Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition
Oracle Real Application Testing
Agile businesses want to be able to quickly adopt new technologies, whether it's operating systems, servers, or software, to help them stay ahead of the competition. However, change often introduces a period of instability into mission-critical IT systems. Real Application Testing—with Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition—allows businesses to quickly adopt new technologies while eliminating the risks associated with change. Real Application Testing combines a workload capture and replay feature with an SQL performance analyzer to help you test changes against real-life workloads, then helps you fine-tune them before putting them into production.
Benefits:
- Uses real workloads—Replays real workloads, not synthetic or artificial loads
- Comprehensive—100% coverage for entire change lifecycle
- Scalable—Requires similar effort for small and large changes
- Predictable—Transfers exact resolution of changes from testing to production
- Cost efficient—Reduces testing effort by up to 90%
From: Oracle
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
Oracle Real Application Testing
Oracle Database 11g Enterprise-Oracle Database Options
Oracle Database 11g Enterprise
Oracle Database Options
Oracle offers a wide range of options to extend the power of Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition to meet specific requirements in the areas of performance and availability, security and compliance, data warehousing, and manageability. This range of options, combined with Oracle Database's extensive out-of-the-box capabilities, make Oracle's the world's #1 database.
Options:
- Real Application Testing
- Advanced Compression
- Total Recall
- Active Data Guard
- Real Application Clusters
- Management Packs
- Partitioning
- Content Database Suite
- Warehouse Builder
- OLAP
- Data Mining
- Spatial
- Database Vault
- Advanced Security
- Label Security
From: Oracle
Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition
Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition
Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition delivers industry leading performance, scalability, security and reliability on a choice of clustered or single-servers running Windows, Linux, and UNIX. It provides comprehensive features to easily manage the most demanding transaction processing, business intelligence, and content management applications.
Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition comes with a wide range of options to extend the world's #1 database to help grow your business and meet your users' performance, security and availability service level expectations.
Benefits:
- Protects from server failure, site failure, human error, and reduces planned downtime
- Secures data and enables compliance with unique row-level security, fine-grained auditing, transparent data encryption and total recall of data
- High-performance data warehousing, online analytic processing, and data mining
- Easily manages entire lifecycle of information for the largest of databases
From: Oracle
Oracle Database 10g Sets New Record for TPC-H Three TB Benchmark
Oracle Database 10g Sets New Record for TPC-H Three TB Benchmark
Achieves World Record Performance with Grid Computing
Oracle set the new world record TPC-H Three terabyte (TB) benchmark for Oracle Database 10g Release 2 using Oracle Real Application Clusters running on an HP ProLiant BL25p server blade cluster. With this achievement, Oracle sets up a new milestone as the fastest TPC-H clustered benchmark ever published, and continues to outpace IBM DB2.
With a server configuration made up of a 64-Node HP ProLiant BL25p cluster, each with one dual-core AMD Opteron 2.4 GHz processor and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, Oracle Database 10g with Oracle Real Application Clusters achieved a record-breaking performance of 110,576.5 QphH@3000GB with a price-performance ratio of $37.80/QphH@3000GB.
"Oracle continues to build upon its preeminent record for setting benchmark records in all the leading TPC size categories," said Richard Sarwal, vice president of Server Performance, Oracle. "Our goal is to always provide customers with high-performance, highly scalable database systems and these record-breaking results are yet another demonstration of our commitment to that goal."
Article from: Oracle
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
New Apple iMac
Apple iMac-Technology
As you might suspect, design doesn’t supersede performance. The new iMac is more powerful than ever, with a faster processor, next-generation graphics, and larger hard drives. And it’s loaded with everything you need to make use of that power, including a built-in iSight camera, Wi-Fi, and SuperDrive.
Intel Core 2 Duo processor
All iMac models feature advanced dual-core Intel processors along with other improvements that pump up the performance.
Built-in wirelessBanish the clutter.
The latest 802.11 Wi-Fi networking and Bluetooth technologies come standard with every iMac.
Built-in iSight camera
The high-quality camera is so neatly integrated, you’ll hardly notice it’s there.
Connections and ports
iMac has all the ports you need for your USB, FireWire 400, and FireWire 800 devices.
Glossy widescreen display
Your photos, movies, and games will come to life with richer, more vivid colors. Choose from 20- and 24-inch widescreen displays.
Advanced graphics
New ATI Radeon HD graphics deliver a stunning visual environment with more vivid, lifelike images.
More storage and memory
Now you have more room for your video and photo collections. And iMac now supports up to 4GB of memory.
SuperDrive
The slot-loading SuperDrive lets you play and burn your own CDs and DVDs.
Thursday, August 16, 2007
>> The Future of Shopping
The Future of Shopping
With new developments, shoppers will have an efficient experience using a supermarket that will know their needs. Asina Pornwasin reports on the future store
You're running out of shampoo, bath cream and toothpaste, so it's time to go to the supermarket. To make sure that you won't forget all the necessary things, you pick up a key chain which is like a member card, and is equipped with a bar code scanning feature, to scan the product item and everything else you want to buy.
Welcome to the future store, where shoppers will find a more convenient way to shop. Forget all about jotting down a list of items on paper. With the new future store concept, all your shopping lists can be electronically sent in advance to the supermarket. Once you get there, just tap the member card, and all your lists will be loaded to a display device on your shopping cart. The cart will then guide you to where your products are stocked.
