Development

A great presentation, worth watching in its entirety.

With apologies to my Hadoop friends but this is good for you too.

Today I noticed strange thing in predicate section of execution plan for simple query with regexp_like, where 3rd parameter “MODIFIER” was not specified:

SQL> select * from dual where regexp_like(dummy,'.');

D
-
X

SQL> select * from table(dbms_xplan.display_cursor);

PLAN_TABLE_OUTPUT
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
SQL_ID  97xuqf9cmjsta, child number 0
-------------------------------------
select * from dual where regexp_like(dummy,'.')

Plan hash value: 272002086

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation         | Name | Rows  | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time     |
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT  |      |       |       |     2 (100)|          |
|*  1 |  TABLE ACCESS FULL| DUAL |     1 |     2 |     2   (0)| 00:00:01 |
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------

   1 - filter( REGEXP_LIKE ("DUMMY",'.',HEXTORAW('F07FD85CFF0700006A1116
              45010000000000000000000000FC12164501000000000000000000000000000000000000
              0010000000000000001880D85CFF07000002000000000000000000000081000000') ))


20 rows selected.

It is particularly interesting that the values in HEXTORAW() are always different for different first parameters:

SQL> select * from dual where regexp_like(dummy,'x');
...
   1 - filter( REGEXP_LIKE ("DUMMY",'x',HEXTORAW('3895D330FF0700006A1116
              45010000000000000000000000FC12164501000000000000000000000000000000000000
              0011000000000000006895D330FF07000002000000000000000000000081000000') ))

SQL> select * from dual where regexp_like(dummy,'y');
...
   1 - filter( REGEXP_LIKE ("DUMMY",'y',HEXTORAW('00DA3C3FFF0700006A1116
              45010000000000000000000000FC12164501000000000000000000000000000000000000
              00110000000000000030DA3C3FFF07000002000000000000000000000081000000') ))

SQL> select * from dual where regexp_like(dummy||'','x')
...
   1 - filter( REGEXP_LIKE ("DUMMY"||'','x',HEXTORAW('70964F2FFF0700006A
              111645010000000000000000000000FC1216450100000000000000000000000000000000
              0000001100000000000000A0964F2FFF07000002000000000000000000000081000000')
               ))

I don’t know, what does it mean, but it looks like garbage from memory.
When I noticed this, I decided to check how regexp_like will work in function-based indexes:

SQL> create table xtest as
  2    select dummy||level as str
  3    from dual
  4    connect by level<=30;

Table created.

SQL> select * from xtest where case when regexp_like(str,'1') then 1 end = 1;
...
12 rows selected.

SQL> select * from table(dbms_xplan.display_cursor);

PLAN_TABLE_OUTPUT
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SQL_ID  7ztp0k8c1zn2h, child number 0
-------------------------------------
select * from xtest where case when regexp_like(str,'1') then 1 end = 1

Plan hash value: 4207139086

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation         | Name  | Rows  | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time     |
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT  |       |       |       |     3 (100)|          |
|*  1 |  TABLE ACCESS FULL| XTEST |    12 |   264 |     3   (0)| 00:00:01 |
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------

   1 - filter(CASE  WHEN  REGEXP_LIKE
              ("STR",'1',HEXTORAW('68F9CB32FF0700006A111645010000000000000000000000FC1
              216450100000000000000000000000000000000000000110000000000000098F9CB32FF0
              7000002000000000000000000000081000000') ) THEN 1 END =1)

SQL> create index xtest_fbi on xtest(case when regexp_like(str,'1') then 1 end);

Index created.

SQL> select * from xtest where case when regexp_like(str,'1') then 1 end = 1;
...
12 rows selected.

