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Oracle Database is the most powerful, flexible, relational database in the world. But it’s way more than “just” a database. Packed into Oracle Database are features designed to make it easier for developers (whether writing in PL/SQL or JavaScript) to build highly secure, high-performance, maintainable applications. The CodeTalk Series, co-sponsored by ODTUG and IOUG and provided by Oracle Developer Advocates, is in its third year. Look for CodeTalk each month to feature a webinar presentation, interview, or discussion among experts who have a mission to make the user community more aware of Oracle Database features and how best to use them.

Past Sessions:

The CodeTalk Series Webinars are Co-sponsored by ODTUG and IOUG.

REST Database Links: Access Oracle Databases in The Cloud Using ORDS, REST, and JSON

Chris Saxon, Oracle Corporation and Robert Marz, its people

This talk covers a real-world solution that recreates database links using ORDS, REST, and JSON. It breaks the limits of database links by loosely coupling two databases. The complexity is completely hidden from users and developers. Modern technologies such as REST and JSON offer elegant ways to couple databases without fixed dependencies. The protocol http(s) is able to surmount the corporate firewall and query databases in the cloud. A transparent layer made of table functions, views, and instead-of triggers can be placed over the connection.

This talk introduces REST, JSON, and ORDS very briefly. After the stage is set, we explore how to query auto-rest enabled tables from PL/SQL and process the JSON documents. Finally a view with an instead-of trigger is built that can be used by the application developers. A generator that produces all necessary objects will be shown. The generator can integrate into SQL Developer.

The presentation includes a live demo.

Practical Advice for Taking Your PL/SQL Testing to the Next Level

Steven Feuerstein, Oracle Corporation

Members of the utPLSQL community, including members of the utPLSQL dev team, will share their successes with introducing automated testing to their projects and moving their unit test suites into a continuous integration (CI) pipeline. They will use simple demonstrations and tips from real-world experiences to both inspire and motivate you to move your testing processes to a whole new level. 

Common Database Development Disasters

Connor McDonald, Oracle Corporation 

Developers are under increasing pressure to deliver solutions faster. So often they are encouraged to “just start coding,” and are not given time to stop and think about the best solution to a problem. In this session, I'll take a look at what the results of that can be—failure, delays, and poor performance in your database application implementations. We’ll look at the things done wrong over and over again and how to avoid making the same mistakes yourself. 

JSON and PL/SQL: A Match Made in Database

Steven Feuerstein, Oracle Corporation and Darryl Hurley, Implestrat

Darryl Hurley of Implestrat and Steven Feuerstein will follow up from their popular first JSON CodeTalk session in 2017 with a session focused on features added in Oracle Database 12c. Release 2 to support manipulation of JSON documents in PL/SQL. We'll also take any and all questions on working with JSON via SQL, support for which was added in Release 1. Want to make your UI developers happy? Then get really good at serving up JSON to them via a PL/SQL API! This CodeTalk session will help you get the expertise you need to do this.

Oracle Database Multilingual Engine: JavaScript IN the Database
Dan McGhan and Matthias Brantner,  Oracle Corporation

Oracle Database 12c Multilingual Engine (MLE) enables developers to work efficiently with DB-resident data in modern programming languages and development environments of their choice. Starting with JavaScript, MLE provides users with a way to run stored procedures and user-defined functions written in JavaScript or TypeScript.
Through various demonstrations, attendees will learn (1) how NPM modules can be deployed and executed inside the database and (2) how JavaScript stored procedures can be used to reduce network round-trips & data transfer.

JSON in the Oracle Database

Steven Feuerstein, Oracle Corporation and Darryl Hurley, Implestrat.com

Did you know that Oracle Database 12c makes it easy for you to store, manipulate, and serve up JSON documents? You certainly do NOT need to install a document store database side-by-side with Oracle Database when your UI developers start demanding JSON! Join Steven Feuerstein for an interview with and demonstrations by Darryl Hurley of Implestrat.com. Darryl, an active database developer and DBA for many years, has lately been diving into the JSON features of 12.1 and 12.2. Make sure you are positioned to have a smart conversation with the JavaScript developers in your company about how you can help meet their JSON needs.

Rapid Web Application Development in the Oracle Cloud

Blaine Carter and Kris Bhanushali, Oracle Corporation

Oracle is quickly ramping up its cloud services, and one of the things you will need to be able to do is combine multiple services to build your apps in the cloud. This immediately leads to questions of how to best manage application changes and deploy them to production in the cloud. In this CodeTalk webcast, Blaine Carter of the Developer Advocates team picks the brains of Kris Bhanushali, senior principal product manager, who will give a live demo showing how various cloud services come together to enable a developer to build enterprise-grade applications quickly with little external dependency. 