"Shoppers' lifestyles in the new era are going to change," said Fredric Lam, manager of the IBM retail innovation centre. "New technology developments will make the supermarket smart enough to facilitate customers with more convenience when shopping."
Member cards equipped with barcode scanning features are the first gateway to make your shopping experience more convenient. "With this," he said, "shopping lists on paper will become something of the past as people in the future will use the card to tap the product to record what they want to buy."
Network infrastructure is also necessary to allow people to send their shopping lists to the supermarket, and once they get there, technology will help them retrieve their information.
In the supermarket, various kinds of technology will be available. For example, a new personal shopping assistant (or PSA) will allow shoppers to view their electronic shopping list.
PSA, an 8.4-inch display device, will communicate directly with the supermarket's server through Bluetooth wireless, Wifi, or infrared connections. Lam explained that once people come to the supermarket and tap their member card at the gate, their information, including member ID, shopping record, and the latest shopping list, will be sent from the central server to the targeted PSA.
There is still more information offered through PSA, he added. Not only will it show a shopping list, it will show shoppers the location of the product's shelf so they can go direct to the right place.
Meanwhile, with the utilisation of technology, the supermarket can also send its promotional information direct to the PSA.
"The promotion can pop up on the PSA screen when shoppers walk past the shelves to pick up their goods, and this way the supermarket can offer customised marketing to each individual," he said.
Technology will also revolutionise the payment system. Lam said in the future store, people can forget all about standing in a long queue to make a payment, as they can pay for products via a self-checkout system.
The system will automatically detect each product item, and then summarise the total amount of payment. The system can detect each product by shape and weight to check that the product is the same as the barcode or RFID tag. "This is to prevent cheating," he added.
For the payment process, instead of paying with cash or a credit card, shoppers just put their finger on the fingerprint scanner to make a payment.
Lam explained that in the self-checkout counter, the system is online and connected to the shopper's bank account.
Therefore, once they put their finger and password on the scanner, the system will automatically ask the bank's system for approval for that transaction.
The new self-checkout system will also help the supermarket to keep records of their customers, and it can use this information to improve their loyalty programmes and to develop new campaigns or promotions specifically for individual customers.
In turning an existing supermarket into a new future store, Lam said supermarket operators can upgrade the system step by step.
"To make the new future store, it does not mean that supermarkets have to change their existing technologies and systems totally. They can select the application they want to use first and change it gradually," he said.
Article from: The nation
>> Global recognition sought for Thai-made software
Global recognition sought for Thai-made software
To encourage recognition of Thai software in the global market, a number of local software companies have teamed up to establish the Thai Software Export Promotion Association (TSEP).
The group consists of five companies - CT Asia, Wealth Management, Solution Corner, Good Idea and InStep - as founding members.
Chalermpon Punnotok, president of TSEP, said the association had been established with a strategy in mind to export Thai software.
The objectives of the group are to prepare global businesses for Thai software and to encourage the local software industry to train more people in terms of quality and quantity.
The association's strategy is to select software which is in niche areas, has solid target groups and involves innovations.
Initially, the association will focus on enterprise software such as what is used in workflow, call centres and financial management areas.
"We believe Thai software is competitive. The selected software must have strength and have been sold in Thailand already, so it can be sold in international markets as well," said Chalermpon.
Under the plan, TSEP will take local software companies to road shows in targeted countries to meet potential target customers in each country.
"To become international software vendors, we will help local software companies find their own customer bases in overseas markets in their own fields of strength," said Chalermpon.
This year the target for the association is to export software to countries in Southeast Asia, especially Vietnam and Laos, before moving to China, the Middle East and Europe over the next five years.
"As we want to build Thai brand awareness globally, we need to put a lot more effort into pushing Thai software to be accepted overseas. It is totally different from Thai brands in food, tourism, and medical industries that are already strong and well accepted," said Chalermpon.
He suggested this role should be adopted more strongly by government rather than the private sector.
TSEP in negotiating with the Software Industry Promotion Agency (Sipa) and Software Park Thailand for funds to establish activities in the global market.
The association requires support from government agencies in areas of advertising, public relations, marketing surveys and attending global events.
TSEP aims to strengthen the Thai software business so it becomes sustainable through customisation and crucial research and development.
"As the United States has Oracle, Germany has SAP, China has Huawei Technologies, Japan has Sony and Korea has Samsung, Thailand should have its own globally recognised IT-related product, especially software, to grab a global market share, instead of the local market being grabbed by global companies," said Chalermpon.
Article from: The nation
>> Top ten trends
Top ten trends
While people around the world are leading more mobile lives, it's expected there will be more affordable handsets and mobile services come on the market this year. A global business and technology consulting firm, inCode Telecom Group, has made predictions predictions of the Top 10 wireless trends to help identify wireless-market development and indicate ways that consumers and businesses will benefit.
Social networking gets mobilised. Mobility will be added to existing Internet business models, services and behaviour, driving traffic for wireless operators. Teens and twenties will become accustomed to constant connectivity and habit-forming websites and this leads to a wave of membership in mobile social networks. Location social networking - including friend and event finder services - are expected to gain popularity, even in the professional and over-50 segments.