SQL> select * from table(dbms_xplan.display_cursor);

PLAN_TABLE_OUTPUT
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SQL_ID  7ztp0k8c1zn2h, child number 0
-------------------------------------
select * from xtest where case when regexp_like(str,'1') then 1 end = 1

Plan hash value: 1479471124

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Id  | Operation                   | Name      | Rows  | Bytes | Cost (%CPU)| Time     |
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|   0 | SELECT STATEMENT            |           |       |       |     2 (100)|          |
|   1 |  TABLE ACCESS BY INDEX ROWID| XTEST     |    12 |   300 |     2   (0)| 00:00:01 |
|*  2 |   INDEX RANGE SCAN          | XTEST_FBI |    12 |       |     1   (0)| 00:00:01 |
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
---------------------------------------------------

   2 - access("XTEST"."SYS_NC00002$"=1)

SQL> select column_expression from user_ind_expressions e where e.index_name='XTEST_FBI';

COLUMN_EXPRESSION
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CASE  WHEN  REGEXP_LIKE ("STR",'1') THEN 1 END

As you can see it works fine, although the predicate from first execution plan differs from the FBI expression.
Then I dumped 10053 trace and noticed that the HEXTORAW(…) function appeared in “Explain Plan Dump” only, so it looks just like plan output bug.

I normally avoid anything that smacks of a competitive discussion on what I consider to be a space for personal reflection. So while I want to disclose the fact that I am not disinterested in the points I am making from a professional standpoint, my main interest is to frame some architecture points that I think are extremely important for the maturation and success of the Hadoop ecosystem.

A few weeks back, Mike Olson of Cloudera spoke at Spark Summit on how Spark relates to the future of Hadoop. The presentation can be found here:

http://youtu.be/8kcdwnbHnJo

In particular I want to draw attention to the statement made at 1:45 in the presentation that describes Spark as the "natural successor to MapReduce" - it becomes clear very quickly that what Olson is talking about is batch processing. This is fascinating as everyone I've talked to immediately points out one obvious thing: Spark isn't a general purpose batch processing framework - that is not its design center. The whole point of Spark is to enable fast data access and interactivity.
 
The guys that clearly "get" Spark - unsurprisingly - are DataBricks. In talking with Ion and company, it's clear they understand the use cases where Spark shines - data scientist driven data exploration and algorithmic development, machine learning, etc. - things that take advantage of the memory mapping capabilities and speed of the framework. And they have offered an online service that allows users to rapidly extract value from cloud friendly datasets, which is smart.

Cloudera's idea of pushing SQL, Pig and other frameworks on to Spark is actually a step backwards - it is a proposal to recreate all the problems of MapReduce 1: it fails to understand the power of refactoring resource management away from the compute model. Spark would have to reinvent and mature models for multi-tenancy, resource managemnet, scheduling, security, scaleout, etc that are frankly already there today for Hadoop 2 with YARN.

The announcement of an intent to lead an implementation of Hive on Spark got some attention. This was something that I looked at carefully with my colleagues almost 2 years ago, so I'd like to make a few observations on why we didn't take this path then.

The first was maturity, in terms of the Spark implementation, of Hive itself, and Shark. Candidly, we knew Hive itself worked at scale but needed significant enhancement and refactoring for both new features on the SQL front and to work at interactive speeds. And we wanted to do all this in a way that did not compromise Hive's ability to work at scale - for real big data problems. So we focused on the mainstream of Hive and the development of a Dryad like runtime for optimal execution of operators in physical plans for SQL in a way that meshed deeply with YARN. That model took the learnings of the database community and scale out big data solutions and built on them "from the inside out", so to speak.

Anyone who has been tracking Hadoop for, oh, the last 2-3 years will understand intuitively the right architectural approach needs to be based on YARN. What I mean is that the query execution must - at the query task level - be composed of tasks that are administered directly by YARN. This is absolutely critical for multi-workload systems (this is one reason why a bolt on MPP solution is a mistake for Hadoop - it is at best a tactical model while the system evolves).  This is why we are working with the community on Tez, a low level framework for enabling YARN native domain specific execution engines. For Hive-on-Tez, Hive is the engine and Tez provides the YARN level integration for resource negotiation and coorindation for DAG execution: a DAG of native operators analogous the the execution model found in the MPP world (when people compare Tez and Spark, they are fundamentally confused - Spark could be run on Tez for example for a much deeper integration with Hadoop 2 for example). This model allows the full range of use cases from interactive to massive batch to be administered in a deeply integrated, YARN native way.

Spark will undoubtedly mature into a great tool for what it is designed for: in memory, interactive scenarios - generally script driven - and likely grow to subsume new use cases we aren't anticipating today. It is, however, exactly the wrong choice for scale out big data batch processing in anything like the near term; worse still, returning to a monolithic general purpose compute framework for all Hadoop models would be a huge regression and is a disastrously bad idea.

