Skip to main content

NATCAP OUG Reboot

NATCAP OUG - or the National Capitol Region Oracle Users Group - has a long history of providing Oracle-related content to those in the DC metro area.  I remember presenting there back in my Oracle days (early 2000's) on multiple occasions.

Over the last few months, a few of us have been trying to resurrect this group, as there are likely more Oracle developers & DBAs in the DC area than any other area in the US, perhaps even the world!  This region has long been underserved, and we hope to change that.

We have had a couple of meeting at Oracle's campus in Reston, and attendance has been, well, not where we need it to be.  So, if you're in the DC area, please consider joining this group.  It's free, and our goal is to have quarterly meetings where both experienced presenters and NATCAP members alike provide the content.

If interested, please sign up on the NATCAP website here: http://natcapoug.org

Let's grow this group and give the DC metro area the user group it so badly needs!

Comments

John Flack said…
Before NATCAPOUG, the Washington DC area hosted the Mid-Atlantic Association of Oracle Professionals (MAOP), which was very active in the '80s and '90s. MAOP covered VA, MD, DC, DE and eastern PA, including some smaller local groups like the Virginia Oracle User Group, which still exists. MAOP was one of the user groups behind the original East Coast Oracle Conferences of 1991-2000, not to be confused with the more recent conferences under the same name. I was active with MAOP's DBA SIG, which met monthly first in Oracle's Bethesda office, then in a few other places, including Oracle Reston.

Unfortunately, when more and more user information, blogs and such became available on the WWW, and when the senior leaders retired or left, with nobody willing to take on the mantle of leadership, MAOP quietly died. A few of us tried to revive MAOP a few years ago and even held a one-day conference at Oracle Reston. The conference attracted about 100 people, but still not enough interest to keep it going.

It was a nice meeting on Tuesday. Glad to see you there. If enough people WANT a local user group for the Metropolitan DC area, I'm certainly interested in helping. But I'm not hopeful.
March 9, 2017 at 9:10 AM
Scott said…
I was also part of MAOP for a while, too - even did the keynote @ GWU back in 2003 or so. It's always been a challenge in this region to keep a user group going, and I think a lot of it has to do with time (or lack of) and location. That's something that we're considering, as for some people, Reston may as well be on the other side of the country. Ideally, we can move the meetings around, and hold them in different locations (Tysons, DC, Bethesda, etc), but that requires space, which usually requires money, of which we have literally none.

For the short term, Oracle has offered their conference room, so the next few may just have to be in Reston until we can find another venue that is either free or a sponsor that's willing to help out.

Would love to have you on board, John!
March 9, 2017 at 9:14 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Custom Export to CSV

It's been a while since I've updated my blog. I've been quite busy lately, and just have not had the time that I used to. We're expecting our 1st child in just a few short weeks now, so most of my free time has been spent learning Lamaze breathing, making the weekly run to Babies R Us, and relocating my office from the larger room upstairs to the smaller one downstairs - which I do happen to like MUCH more than I had anticipated. I have everything I need within a short walk - a bathroom, beer fridge, and 52" HD TV. I only need to go upstairs to eat and sleep now, but alas, this will all change soon... Recently, I was asked if you could change the way Export to CSV in ApEx works. The short answer is, of course, no. But it's not too difficult to "roll your own" CSV export procedure. Why would you want to do this? Well, the customer's requirement was to manipulate some data when the Export link was clicked, and then export it to CSV in a forma
76 comments
Read more

Refreshing PL/SQL Regions in APEX

If you've been using APEX long enough, you've probably used a PL/SQL Region to render some sort of HTML that the APEX built-in components simply can't handle. Perhaps a complex chart or region that has a lot of custom content and/or layout. While best practices may be to use an APEX component, or if not, build a plugin, we all know that sometimes reality doesn't give us that kind of time or flexibility. While the PL/SQL Region is quite powerful, it still lacks a key feature: the ability to be refreshed by a Dynamic Action. This is true even in APEX 5. Fortunately, there's a simple workaround that only requires a small change to your code: change your procedure to a function and call it from a Classic Report region. In changing your procedure to a function, you'll likely only need to make one type of change: converting and htp.prn calls to instead populate and return a variable at the end of the function. Most, if not all of the rest of the code can rem
5 comments
Read more

Manipulating Images with the... Database?

A recent thread on the OTN HTML DB Forum asked about how to determine the width & height of an image stored as a BLOB in an Oracle table. I mentioned in that thread that I have some code to manipulate an image stored in a BLOB column. This is particularly useful if you’re going to let users upload images, and you want to re-size them to display as a thumbnail. Thanks to Oracle interMedia , it is trivial to manipulate the width, height, and other attributes of images stored in an Oracle table. I’ve created a sample application here which demonstrates Oracle interMedia and HTML DB in action. Feel free to have a look. You can download this application from HTML DB Studio as well. Basically, this application allows you to upload images and perform an operation on the image as it is inserted into the PHOTO_CATALOG table. There are two places where some PL/SQL code is required: an After Submit process on page 2, and a procedure to display the images. Here is the PL/SQL for the After
33 comments
Read more