Google, Yahoo and Skype are more compelling for users. As customer appetites for social data and video services spike, wireless operators offer more "all you can eat" pricing for high-end data packages. Social networking applications initially are preloaded on many mobile devices and become downloadable.
In the short term, wireless users are unlikely to plunk down between US$5.99 (Bt200) and $9.99 per month for mobile television services. Instead, look for per-view or per-minute pricing for "sneaking", a consumer tendency to watch key minutes of a sports event or drama while engaged in another activity.
Sneaking leads to more regular viewing, and within three to five years, mobile television becomes an indispensable service. Broadcast television is the primary driver of revenues and consumer adoption, but peer-to-peer video gains interest, too.
Multi-function devices become cheaper and more versatile.
Intense competition and margin pressure will continue in the handset market forcing prices of third-generation (3G) handsets below $90 and making them affordable for a wide range of users. Seeking to replicate the success of camera phones, device manufacturers will produce more multi-function units with music-playing, location, video and other capabilities. These lower-cost, multi-function handsets help wireless operators increase traffic and margins.
However, like swimming pools at hotels, some functions, such as music, are "must haves" used only by a few. Still, it's estimated that 20 per cent of all handsets sold in North America will be application specific - built for a usage proposition, such as music or video consumption or business productivity. WiFi handset capability could become the Trojan horse that allows Internet companies to bypass revenue from mobile subscribers.
GPS is the location technology of choice for the wireless industry. Handset manufacturers will continue to push GPS-enabled handsets as the technology evolves from popular in-car satellite navigation systems to a broadly accepted feature in wireless phones.
With Nokia having launched its first GPS-enabled handsets early this year, and bandwidth available to support new multimedia services, location-based service providers will build critical mass. Since there are 10 to 20 times more mobile phones sold than any other consumer-electronics device, wireless is a huge driver for GPS adoption. That's great for users and handset vendors, but the benefit to operators isn't clear.
AOL, Yahoo! and Google multimedia platforms challenge IMS.
As multimedia service platforms emerge, Internet service providers will build their own media architecture. That poses a risk to telecom operators adopting an IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) approach. However, IMS needs a flagship application and develops slowly until entrepreneurs and venture capitalists create innovative IMS services as they did with the Internet.
Together, China and India will connect more than 10 million wireless customers per month in 2007, creating a subscriber base of 200 million customers. By the end of the year, China will finally start issuing 3G licenses. Wireless technologies are developed and deployed first in China and India, rather than Europe and North America as in the past. The result is a significant shift in industrial influence. Although Chinese infrastructure vendors may be viewed as the "Wal-Mart of wireless", that's more perception than reality.
Chinese manufacturers make rapid technology improvements and aim for long-term strategic advantage. Expect intensified focus to ensure a strong Asian influence in the 4G market.
Mobile advertising breaks loose. Major brands shift from basic SMS marketing to more sophisticated multimedia advertising. RBC Capital Markets expects mobile marketing revenues to balloon from $45 million in 2005 to $1.5 billion by 2010. With the technological ability to target and measure the effectiveness of mobile advertising, brands are more strategic in their approach. Operators under increasing price pressure will set limits on current handset subsidisation.
Brands take up the slack, subsidise handsets and services for target demographics, and take direct ownership of marketing channels. Rich 3G content and video services, and accuracy advancements in GPS-based location services, deliver further value to brands targeting existing and potential customers in innovative ways.
This year, mobile will make headway against fixed broadband operators, who have dominated Internet and cheaper voice service provision in the home. WiFi remains the primary wireless access technology. Low cost femtocells and combined WiFi/High-Speed Packet Access (HSPA) routers emerge as attractive alternatives to VoIP over WiFi. The fixed operators may be strengthened by WiFi capabilities in consumer electronics devices - set-top boxes, game consoles and MP3 players - that enable cost-effective content downloads. However, innovative business models for HSPA will give mobile operators a real way to fight back, particularly in emerging markets.
Put strong security measures in place - this could be the year that hackers really start paying attention to millions of wireless devices, the growth in mobile data usage, and vulnerable points between mobile and fixed networks.
CIOs consistently cite security as their top concern in extending network access to wireless devices. Attacks, viruses and data security now exceed device loss or theft as concerns. Emerging services, such as VoIP and mobile payments, provide additional challenges. Vulnerabilities directly affect the bottom line, corporate image, regulatory compliance and competitive advantage. In the consumer segment, seamless mobility, off-portal content, IMS and convergence evolution continue to create new business needs for end-to-end security.
Enterprises can't resist the convenient, reliable, attractively priced, bundled mobile products entering the market. Corporations will switch from phones to mobile computers for transactions, data collection and messaging for a wide variety of employees. Many voice communications processes, such as order placement and delivery notifications, dispatch operations and remote asset monitoring, will continue to shift to wireless data to increase information access and field transaction volume across organisations.
Article from: The nation
>> 2-D barcode speeds up services for passengers
2-D barcode speeds up services for passengers
Nok Airlines will use a two-dimensional barcode system to maintain passenger information, and implement customer relationship management (CRM) to improve the quality of services.