Oracle again changed the layout of the forum. For me, the old link didn't work any more. In case you have problems finding it, here is the new link:

https://community.oracle.com/community/database/developer-tools/application_express

If you go to the forum and search for example for "APEX" or "Application Exp", you will see no results. Typing in "Application Ex" will find "Application Express".



Each of the found links will have a funny description saying:

"An error occurred processing your request. If this problem persists, please contact the webmaster or administrator of this site."



:) So, it seems there are now even more bugs than before.

Probably, the intention to change the forum wasn't bad. However, once you manage to open it you will see a lot of information you don't need (or at least not all of the time). The real content is somewhere underneath and needs scrolling like in Facebook (oh, how I hate that site). And the worst thing is that you can see only ten threads per page - if you want to see more then click and scroll again. For those interested in helping others this is making things much more complicated.



One positive thing though. :) My name suddenly appears in the top list of the participants in the forum. The list isn't reduced to the top five but it now shows the top six. Top six is obviously the new top five. ;)

I wanted to briefly comment on Alisdair MacIntyre's lectures collected as "Dependent Rational Animals", but let me precede that with a couple of comments for context: first, as I alluded in my last post referencing Levinas, it is my view that the the ethics demands a certain primacy in any healthy conception of life and society; second, in the area of ethics, Macintyre's After Virtue is the book that has had perhaps the biggest impact on my own thinking.

One of the criticisms of MacIntyre is that his critique of rational ethics is, on the one hand, devastating; on the other hand, his positive case for working out a defense of his own position - a revivification of social ethics in the Aristotelian-Thomist tradition(s) was somewhat pro forma. I think this is legitimate in so far as it relates to After Virtue itself (I believe I have read the latest edition - 3 - most recently), though I am not enough of a MacIntyre expert to offer a defensible critique of his work overall.

I do, however, want to draw attention to Dependent Rational Animals specifically in this light. Here MacIntyre begins with is the position of human as animal - as a kind of naturalist starting point for developing another pass at the importance of the tradition of the virtues. What is most remarkable is that in the process of exploring the implications of our "animality" MacIntyre manages to subvert yet another trajectory of twentieth century philosophy, this time as it relates to the primacy of linguistics. The net effect is to restore philosophical discourse back toward the reality of the human condition in the context of the broader evolutionary context of life on earth without - and this I must say is the most amazing part of this book - resorting to fables-masked-as-science (evolutionary psychology).

I while back I blogged about a technique for doing responsive design with JDeveloper 12.1.2 using media queries and css, but it is time for a small update for those who are using 12.1.3 - since there are some new capabilities that you can leverage.  (I would still recommend watching the other video as it shows some other things you can do with the same technique like changing the size of icons/fonts).

The major change in 12.1.3 is that you can now include your media query and style classes inside the skin definition. When you combine this with page templates you get very clean pages that don't need to include code for responsiveness.

See the demo below for how it works.

One note - in the houses demo I actually used a region that is replicated on the left side and in the panel drawer. This way you only need to code that part once.

Here is the code for the skin's css file:

.wide {

    display: inline;

}

.narrow {

    display: none;

}

@media screen and (max-width:950px) {

            .narrow {

                display: inline;

            }

            .wide {

                display: none;

            }

        }

And here is the code for the page template:

 <?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>

<af:pageTemplateDef xmlns:af="http://xmlns.oracle.com/adf/faces/rich" var="attrs" definition="private"