Ten Things About PL/SQL You Probably Don’t Know

Steven Feuerstein, Oracle Corporation, and Sven Weller, Syntegris Information Solutions GmbH 

Join Steven Feuerstein for an exploration with Sven Weller (@svenweller) into interesting, lesser-known aspects of PL/SQL. Sven’s been working with Oracle database technology for more than 15 years. He loves to do in-depth analysis of problems, and find new ways to tweak SQL and PL/SQL to come up with solutions. These days, he focuses on performance tuning and rapid application development with Application Express. 

Sven’s been working with Oracle database technology for more than 15 years. He loves to do in-depth analysis of problems, and find new ways to tweak SQL and PL/SQL to come up with solutions. These days, he focuses on performance tuning and rapid application development with Application Express.  He is also one of the owners and CEOs of Germany based "syntegris information solutions GmbH", a company that specializes in Oracle based consulting and development.

Six Reasons Why You Will Get Addicted to SQLcl Scripting

Robert Marz and Sabine Heimsath,  its-people GmbH, and Chris Saxon, Oracle Corporation

SQLcl is ready to replace the reliable but somewhat outdated SQL*Plus as the new command line interface of the database. The most exciting new feature of SQLcl is scripting: Batch scripts can now be written in languages such as JavaScript, Python, or Perl. This means a veritable cornucopia of options, many of which are not obvious at first sight. After a brief introduction to SQLcl, we will show many real-world examples that demonstrate the new possibilities. All examples are available for download to allow for further tests and exploration. This presentation provides many in-depth live demos.

A Guided Tour through the Universal Theme 

Dan McGhan and Shakeeb Rahman, Oracle Corporation

Over the years, the APEX team created and maintained dozens of application themes. This practice was simply unsustainable, especially when the choice between themes was often based on color alone. Enter Universal Theme (UT): the theme designed to supersede all the others. 

Universal Theme is a responsive theme with features such as Template Options and Theme Roller, which allow developers to customize the theme as needed. But how should one get started? In this CodeTalk, the man behind Universal Theme will tell you how! Attendees will receive a guided tour through the Universal Theme demo app and see a customization based on a logo done live. 

Unit Testing PL/SQL Code in the Real World

Steven Feuerstein, Oracle Corporation with Stefan Poschenrieder, Jacek Gebel and Pavel Kaplya

It’s been quite a while since Oracle Database developers could complain that there were no tools to help them automate the testing of PL/SQL program units. These days, you can choose from SQL Developer with its integrated unit testing, utPLSQL, an open source framework, Code Tester for Oracle, a commercial product from Quest Software, and more. In this CodeTalk, Steven hosts a conversation with three developers who have been heavily involved in establishment strong unit testing processes with their dev teams. Learn from their experiences, mistakes and lessons!  

Modern ETL with Node.js and Oracle Database

Dan McGhan, Oracle Corporation and "Soyuka", F.G.R. DS-RESTAURATION

In this CodeTalk, Dan McGhan will interview Soyuka, a software engineer and lead developer at F.G.R. DS-RESTAURATION. Soyuka will show how to build a modern, maintainable, real-time ETL. From asynchronous database polling to data extraction based on streams, we will study a real-life use-case with Oracle Database and Node.js. With the help of a well-known process manager, we will see how we can combine micro services to do so.  

Get Your Money's Worth Out of Your Database

Chris Saxon, Oracle Corporation and Patrick Barel, AMIS Services

Stop treating your database as a bit bucket and start using the advanced features available in the database. If you use the database to its full extent, you will not only see an increase in performance of your application, but also an increase of the productivity of the developers.

The database is one of the most important assets to your application. It is also one of the most expensive parts in your application. Most organizations don’t get the most out of their database license and treat it like a simple bit bucket. The modern Oracle database can do so much more than just store data. Features you can use ‘in the database’ include:

  • Flashback queries (what did my data look like at a certain moment in time)
  • Data Security (only read and write data you are authorized for)
  • Identity columns (12c)
  • Invisible columns (12c)

And many more, of which Chris and Patrick will cover as many as they can.

The PL/SQL Ninja: PL/SQL Can Do WHAT? 

Steven Feuerstein, Oracle Corporation interviews Morten Egan, the PL/SQL Ninja

How do we make PL/SQL as easy and fun to develop in as Node/Ruby/Python/[flavor of the day]? What are the things that make a language “cool” to build stuff in? Apart from being hip or used by Facebook/Google/Apple, what is the core functionality that should be available in any language and what are the core parts of the ecosystem around a language that makes it easier to pick up and start building? Looking at PL/SQL, what are the must-know packages that will get you started doing fun, useful libraries or applications?

In this CodeTalk session, Steven Feuerstein interviews Morten Egan, aka the PL/SQL Ninja, who has been asking himself – and then answering via code – these very questions. We’ll take a look at some of the utilities and libraries he has built for codemonth.dk and plsql.ninja to see what is possible and discover the sources of Morten’s inspiration and creativity. And time permitting, he’ll demonstrate with some “live” coding as well!