Kramol Pulkes, vice president of information technology at Nok Airlines, said the firm was to develop a 2-D barcode to contain passengers' details in order to reduce human error.
The 2-D barcode will be provided to passengers by e-mail or Multimedia Messaging Service supported by General Package Radio Services after passengers confirm their electronic ticket. Passengers will then print out the barcode or use their mobile phone at the check-in counter to identify their ticket by a barcode reader without a second input of passenger information.
"The 2-D barcode does not only improve the quality of service, it reduces human error and cuts the check-in time. It also reduces the complexity of information processes and offers convenience to passengers," said Kramol.
By the end of this year, the firm in the first step will use a 1-D barcode to retain customer information. It will also, together with its partner, utilise 1-D barcode technology to improve productivity. The firm is also implementing CRM to support customer satisfaction and keep passengers' loyalty.
Pinyot Pibulsonggram, vice president of marketing at the company, said PDAs are now used to check in passengers under the Nok Xpress or Nok X service programme.
Nok X offers speedy check-in for Nok Air passengers who have only carry-on luggage. They can show their booking number and an ID card or passport to Nok Air's roving Xpress staff, who then print out their boarding pass from a handheld PDA. They can then be on their way to board the plane. The real-time system will be linked by wireless technology, and connected to a small mobile printer to print out the boarding passes instantly.
The firm also allows customers to book flights via telephone check-in services by calling 1318. The system then gives a booking number, their name and flight number to Nok Air staff, who check all the information is correct, and then inform the passenger as to where to pick up the boarding pass. Nok Air expects to carry around 22.4 million passengers this year.
Nok Air travellers can also book and pay for their flights using mPAY via WAP under the Nok Mobile Booking Service, as well as at Tsutaya President Park, Seacon Square or Big C Rajdamri.
Article from: The nation
>> Cisco Unveils Plans to Transform the Data Center
Cisco Unveils Plans to Transform the Data Center
Cisco Introduces New Data Center Products, Services and Programs to Support a Holistic View of the Data Center.
Cisco introduced a broad array of innovative data center products and solutions that will enable customers to better utilize their data center resources, deploy more robust business continuance, build cost-effective storage area networks, and enhance data security.
Cisco's vision for next-generation data centers, called Data Center 3.0, entails the real-time, dynamic orchestration of infrastructure services from shared pools of virtualized server, storage and network resources, while optimizing application performance, service levels, efficiency and collaboration.
"The network is uniquely positioned to be the platform for the data center, and Cisco is investing in innovations to help our customers transform their data centers for improved efficiency and increased business productivity. Data Center 3.0 provides our customers with a roadmap to build mission-critical data centers that improves collaboration within their organisations while dramatically reducing power consumption," said Tatchapol Poshyanonda, Cisco's managing director.
Over the next 24 months, Cisco will deliver innovative new products, programs, and capabilities to help customers realize the Cisco Data Center 3.0 vision. New products and programs announced today support that vision, representing the first steps in helping customers to create next-generation data centers.
Article from: The nation
>> Guidelines set for universal access
Guidelines set for universal access
The National Electronics and Computer Technology Centre (Nectec) has announced Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) for 250 government agencies to develop their websites to support disabled people in order to ensure universal access.
Wantanee Phantachat, chief of assistive technology at Nectec, said the centre was issuing WCAG as a national guide to developers to create their websites to support Web accessibility to enable those with disabilities easier access to information.
"The centre has completed the national guidelines needed to develop websites for the disabled to encourage government agencies and the private sector to assist those with disabilities.
It will distribute the guidelines to more than 250 government agencies and conduct training for Web developers from government agencies as the next step," said Wantanee.
The idea is to allow disabled people in Thailand the same access to information and knowledge via the Internet as others, and ensure they have universal access to services. The centre will also upload the guidelines to a public website.
"The websites which follow the guidelines will provide an opportunity for disabled people to access information. So far no government agency website supports universal access," said Wantanee.
She said the guidelines would also be aimed at ensuring telecom companies and service providers developed communications services that were available to everyone on an equal basis.
The guidelines will also determine the format and standard for the development of telecommunications and information services for disabled people so it will be easier for them to use new technology and services.
The guidelines explain how to make Web content accessible to people with disabilities and are intended for all Web content developers and developers of authoring tools.
She said the guidelines would help people more quickly find information on the Web, and do not discourage content developers from using images and video. They also explain how to make multimedia content more accessible to a wide audience including techniques for document validation and testing, with an index of HTML elements and attributes.
"Disabled people in Thailand will soon enjoy universal access to improve their quality of life through access to knowledge and information via Web accessibility."
Private Satansat, an official at the Thailand Association for the Blind, said most disabled people now lack the opportunity to access knowledge and information from the Internet. To promote universal access and Web accessibility, government agencies should set the example and create their sites to allow disabled and blind people easier access to knowledge from the Internet through services such as electronic learning.
"The Internet is an important resource for the disabled to reach information. If Web developers build their sites following the WCAG standards it will very useful to these people," said Private.
He said however that disabled people have to purchase screen readers worth more than Bt40,000 per unit.
Wantanee said that Thailand now has around six million or 10 per cent disabled people in the population of 62 million. The centre expects the guidelines will encourage government agencies to create websites under the national standard at around 5 per cent in the first year with all websites supporting WCAG in the next five years.