                    xmlns:afc="http://xmlns.oracle.com/adf/faces/rich/component">

    <af:xmlContent>

        <afc:component>

            <afc:description/>

            <afc:display-name>collapseTemplate</afc:display-name>

            <afc:facet>

                <afc:facet-name>right</afc:facet-name>

            </afc:facet>

            <afc:facet>

                <afc:facet-name>drawer</afc:facet-name>

            </afc:facet>

            <afc:facet>

                <afc:facet-name>center</afc:facet-name>

            </afc:facet>

        </afc:component>

    </af:xmlContent>

    <af:panelGridLayout id="pt_pgl1">

        <af:gridRow marginTop="5px" height="auto" marginBottom="5px" id="pt_gr1">

            <af:gridCell marginStart="5px" width="20%" id="pt_gc1" >

            <af:panelGroupLayout layout="vertical" styleClass="wide">

                <af:facetRef facetName="right"/>

                </af:panelGroupLayout>

            </af:gridCell>

            <af:gridCell marginStart="5px" marginEnd="5px" width="80%" id="pt_gc2">

                <af:facetRef facetName="center"/>

            </af:gridCell>

            <af:gridCell  halign="stretch" width="auto" id="pt_gc3" >

            <af:panelGroupLayout layout="vertical" styleClass="narrow">

                <af:panelDrawer  id="pt_pd1" height="500px">

                    <af:showDetailItem id="dr1" shortDesc="Drawer 1">

                        <af:facetRef facetName="drawer"/>

                    </af:showDetailItem>

                </af:panelDrawer>

                </af:panelGroupLayout>

            </af:gridCell>

        </af:gridRow>

    </af:panelGridLayout>

</af:pageTemplateDef>

As before you should also be setting the web.xml contextual parameter org.apache.myfaces.trinidad.DISABLE_CONTENT_COMPRESSION  =  true

"Essentially, all models are wrong. Some models are useful."

It is the nature of short essays or speeches that they can at best explore the surface of an idea. This is a surprisingly difficult task, since ideas worth exploring usually need to be approached with some rigor. The easy use of the speech form is to promote an idea to listeners or readers who already share a common view - that is one reason speeches are effective forms for political persuasion for rallying true believers. It's much more difficult to create new vantage points or vistas into a new world - a sense of something grander that calls for further exploration.

Yet this is exactly what Ryszard Kapuscinski accomplishes in his series of talks published as The Other. Here, the Polish journalist builds on his experience and most importantly on the reflections on the Lithuanian-Jewish philosopher Emmanual Levinas to reflect on how the encounter with the Other in a broad, cross cultural sense is the defining event - and opportunity - in late (or post) modernity. For Kapuscinski, the Other is the specifically the non-European cultures in which he spent most of his career as a journalist. For another reader it might be someone very much like Kapuscinski himself.

There are three simple points that Kapuscinski raises that bear attention:

1) The era we live in provides a unique, interpersonal opportunity for encounter with the Other - which is to say that we are neither in the area of relative isolation from the Other that dominated much of human history nor are we any longer in the phase of violent domination that marked the period of European colonial expansion. We have a chance to make space for encounter to be consistently about engagement and exchange, rather than conflict.

2) This encounter cannot primarily technical, its must be interpersonal. Technical means are not only anonymous but more conducive to inculcating mass culture rather than creating space for authentic personal engagement. The current period of human history - post industrial, urbanized, technological - is given to mass culture, mass movements, as a rule - this is accelerated by globalization and communications advances. And while it is clear that the early "psychological" literature of the crowd - and I am thinking not only of the trajectory set by Gustave LeBon, but the later and more mature reflections of Ortega y Gasset - were primarily reactionary, nonetheless they point consistently to the fact that the crowd involves not just a loss of identity, but a loss of the individual: it leaves little room for real encounter and exchange.

While the increasing ability to encounter different cultures offers the possibility of real engagement,  at the same time modern mass culture is the number one threat to the Other - in that it subordinates the value of whatever is unique to whatever is both common and most importantly sellable. In visiting Ukraine over the last few years, what fascinated me the most were the things that made the country uniquely Ukrainian. Following a recent trip, I noted the following in a piece by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof on a visit to Karapchiv: "The kids here learn English and flirt in low-cut bluejeans. They listen to Rihanna, AC/DC and Taylor Swift. They have crushes on George Clooney and Angelina Jolie, watch “The Simpsons” and “Family Guy,” and play Grand Theft Auto. The school here has computers and an Internet connection, which kids use to watch YouTube and join Facebook. Many expect to get jobs in Italy or Spain — perhaps even America."

What here makes the Other both unique and beautiful is being obliterated by mass culture. Kristof is, of course, a cheerleader for this tragedy, but the true opportunity Kapuscinski asks us to look for ways to build up and offer support in encounter.

3) Lastly and most importantly, for encounter with the Other to be one of mutual recognition and sharing, the personal encounter must have an ethical basis. Kapuscinski observes that the first half of the last century was dominated by Husserl and Heidegger - in other words by epistemic and ontological models. It is no accident, I think, that the same century was marred by enormities wrought by totalizing ideologies - where ethics is subordinated entirely, ideology can rage out of control. Kapuscinski follows Levinas in response - ultimately seeing the Other as a source of ethical responsibility is an imperative of the first order.

