Storing Images in the Database, the Scottish User Group and Mod PL/SQL

Yesterday I had an earlier than usual start. I was off to Scotland for the Scottish User Group SIG and had planned to fly up and back in the day. This is easy. The early bit is because I have a mutt (said mutt) and I take him for a walk every day, rain or snow. I am also pretty determined not to short change him, so yesterday we did our regular 50 mins starting at 5am. Now I realise for many of you that this is not a big deal, but it's earlier than my regular start. It was incredibly beautiful out and I'd recommend it to you all. But I digress - the Scottish OUG...

This was my first venture up to North for a SIG, and I was very impressed. They ran two streams, BI and Development, and had a nice attendance. The only snag was the very fine weather. When it's that good, the attendance can peter off as the day progresses. If you live in one of those places in the world where every day provides clear blue skies, you might have no understanding of this. But if you come from a spot where recognising the sun is not always easy, then you'll know what I mean!

I was impressed by the both the variety of talks, the variety of topics covered and that they weren't all Oracle presenters. More recently, Oracle speakers have dominated the SIGs I have attended. As these are Oracle USER Groups, I find it refreshing to hear user experiences and input. When I pointed this out to Thomas Presslie, one of the SIG chairs, he said it was actually unusual to have as many as 2 Oracle presenters at one event, as he avoids this as a rule. Grant Ronald spoke about JDeveloper and ADF and I did a SQL Developer

One of the more refreshing talks I'd been to in a while was by Marcel Kratochvil, from Australia. He is in Scotland doing some work locally and Thomas persuaded him to come along. He works for Piction in Australia. Marcel doesn't have a blog, but there is this article on OTN about storing images on the database. Their area is multimedia and they help companies with content and managing their digital resources. They use Oracle, mod_pl/sql and hence PL/SQL, because it's fast, scalable (up and down...) and he can use the power of the Oracle database. He threw a lot of curve balls into the group, asking questions that maybe people have stopped thinking about. I can't write out his whole talk, but like Tom Kyte, he seems to have a "question everything" philosophy. I like that. We can slip into taking things at face value too quickly. I am not suggesting cynical, I suggesting thinking about what's been proposed, before just accepting, regardless of the 'authority' proposing it.

I was also impressed with the piece of news that they use mod_pl/sql and he repeated, "PL/SQL is FAST" (read with Aussie accent) a number of times. I used to love that technology when I worked with it. One of the first courses I wrote many years back, after "Oracle Designer New Features", was the Web Server Generator course (or WSG as it is/was affectionately called). We generated PL/SQL, used owa and htp etc and of course mod_pl/sql. Very performant. Of course this is the architecture for Application Express (HTMLDB) and you may know that many Oracle sites (See Apex Studio and Apex References), are built using this technology. I know, from past experience that many, many companies out there have used this technology, very successfully. Many are hand coded, i.e. not using Application Express or Generating from Designer. It was refreshing to see there are still folk out there, very happy with this technology.

It was quite fitting then this morning to see Pete Finnigan's blog picking up on Laurent's article on mod_pl/sql. While Laurent talks of how easy it is to get started, Pete is a security man, so you should think about them both. This had me do a little search and Roland Bouman does a piece on setting yourself up on XE. So now you have enough links to get lost in the web for at least a morning!

Of course, sitting behind all of this PL/SQL stuff, is the need for a nice little tool to help you edit and debug and review... so do download SQL Developer and give it a go. When I talk about SQL Developer, I end up demonstrating a lot of the functionality and as with any product, there are things I do, that others are not aware of. So not only did that part of the audience who've not yet ventured into using the product say they would be downloading it now, but those who are using it found a few more features.

Go on - give it a go -

I'd like to hear from you.