Article from: The nation
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
>> Sensors become chips
Sensors become chips
Thai Microelectronics Centre (TMEC) has set its direction to develop sensor technology during the next two years, starting with basic sensor products and moving up to produce what it called smart sensors and smart control technology.
TMEC is a microelectronics research and development unit under the National Electronics and Computer Technology Centre (Nectec) to develop microelectronics prototypes aiming towards industrial mass production. It also has wafer fabrication facilities for small volume production of microelectronic and chip products.
TMEC will begin the development of basic sensors including thermal sensors, pH sensors and pressure sensors to serve industries. The outcome of the development is expected this year. As sensors are likely to be in widespread use in electronic products in the future, it will offer potential for the country to develop this technology, said Nectec's director Pansak Siriruchatapong.
He said since Thailand was a production base for electrical and electronic appliances, local development of sensor products would support local manufacturers who wanted to add more value to their products.
So far, TMEC has developed microelectronics for thermal sensors, pH sensors, blood pressure sensors, magnetic sensors and light sensors. Pansak said these were basic sensors that could be used in various devices including electrical and electronic appliances, medical devices, hard disk drives or electronic devices for agriculture or agritronics.
Nectec's assistant director Suthee Phoojaruenchanachai, who oversees TMEC, added that to make the sensor chips function as required, the centre would work with local universities to integrate the chips on IC boards.
"We will start with putting the sensor chips we produce ourselves in the lab on IC boards to make each sensor work as intended and next, we hope to develop all the systems into a single chip," Suthee said.
Apart from basic sensors, Pansak added that the plan also included the development of what he called a silicon microphone, a very small microphone which will be embedded in various kinds of electronic devices to detect sound. It will also be used as an input device for voice command applications.
Pansak said as the silicon microphone was related to microelectronics, it would be a key strength for TMEC.
To develop the silicon microphone requires microelectronic expertise to put several silicon microphones into an array so the microphone will be able to detect and separate sound to properly respond to the application.
"In the future, we believe there will be more use of voice-command devices, so this kind of microphone is important to make all the spoken-command responses accurate," he said.
TMEC plans to start silicon-microphone development next year.
Under TMEC's development path, the centre also hopes that its research activities will move towards the development of smart control technology for use in home appliances, automobiles, medical science, agriculture and environmental industries.
Smart control is a technology combining intelligent power-integrated circuits and smart sensors in a single chip. When used in automobile or home-appliance products, for example, it will add more value to the products and allow the device to offer functions which can be customised to serve individual user's requirements.
"We see that with this technology, future products like air-conditioners, for example, will be able to offer users more comfort. Instead of users having to adjust the temperature themselves, the device will detect the surroundings, such as temperature, heat and humidity, and then adjust for the most comfortable environment automatically," Pansak said.
TMEC plans to begin development of smart control technology in the next two years.
In addition to research activities, TMEC also offers wafer-fabrication services to produce small volumes of microelectronic products for outside organisations. The centre this year received a budget of Bt257 million to improve its utilities infrastructure to support wafer-fabrication processes and upgrade its machines to make the fabrication process more stable.
TMEC's director Amporn Poyai said that in the past, the centre instability of electricity, which made the fabrication process temporary halt at some times. With this new budget, the centre could build its own backup power source so the process could run continuously even if there was a blackout.
TMEC has a capacity to make 300 wafers per month. The technology used now is at 0.8 micron, which is suitable for use in the production of sensor chips. However, the centre plans to upgrade its production technology to 0.5 microns in the next two years.
From: The nation
>> More power in numbers-high-performance computing
More power in numbers
To create collaboration among Thai communities around the use of high-performance computing (HPC), a group of Thai professors has been working to establish formal cooperation in the form of the Thai HPC Consortium.
HPC is the use of parallel processing to run advanced application programs efficiently, reliably and quickly.
Chokchai Leangsuksun, director of Extreme Computing Research Group and associate professor of Computer Science, Louisiana Tech University, who initiated the Thai HPC Consortium, said the consortium was expected to be the basis for the collaboration of professors in universities throughout the country as well as having links to global universities, especially Louisiana Tech University. The consortium will be officially launched in the next few months.
The idea is to help academic communities take advantage of the use of high-performance computing technology and to encourage Thai researchers to share not only knowledge but also resources, both in research efforts and technologies, among themselves.
This collaboration complements the government's Thai National Grid Centre (TNGC). It is a grid users' collaborative and high-performance computing is a part of the whole of grid computing.
"TNGC has technology criteria for applicants to use the facility, so if some applications do not meet TNGC's criteria they can use the consortium's HPC facility to, for example, conduct their proof of concept. We give them more flexible platforms," said Chokchai.
Solid collaboration began six months ago when Chokchai and his colleagues in global IT firms came to Thailand to donate four cluster systems for high performance computing - 32 CPUs each - to Chiang Mai University, Kasetsart University, Thammasat University and Prince of Songkla University, to allow Thai researchers and professors to benefit from the use of the next generation of computation.
"All four universities are founding member of the consortium. In the future, the consortium will have more members. The consortium will also have technology backed up by the Louisiana Tech University," said Chokchai.