The diversity of human cultures is, as Solzhenitzyn rightly noted, the "wealth of mankind, its collective personalities; the very least of them wears its own special colors and bears within itself a special facet of God's design." And yet is only if we can encounter the Other in terms of mutual respect and self-confidence, in terms of exchange and recognition of value in the Other, that we can actually see the Other as a treasure - one that helps ground who I am as much as reveals the treasure for what it is. And this is our main challenge - the other paths, conflict and exclusion, are paths we cannot afford to tread.

On this day in 1858, members of the Linnaean Society of London listened to the reading of a composite paper, with two authors, announcing the discovery of evolution by natural selection.
One author you've probably heard of: Charles Darwin
The other? Famous in his time, but in the 20th and 21st centuries largely forgotten: Alfred Russel Wallace.
Darwin was a Big Data scientist, spending 20 years after his trip to the Galapagos gathering data from his own experiments and from botanists around the world, to make his theory unassailable. Wallace was a field naturalist, studying species and variation, up close and very personal.
Both ended up in the same place at roughly the same time, driven by the inescapable conclusion from these three facts:
1. More organisms are born than can survive (for their full "normal" lifespan). 2. Like father like son: we inherit characteristics from our parents3. NOT like father like son: each offspring varies in some way from its parents.
So who/what survives to reproduce and pass on its genes? Or rather, who dies and why? You can die purely by accident. You are the biggest, strongest lion. Nothing can beat you. But a tree falls on you. Dead and gone.
Or you can survive because you have an advantage, however slight, that another in your species lacks. Your beak is slightly more narrow and lets you get at all the nuts on the tree. Your legs are slightly longer so you can avoid the tiger. And so on, everything sorting out how to eat, how to survive long enough to reproduce, from bacteria to coral to fish to mammals.
And with each passing generation, the mutations that help you survive get passed along, and so we (humans and everyone, everything) change - sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly. But change we do. 
With this announcement on July 1, 1858, humans now had a way of understanding how the world works without having to fall back on some unknowable god or gods. And we have also been able to build on Wallace's and Darwin's insight to now understand, perhaps too well, how life works on our planet, and how similar we are to so many other species.
Which means - to my way of thinking - that we no longer have any excuses, we humans, for our ongoing devastation and depletion of our world and our co-inhabitants.
In a more rational world, in which humans shared their planet with everything around them, instead of consuming everything in sight, July 1 would be an international day of celebration.
Well, at least I posted a note on my blog! Plus I will go outside later and cut back invasives, to help native trees grow.
How will you celebrate International Evolution Day?
Here are some links to information about evolution, about the way these two men got to the point of announcing their discoveries, and more.
You will read in some of these articles about Wallace being "robbed" of his just fame and recognition; I must tell you that Wallace, in his own words and the way he lived his life, was gracious and generous in spirit. He always saw Darwin as the one who fully elaborated the theory, making its acceptance so instantly widespread across Europe. He did not seem the least bit jealous.
And Wallace was, in many ways, a far more interesting human being than Darwin. I encourage to check out his autobiography, My Life, as a way of being introduced to one of my heroes.
http://www.wired.com/2011/07/0701darwin-wallace-linnaean-society-london/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_selection

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/natural-selection--it-takes-two-darwins-rival-alfred-russel-wallace-recognised-at-last-8458765.html

With the 12.1.3 release of Oracle Service Bus and Oracle SOA Suite we finally can build all our soa projects with Maven. And this time we can do it natively without calling a utility like configjar or ANT from Maven . We start by setting all the required variables like JAVA_HOME,M2_HOME and PATH export JAVA_HOME=/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk1.7.0_45.jdk/Contents/Home/jre export M2_HOME=

The new Oracle ADF and JDeveloper 12.1.3 is out and it comes with a bunch of new features, especially in the UI layer - ADF Faces.

You can read the new features document on OTN, and you should also look into the new components demo for some inspiration.

For a quick overview of some of the new UI capabilities check out this quick video that shows some of the key new features.

