this move seems to put Oracle on a path to go squarely after IBM, as no doubt that Hurd won't be the last ex-HP employee making the switch to Oracle in the next few months.   Hurd's experience in hardware is something that Oracle needed in order to parlay the Sun hardware acquired in the