Instead of being an individual effort, the idea is to be a consortium where resources and knowledge can be shared. The establishment of the consortium is also aimed at promoting a greater awareness of high-performance computing technology and training the next generation of computational technologists.
"The consortium's plan is to provide training courses around the use of high-performance computing. High-performance computing is not easy to set up and use. It is quite complicated and the systems require a high level of knowledge and skill," said Chokchai.
He said using high-performance computing technology is not the same as the linear approach of the old way of processing.
Using high-performance computing involves managing a combination of all technologies to produce the highest performances.
From: The nation
>> Young Thai developers named software design champion
Young Thai developers named software design champion
A group of Thai engineering students won the first prize in the world final Imagine Cup 2007
Microsoft Corp. announced the winners of Imagine Cup 2007, after a week of intense competition among finalists chosen from a total of 344 students from 112 teams representing 59 different countries.
3 KC Returns" representatives from Thailand celebrated their victory in the worldwide Software Design Invitational and were awarded a $25,000 cash prize.
Imagine Cup, the world's premier competition for technology students or known as 'Technology Olympics', gives students the chance to unlock their creative genius and build solutions that tackle real-world issues facing society today.
Representing from Thailand, "3KC Returns"- the first-place winning team of students developed a software application called "Live Book" which enables the poorly educated to enhance their reading, writing and listening skills. Members of the triumphant team include: Vasan Chienmaneetaveesin from Chulalongkorn University, Prachaya Phaisanwiphatpong, Jatupon Sukkasem and Pathompol Saeng-Uraiporn from Kasetsart University.
"It's amazing to see the passionate students doing such great work. We are so proud and exciting that this is the first year Thailand has a chance passing to the top ranking of Imagine Cup competition, said Patama Chantaruck, Managing Director of Microsoft (Thailand) Limited. "The high caliber of the students and their projects is an indication of their potential to become great business and technology leaders, and a demonstration of how our local innovations have a lasting and transformative impact on education and beyond."
Under the theme of "Imagine a world where technology enables a better education for all", "Live Book" application is only putting any general text-book in front of Web Camera, the system will automatically capture paragraph on each pages, do character recognise, and transform each word into graphical new ones on screen, with attractive imaginary presenting its original description and vocabulary on paragraph, showing its meaning and teach them how to read it in the right way.
"This is such a great experience in our life," said Prachaya Phaisanwiphatpong from Kasetsart University, member of Thailand representative. "We try our best to proof that Thailand innovation can be accepted on global stage. The exciting thing about Microsoft's Imagine Cup is that we take what is possible with technology today and try to solve real world problems with software solutions"
The follow-up plan for the winning team is the Imagine Cup Innovation Accelerator program, which is a project from Microsoft to propel Imagine Cup software design champions into the next stage of developing their innovative ideas as a business. Teams selected for the Innovation Accelerator program receive technical support and business coaching to create the must-have technology and communications applications of the future. Over an intensive two-week period, students further develop their designs and viable business plans with close guidance from some of the best minds at Microsoft.
"The students who participate in the Imagine Cup represent the next generation of technology and business leaders." said Yik Joon Ho, Developer & Platform Strategy Director, Microsoft (Thailand) Limited "Their creativity and innovation speak volumes about the promise of technology to really make a difference in peoples' lives in the way we think, work and communicate.
Imagine Cup, now in its fifth year, challenges students to imagine a better world enabled by their own talent and also to contribute directly to the future of technology, software and computing. Participating teams are assigned to develop innovative technological and artistic projects aligned to a social cause each year. In addition, Imagine Cup complements Microsoft's Unlimited Potential commitment to create social and economic opportunity through programs and products that transform education, foster local innovation, and enable jobs and opportunities worldwide.
The next Imagine Cup 2008 will be held in France, Paris. The theme will be "Imagine a world where technology enables a sustainable environment."
From: The nation
>> Guidelines set for universal access
Guidelines set for universal access
The National Electronics and Computer Technology Centre (Nectec) has announced Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) for 250 government agencies to develop their websites to support disabled people in order to ensure universal access.
Wantanee Phantachat, chief of assistive technology at Nectec, said the centre was issuing WCAG as a national guide to developers to create their websites to support Web accessibility to enable those with disabilities easier access to information.
"The centre has completed the national guidelines needed to develop websites for the disabled to encourage government agencies and the private sector to assist those with disabilities.
It will distribute the guidelines to more than 250 government agencies and conduct training for Web developers from government agencies as the next step," said Wantanee.
The idea is to allow disabled people in Thailand the same access to information and knowledge via the Internet as others, and ensure they have universal access to services. The centre will also upload the guidelines to a public website.
"The websites which follow the guidelines will provide an opportunity for disabled people to access information. So far no government agency website supports universal access," said Wantanee.
She said the guidelines would also be aimed at ensuring telecom companies and service providers developed communications services that were available to everyone on an equal basis. The guidelines will also determine the format and standard for the development of telecommunications and information services for disabled people so it will be easier for them to use new technology and services.
The guidelines explain how to make Web content accessible to people with disabilities and are intended for all Web content developers and developers of authoring tools.
She said the guidelines would help people more quickly find information on the Web, and do not discourage content developers from using images and video. They also explain how to make multimedia content more accessible to a wide audience including techniques for document validation and testing, with an index of HTML elements and attributes.
