Collaborate 08 - Tuesday

On Tuesday there were less APEX sessions.

The first session of the day was “Application Express Best Practices” by John Scott.
We already gave this presentation at our European APEX Training days (site no longer online), so it was not completely new for me. Nevertheless John changed quite a bit in the presentation. - Edit -
One of Johns best presentations is “Debugging in APEX”, but this presentation must come close…

For my next session I went to Steven Feuerstein talk about “Collect Yourself: Optimize PL/SQL Code with Collections”.
I always enjoy presentations by Steven, but this time he talked really fast! He tried to fit in 1 hour a 2 hour session ;-) I believe collections are very underutilized in a lot of development projects. Maybe you don’t know collections, but have heard of PL/SQL tables, which is the old naming. Click on the link for more information about PL/SQL Collections.

In the afternoon I went to David Scott’s “Using External Tables with Application Express”.
He talked about his data warehouse environment and how external tables helped him to load and display data. As a starting point he used the packaged application which he changed for his needs.

At 6 PM we had the APEX SIG meeting. At the same moment there were free “shots” (drinks) served in the Exhibition Hall. There was also a little mess-up with the agenda, so there weren’t that many people for our meeting. But having said that, we had a lively discussion for over an hour!

The people in the room could ask any (APEX) question to the panel. My panel existed out of:
- Tony Jedlinski, Director of Konoso and Apex Developer of the year 2005
- John Scott, my partner and co-founder of Apex Evangelists (site no longer online) and Apex Developer of the year 2006
- Doug Gault, Director of Product Development (R&D) at Hotsos and a very knowledgeble person
- David Peake, Product Manager of Application Express at Oracle

There were a lot of interesting questions and comments, especially David Peake gave some nice insights in the future of APEX. I’ll do another post dedicated to it as I think there were some important messages and insights in the future of APEX.

After the meeting a nice guy called Michael stopped us for some questions and to have a picture with him. Apparently he did a bet or a challenge at his company to get a picture taken with John and me and appear on the blog. So here you go Michael, the picture…

After the SIG meeting we went to the Rock Bottom bar/restaurant to have some food, drinks and fun. On the picture from left to right: John Scott, myself, David Peake, Doug Gault and Tony Jedlinski.

I already said, in the States everything is big, but that pie… was huge!

Thanks guys! It was a fun night, but I had to leverage what I did as on Wednesday I have my presentation!