<span id="XinhaEditingPostion"></span>

Sunday is typically the day where the Oracle development team is on stage to talk about what they do, give insight in the product etc. - for me personally one of the highlights of the conference.

The Awesome Evolution of Oracle Application Express 5.0 by Joel Kallman
Joel demoed HTML DB 1.6 again, the predecessor of APEX - went live in 2004, so 10 years ago (time goes fast!). Next he timed doing development in APEX 4.2 compared to APEX 5.0.  
Conclusion: APEX 5.0 is more productive, efficient, intuitive, modern and easy.
Joel highlighted the other new features in APEX 5.0, most of them I already blogged about or you find them here.

The Game Changed - APEX Designer by Patrick Wolf
Patrick showed the time it takes to build components and items in previous versions of APEX. Next he compared it to how you do things with the new Page Designer in APEX 5.0.
There're so many new features in the Page Designer, just give it a try to explore them. It will take a bit of time to get used to them, but it will be the future. 

Turbo Mobile Development by Marc Sewtz
APEX uses jQuery Mobile behind the scenes. APEX 5.0 includes the latest version (jQuery Mobile 1.4). The philosophy is to create "mobile first" applications.APEX 5.0 will include a new mobile theme, which support the new jQuery Mobile swatches. It's very easy to use ThemeRoller to create your own swatch and upload the zip in Shared Components in APEX and add a style to the theme and make it active.
There are many more new features in APEX 5.0 for mobile development like for example a new region type called "Reflow table".

This great feature is finaly there. I remember asking for a solution back in 2007. I needed to send emails with application links to my users. If they would receive an email they would click on the link and were supposed to land on a particular page. The problem was that they would already have an open session and they expected the link to go straight to the page without asking for a new login. The solution I found was quite tricky and it stopped working with the version 4.1 because of the changed session handling. APEX 5.0 finaly introduces this option out of the box. You can enable it in the security attributes for:

- Public Sessions only
- All Sessions



You can of course override these settings on the page level, which makes a lot of sense.

In APEX 5.0 you (can) develop in the new Page Designer.

The Page Designer makes you way more productive, less clicks and quicker results. You have to get used to it, and you probably want a big monitor (time to ask your boss!), but once all that is done - you will love it.

The Page Designer is so intuitive and attention was put in the details. When you make a mistake APEX gives you immediate feedback. Here's a screenshot:


The region where the error is, is highlighted.
You get a notification message top right in red with the error message and inside the property panel it's highlighted what you need to change. Once you click on the field it will give another text notification e.g. that it is required.

There's also the Messages tab which gives you an explanation of what is wrong. Clicking on the link will bring you right where you need to go.

But just look at the Page Designer for a while; notice the small top left red triangles; it identifies it's a required field. The "Show Common" and "Show All" tabs are great too.

So many things, small, large, ... but so useful.

Here's another one - Developer Comments for the page. If there are comments you see a number in the comment icon. When clicking on the icon you can add more comments. I believe it would also be useful to see the existing comments, hopefully that will be in the final release.


This post is based on Oracle APEX 5.0 EA2, but there's more coming it looks like. Linked to the previous feature, I see a tighter integration with Team Development already too.

So many things to explore in the APEX 5.0 Page Designer... definitely worth your time.

Just a quick entry about something that I ran into in the past with JDeveloper 11.1.2.4, and that some of you who are using Mac might run into.

When you try and run your web application and the embedded WebLogic tries to start you might run into an error like:

Unrecognized option: -jrockit
Error: Could not create the Java Virtual Machine.
Error: A fatal exception has occurred. Program will exit. 

This is most likely due to the fact that JDeveloper is trying to use the wrong JVM to run your WebLogic.

To solve this - go into the system11.1.2.4.39.64.36.1/DefaultDomain/bin directory and locate the setDefaultDomain.sh file.

Edit this file and add the following lines:

JAVA_VENDOR="Sun"

export JAVA_VENDOR 

By doing this you'll instruct WebLogic to start with a regular JVM and not the JRockit variant which isn't on your mac. 

With the new template, the new buttons for example are highly customisable in APEX 5.0(icon on the left or right, spacing between, etc.)

In the Appearance section you find kinda the same options as in APEX 4.x, but when you look a bit further, there's so much more now.

You can declaratively change the way your button looks like, by clicking the Template Options:


The icons you can chose for your button are based on Font Awesome, a great scalable vector icons library.