"Disabled people in Thailand will soon enjoy universal access to improve their quality of life through access to knowledge and information via Web accessibility."
Private Satansat, an official at the Thailand Association for the Blind, said most disabled people now lack the opportunity to access knowledge and information from the Internet. To promote universal access and Web accessibility, government agencies should set the example and create their sites to allow disabled and blind people easier access to knowledge from the Internet through services such as electronic learning.
"The Internet is an important resource for the disabled to reach information. If Web developers build their sites following the WCAG standards it will very useful to these people," said Private.
He said however that disabled people have to purchase screen readers worth more than Bt40,000 per unit.
Wantanee said that Thailand now has around six million or 10 per cent disabled people in the population of 62 million. The centre expects the guidelines will encourage government agencies to create websites under the national standard at around 5 per cent in the first year with all websites supporting WCAG in the next five years.
Article from: nationmultimedia, Jirapan Boonnoon
Thursday, August 9, 2007
>> Lifecycle of an Ajax Application
Lifecycle of an Ajax Application
The Ajax lifecycle is more like that of a traditional GUI than a traditional web application, with DOM objects acting like GUI widgets. The script registers event listeners on DOM objects, and manipulates the DOM in response to those events. As part of the event-processing cycle, the server may be invoked. There's actually a slight complication here in that the server calls are asynchronous, so the event-listening phase is split from the event-responding phase.
Here's a typical Ajax lifecycle within the browser:
- Visit: The user visits a site the usual way, i.e. by clicking on a link or typing a URL.
- Initialisation The page initially loads. Callbacks are established to handle user input, a loop might be established to continously refresh page elements.
- Event Loop: Browser Event An event occurs, such as a keypress.
- Server Request The browser sends a request to the server.
- ...
- Server Response A moment later, the server responds, and the response is passed into a request callback function, one that was specified when the request was issued.
- Browser Update The request callback function updates the DOM, including any Javascript variables, according to the response.
Of course, there are plenty of variants. In particular, many events are handled locally and don't actually trigger a trip to the server. Also, some Ajax applications are short-lived and the browser interaction is eventually terminated with the user submitting a form. Others remain to interact with the user as long as they are in the user's browser.
Note that the Browser Event and the Server Request occur in one thread, and the Server Response and Browser Update occur in a separate thread. This is due to the asynchronous nature of the server request. It's actually possible to configure XMLHttpRequest to make synchronous calls, but poor practice as it holds up the user.
>> Downsides of Ajax
Downsides of Ajax
Ajax is a trade-off. Any developer considering its adoption should be aware of the downsides, such as:
- Limited Capabilities: Some Ajax applications are certainly doing things people never dreamed were possible on the web, but there are still substantial restrictions of the web platform. For example: multimedia capabilities, local data storage, real-time graphics, interaction with hardware such as printers and webcams. Support for some of these are improving in recent browsers, some can be achieved by delegating to Flash, but many are simply not possible, and if required, would rule out Ajax.
- Performance Concerns: Constant interaction between browser and server can make an application feel unresponsive. There are, however, quite a few well-known patterns for performance optimization such as browser-side caching. These usually suffice, even for fast-paced applications like stock trading, but Ajax still might not work for really time-critical applications such as machine control.
- Internet Access Required: The user can't access an Ajax application in the absence of a network connection.
- Second Programming Language: Serious Ajax applications require some knowledge of Javascript. Many developers are discovering that Javascript is actually a more capable language than at first assumed, but there is nevertheless an imposition to use a language different to that on the server-side.
- Easily Abused: As with any powerful technology, Ajax concepts can be abused by careless programmers. The patterns on this site are intended to guide developers towards more usable solutions, but the fact remains that Ajax isn't always used in a manner that supports usability.
>> Whats Ajax
Whats Ajax?
A Primer on the Ajax Phenomenon
With all the hype about "Ajax web applications", you could be forgiven for assuming Ajax is some radical new plugin, akin to Macromedia Flash. And you would therefore be under the impression that Ajax is out of bounds until you upgrade your "so last month" browser, or at least download the coveted "Ajax plugin".
Good news: You can run Ajax right now. At least, assuming you have a web browser from the past few years - IE, Firefox, Safari, or Opera. Have you seen Google Maps or perhaps GMail? They're both Ajax applications. So are Zuggest and the AjaxPatterns Wiki Demo .
What do they all have in common? All these applications take a great leap forth towards the richness of standard desktop applications. No longer are you forced to wait five seconds for the page to reload every time you click on something. Ajax applications change in real time. They can let you drag boxes around, they can refresh themselves with new information, they can completely re-arrange the page without clearing it. And there's no special plugin required. Ajax is just a style of design, one that milks all the features of modern browsers to produce something that feels less web and more desktop.
Applications can act more like and be developed more like the days of Visual Basic, Delphi, PowerBuilder, C++ with GUI frameworks, etc. Thus, it is 90's GUI features but with a web browser: it strives to meld the best of web and the best of desktop GUI's. Web browser standards were originally designed for e-brochures only. Business forms and other needs were hacked into this e-brochure framework over time and it is clear that this after-thought retrofitting for different purposes has been ugly. Ajax attempts to remedy this.