Internet of Things and Oracle Database

Blaine Carter, Oracle Corporation, and Anton Nielsen, C2 Consulting

To say we live in an increasingly connected world is to state the obvious – and to entice developers to wonder how they can connect their devices to the Internet. Of course, that immediately begs the question of what to do with all the data gathered. We kick off the CodeTalk 2017 series with an interview with Anton Nielsen, longtime explorer of leading-edge technologies in and around Oracle Database. He’s got lots to say about the IoT, and Blaine Carter, Oracle Developer Advocate for Open Source, will make sure you hear all about it.


The NoPL/SQL And Thick Database Methods

Toon Koppelaars and Chris Saxon, Oracle Corporation

Toon Koppelaars recently conducted an experiment comparing the performance of different ways of implementing a specific task. The NoPL/SQL approach treats the database as no more than a persistence layer, using only naive single-row SQL statements; it implements all business logic outside of it. The thick database approach treats the database as a processing engine; it uses a combination of sophisticated set-based SQL statements and PL/SQL to implement all business logic inside it. In this session, Chris and Toon investigate Toon’s findings and discuss their implications for database development. This session is a must-watch for anyone who builds applications using Oracle Database.


Git, Git Hosting Services, and Oracle's Role in Open Source

Blaine Carter, Oracle Corporation,  Martin D'Souza, Insum

Git has quickly become one of the dominant version control systems. Git can be intimidating at first, but understanding some of the basic functionality is all that's needed to get started. We'll talk about what Git is and explore the must-know features to get you productive quickly. We'll also explore the major Git repositories GitHub and Bitbucket, and help you get started with each. Finally, we'll take a look at some of the many Oracle open source projects available on https://Github.com/oracle. You'll learn how to fork these repositories, pull them to your local machine, and eventually become a valuable contributor to the open source community.

Simplifying Effective Date Range Queries with Temporal Validity

Chris Saxon and Stew Ashton, Oracle Corporation

Storing changes to data over time is a common requirement. For example, many businesses like to keep a historic record of customer address changes or product price updates. Data warehouse developers frequently need to store history in slowly changing dimensions. 

Typically these requirements are implemented by adding effective "from" and "to" date columns to tables. This requires developers to write convoluted select statements to find the rows active at a given point in time. This is error-prone and open to interpretation by developers, making applications harder to maintain. 

Introduced in 12c, temporal validity provides a standard way to write queries using effective date ranges. Implementing this helps improve developer productivity by simplifying SQL and providing a consistent method for managing time series data. Watch this session to see how you can easily adopt this on your 12c databases.



Application Development on Oracle Database: A Yearlong CodeTalk Series 

Connor McDonald, Oracle Corporation; Scott Wesley, Sage Computing Systems

Analytic SQL in the Oracle Database has been there since 8.1.6, but is still dramatically underused by application developers. Rather than wade through syntax diagrams, let's spend a session solving what used to be considered complex problems, now made simple with the power of Analytics. Oracle ACE Scott Wesley will interview Oracle Developer Advocate Connor McDonald on how to get the best out the Analytic SQL facilities.



Oracle Database Developers: The Most Important Programmers on Earth

Almost all eyes are focused on UI development these days, leveraging JavaScript to build intuitive apps and more. Yet underneath it all, we still rely heavily on databases generally, and Oracle Database in particular. Join IOUG for the launch of a 12-month series of discussions with experts such as Steven Feuerstein and Connor McDonald as we explore how to fully leverage all the application development features in Oracle Database.

In this first webcast, a community expert will interview Steven Feuerstein about the importance of SQL and PL/SQL when building secure, high-performance, and maintainable applications on Oracle Database.



Security Issues for Developers

Steven Feuerstein, Oracle Corporation

Join Steven Feuerstein, Architect at Oracle Corporation, and Rob Lockard, database security expert and winner of a 2015 Oracle Database Developer Choice award, as they discuss the top security issues facing Oracle developers today and how they can harden their applications against attack. This session will feature their conversation from COLLABORATE 16, followed by a live Q&A session. Join Steven Feuerstein, Architect at Oracle Corporation, and Rob Lockard, database security expert and winner of a 2015 Oracle Database Developer Choice award, as they discuss the top security issues facing Oracle developers today and how they can harden their applications against attack.



A View from the Trenches: Oracle Database Development at Moovit

Steven Feuerstein, Oracle Corporation and Oren Nakdimon, Moovit 

Millions of people develop applications on top of Oracle Database. The most secure and optimized of those applications take full advantage of SQL and PL/SQL. In this CodeTalk webcast, Steven Feuerstein interviews Oren Nakdimon of Moovit (http://moovitapp.com), lead developer for the backend of this popular transit app, to find out just how he and his small team have made the most of PL/SQL, and how they manage their PL/SQL code base.