I use Font Awesome in APEX 4.x too, but I had to create a new button template and put the name of the icon in the class section. This is now all integrated and declarative in APEX 5.0.

Develop even faster? use the keyboard shortcuts in Oracle Application Express (APEX) - you find them defined here:



Here's the list:

• Display From HereCtrl+Option+D
• Display From PageCtrl+Option+T
• Go to Dynamic ActionsOption+2
• Go to Gallery ButtonsOption+9
• Go to Gallery ItemsOption+8
• Go to Gallery RegionsOption+7
• Go to Grid LayoutOption+5
• Go to HelpOption+F1
• Go to MessagesCtrl+F1
• Go to Page Shared ComponentsOption+4
• Go to ProcessingOption+3
• Go to Property EditorOption+6
• Go to RenderingOption+1
• Keyboard ShortcutsOption+Shift+F1
• Page SearchCtrl+Option+F
• RedoCtrl+Y
• Restore/ExpandOption+F11
• SaveCtrl+Option+S
• Save and Run PageCtrl+Option+R
• Toggle Hide Empty PositionsCtrl+Option+E
• UndoCtrl+Z

For Mac users like me; the Option key is "alt". For the F1 etc. use "fn".

You can now request a workspace in the brand-new version of Oracle APEX 5.0 (EA2).


Once requested a workspace you will get an email to activate it - and you're up-and-running!


The login screen looks awesome:


And then you see the new APEX Builder - new theme, with all new icons:


The Application Builder looks different now too - look at the nice icons and new style of Interactive Report:


Creating a new application - the wizard is more streamlined:

Creation of a new page is now with a modal window implementation:

When finished it opens the page in the new Page Designer:


It looks like all the components are now available in the Page Designer (Shared Components for ex. wasn't available in EA1 - but it is now)

Creating new pages work well and the new universal theme (theme 42) looks nice too.

Oracle APEX went flat design, with bright color blue and grey and nice icons (which are available as a font).

More to come in other blog posts... have fun! and thanks to the APEX Development team for another great release.

Steve Ballmer is a terribly oblivious ultra-rich man.

His offer of $2B for the Los Angeles Clippers is so ridiculously outsized and unjustified, plus it so richly rewards Sterling for, um, for saying something in private.

[Interesting to consider how in the US, land of free speech, this nasty brutish fellow is being punished -well he was being punished before Ballmer rewarded him - for his private thoughts. That's pretty awful when you think about it.]
Anyway back to Ballmer. His offer is so absurd that it becomes patently obvious to everyone that he has so much money it's simply no big deal for him to throw $2B on the table to unambiguously cinch the deal. 
The aristocracy in France did quite well, too, until they forgot that they were supposed to pretend at lesat a little bit that everyone else weren't virtually slaves for them. But when they got too flagrant, they paid, oh how they paid.
And here in the 21st century, in what is supposedly and still formally a democracy, with citizens supposedly being equal under the law, you really don't want to draw attention to your beyond obscene wealth.

Bad move, Ballmer. If I were a fellow billionaire, I'd get in touch and tell him to tone it down. 

In the last couple of years, I have shifted my attention away from the human condition (wars here and there, cool new gadgets, etc.) to the non-human condition: the natural world of trees, water, creatures large and small, the process of evolution.

Along the way, I have been reminded that what you pay the most attention to is what your brain spends the most time thinking about (at least the parts of my brain that "I" am "conscious" of). So I need to be careful about what I pay attention to (one reason that I have stopped watching television almost completely). 
And spending ten plus hours a week outdoors, in the woods, cutting back invasives and rescuing trees, has reinforced this to me:
With living things, the more I watch and more closely I watch (and smell and taste), the more amazed I am by the wonders of life. And the more alive I feel,
With manufactured things, it is just the opposite.
The more closely I look at something made by humans, the more sterile, dead and energy-sucking it appears. And the more I watch (or smell or taste), the more deadened I feel.
Perhaps this is not such a big surprise, since everything that humans make is dead, and built upon the deaths of many creatures. Sorry if that sounds like such a downer, but I believe it is simply a statement of fact.
Anyway, no need to feel down. Just go outside, into the trees, into a field, away from things we make, take a deep breath, feel the sun on your face....and you will feel much better.