This will not be of interest to most of my readers, but one person did ask.
This is just to document how my system (which was built quite a few years ago) handles credit card payments via Westpac’s payment gateway, PayWay. The interface is rather dated and the way my system uses it is a bit hackish (in other words, this is not best practice!) but for what it’s worth:
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If you can get yourself to Perth in November, you must try to get to AUSOUG Connect. Here is my “Must See” list based on the current program (subject to change):
Monday 7 Nov
Tuesday 8 Nov
Lots of APEX goodies, a new (to me, at least) database IDE, plus plenty of solid Oracle database content – there’ll probably be a few conflicts leading to some decisions to make on the day.
I’m looking forward to a long-awaited return of the AUSOUG conference series – I hope to see you all there.
What a great conference – there’s been a lot of praise for the organisers and all the speakers. I haven’t missed a conference since I started 15 years ago, and I hope it keeps going (in one form or another) for a long time to come.
This year I attended the following sessions (some titles changed for effect):
Björn Rost – 12c for DBAs and Developers; FDA (time to drop those journal triggers)
Scott Wesley – CSS & JQuery hands-on lab; 5 Security & Performance Techniques
Branka Njegich & Craig Purser – a Case Study about building a very slick Tablet app in Apex
Martin Power – how to recover from data block corruption (where I realised it’s about time I learned this “rman” thing)
Connor McDonald – 12c for Developers in only 1,000,000 slides
Penny Cookson – OHarmony (or, how to find a tall, dark DBA…)
Tim Hall – Performance Mistakes; PL/SQL Function Call Performance
Gavin Soorma – How to Migrate your Data to 12c
If you are interested, you can review the slides from my presentation here: Building Maintainable Applications in Apex. Whether or not you agree with all my points, I hope it at least makes you think 🙂
It’s that wonderful time of year again – no, not talking about springtime, when I’m stalked by airborne grass pollens causing me to choke and gag all day. The sound of a lawnmower is enough to elicit a sneezing fit – and in Aussie springtime, that’s most weekends. (I’m so glad my wife does the mowing at our place, usually while I’m at work. My son is now old enough to do the mowing – and I’m quite happy to pay him to do it, I can tell you!)
The “wonderful time of year” I referred to earlier is that time when the excitement of OpenWorld has petered a bit and AUSOUG have released the program for Perth’s excellent conference.
I’ll be presenting a talk about Building Maintainable Applications in Apex, which I sincerely hope will be a lot more interesting than the title sounds. (It’s funny how you think after rejecting several competing wordings, the title you finally settle on is perfect when you submit the abstract – but when you see it alongside the other gems on the program you think “surely I could have come up with a more interesting title?”. Oh well.)
I’ll be talking about why you should remove most of the business logic from your Apex application – or at least consider it. I won’t promise it will necessarily be earth-shattering or original. I think there’s some ideas here that are worth spreading around – get people thinking, talking and writing about. Most of the talk will be in reference to a recent greenfields project, but the ideas are ones I’ve picked up over the years at different locations and from other Oracle developers – bits that I find work well or seem worthwhile expanding on.
If that topic doesn’t grab you, you might be interested in hearing Tim Hall talk about virtualization. If I wasn’t speaking at the time I would have attended that one – so if you do, could you make sure to take a few notes for me? Thanks.
I hope to see you there. But – fake flowers only please.
WA Conference Program
Scott Wesley has started an excellent series of posts exploring the Early Adopter release of APEX 5.0 [apexea.oracle.com].
I’m excited about the changes in 5.0 but have been too busy both at work and at home to look into it personally – so for now reading other people’s reviews has had to suffice. I’m looking forward to hopefully hearing more about it at AUSOUG later this year.
My advice is, have a look and give it a go sometime. In other words, do as I say, not as I do 🙂
AUSOUG is holding a series of conferences this year right across the country – starting in Sydney on 15-16 August, touring the other major city centres, and ending in Perth on 12-13 November.
The Perth program is still being finalized but the lineup is looking good. You can see the current list here: http://www.ausoug.org.au/insync13/insync13-perth-program.html
I’ll be talking about Oracle Virtual Private Database or RLS and its use in APEX applications. I’ve made good use of this technology in a recent project which is now live and I’m looking forward to presenting what I’ve learned. Abstract
Make sure you register soon – pre-registrations close soon for some locations.
UPDATE: The Perth program is now published: INSYNC13_Program_Perth.pdf
UPDATE 2: The slide deck if you’re interested can be seen here.
If you’re interested in my presentation on the Function Result Cache, it’s now available from my presentations page. It was given this morning at Oracle’s offices in Perth to the local AUSOUG branch and seemed to go down well and I got some good feedback. It was only a little overshadowed by all the hoopla over the release of 12c 🙂
If you’re in Perth on Wednesday the 26th, come for breakfast at the Oracle offices and hear me talk about my experiences with the PL/SQL Function Result Cache.
More details here: www.ausoug.org.au/cms/rest/event/1936
The Australian Oracle User Group is holding the Oracle with 20:20 Foresight National Conference in Perth, 29-30 October. Yikes, that’s only 3 weeks away – if you’re in Perth, you have to sign up right now. If you’re not in Perth, grab your skateboard or canoe (depending on the intervening terrain) and get over here!
We’re going to be treated with talks by Tom Kyte, Connor McDonald, Chris Muir, Scott Wesley, Graham Wood and many others. Check out the conference program to see what’s on offer. A lot of the topics seem to be very Mobile and Cloudy…
I’ll be presenting twice, if you’re interested I’d love to see you there:
1. Alexandria – A Guided Tour – an overview of just a few of the goodies that you’ll find in the Alexandria PL/SQL Library, and how you can use them out-of-the-box to do things that you might have thought could not be done in PL/SQL.
2. Top 20 Gotchas with Old Database Versions – most probably you’ll be working with Oracle 10g or 11g nowadays – but sometimes you don’t have a choice but to deal with older versions like 8i or 9i. If so you may very well pick up a few hints and tips that will save you time and headaches.
If you missed out on that “open world” conference, you’ll have to come and hear about the new features planned for Oracle 12c. Even if you did manage to get to that big conference, you’ll want to come to this one as well, not least because it’s in beautiful sunny Perth 🙂
EDIT: Slide decks and demo scripts for the presentations are available from here: http://jeffkemponoracle.com/presentations/
In Perth this morning, at a breakfast courtesy of the local AUSOUG, I spoke about using the Alexandria PL/SQL Library to automate various tasks with Amazon’s Simple Storage (S3) service. If you haven’t used Amazon Web Services before, or haven’t looked at Alexandria yet, and you enjoy discovering new capabilities with PL/SQL I think you’ll find this interesting.
The powerpoint slides and demo script are now available on my Presentations page.
In late October I’ll be speaking at the 20:20 Foresight Perth Conference – more details later.