Some of the characteristics of Ajax applications include:
- Continuous Feel: Traditional web applications force you to submit a form, wait a few seconds, watch the page redraw, and then add some more info. Forgot to enter the area code in a phone number? Start all over again. Sometimes, you feel like you're in the middle of a traffic jam: go 20 metres, stop a minute, go 20 metres, stop a minute ... How many E-Commerce sales have been lost because the user encountered one too many error message and gave up the battle? Ajax offers a smooth ride all the way. There's no page reloads here - you're just doing stuff and the browser is responding. The server is only telling the screen what changed rather than having it redraw the whole screen from scratch.
- Real-Time Updates: As part of the continous feel, Ajax applications can update the page in real-time. Currently, news services on the web redraw the entire page at intervals, e.g. once every 15 minutes. In contrast, it's feasible for a browser running an Ajax application to poll the server every few seconds, so it's capable of updating any information directly on the parts of the page that need changing. The rest of the page is unaffected.
- Graphical Interaction: Flashy backdrops are abundant on the web, but the basic mode of interaction has nevertheless mimicked the 1970s-style form-based data entry systems. Ajax represents a transition into the world of GUI controls visible on present-day desktops. Thus, you will encounter animations such as fading text to tell you something's just been saved, you will be able to drag items around, you will see some static text suddenly turn into an edit field as you hover over it.
- Language Neutrality - Ajax strives to be equally usable with all the popular languages rather than be tied to one language. Past GUI attempts such as VB, Tk, and Swing tended to be married to one specific programming language. Ajax has learned from the past and rejects this notion. To help facilitate this, XML is often used as a declarative interface language.
To prevent any confusion, these things are not characteristic of Ajax:
- Proprietary: "Ajax" is perhaps one of the most common brand names in history, but in the present context, "Ajax" is neither the name of a company nor a product. It's not even the name of a standard or committee. It's a label for a design approach involving several related technologies and open standards such as HTML, CSS, and Javascript. Each of these is "open" in the sense that its based on a published standard governed by a standards body and able to be implemented in any browser, free of legal and information constraints.
- Plugin-Based: Ajax applications do not require users to install browser plugins, or desktop software for that matter.
- Browser Specific: As long as the user is working with a relatively recent, mainstream, browser (say 2001+), the application should work roughly the same way. Browser-specific applications somewhat defeat the purpose of Ajax.
Tuesday, August 7, 2007
>> Oracle Reporting with the Familiar
Figure 1: The Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher Enterprise home pageLog in to the Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher Enterprise home page (the default username and password are Administrator/Administrator) to bring up a portal-style interface that shows the reports you can manage and run (see Figure 1).
The left side of the page provides a list of common tasks, and the main part of the page displays reports organized into folders and subfolders. To edit a folder, click the folder icon next to the folder name; to run a report, click the report name; to drill down further into folders and subfolders, click the folder name.
Before you can start building some reports, though, you need to configure Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher Enterprise to add a JDBC datasource, which will point to the database used for the first report. To do this, click the Admin tab (see Figure 1), locate the datasources area of the page, click JDBC Connection, and then click Add Data Source. Next, enter the details for your installation. The following are examples and placeholders for the datasource, URL, username, and password:
- Datasource name: oe_ds
- URL: jdbc.oracle.thin:@
- Username: oe
- Password: password
- Database driver class: oracle.jdbc.driver.OracleDriver
The reports in this article are designed to query the OE sample schema. For your system, provide the correct datasource name, URL, username, and password; click Test Connection to check whether the details you entered are correct; and click Apply to save the details. You are now ready to create your first report.
The first report request is to create a warehouse inventory report in which the user can select a warehouse and see all the products and stock on hand. The data for this report will come from the OE.WAREHOUSES, OE.PRODUCTS, and OE.INVENTORIES tables. To start creating this report, first click the Reports tab to return to the Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher Enterprise home page, click the My Folders link, and then click Create a new report in the Folder and Report Tasks area. In the Enter Report Name field, enter the report name warehouse_inventories and click Create. The new report appears on the right side of the page; click the Edit link under the report name to start the data set report definition.
Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher Enterprise now displays the Data Set page, which includes a dynamic HTML interface that enables you to define the data model, lists of values, parameters, and templates associated with a report (see Figure 2).
Figure 2: The Data Set pageClick Data Model in the Report navigator (on the left side of the page), and click New to create a new data set. Name the query inventory_query, and select SQL Query in the Type field. Select the datasource you previously created from the Data Source list (oe_ds in our example), and check the Cache Result check box if you would like Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher to save the data requested by the report to speed up future requests.
The SQL query used to provide data for the report can be provided in one of two ways. You can either type it directly into the SQL Query text box, using the following SQL script:
select w.warehouse_name
, p.product_name
, i.quantity_on_hand
from oe.inventories i
, oe.products p
, oe.warehouses w
where w.warehouse_id = i.warehouse_id
and p.product_id = i.product_id
and w.warehouse_name
in (:warehouses)
(Note that the :warehouses bind variable will be used later when you add a parameter to the report.)
Or you can use the Query Builder feature to create your SQL statement graphically (see Figure 3).
Figure 3: Query Builder
To use Query Builder, click Query Builder on the Report Definition page. On the Query Builder page, select OE from the Schema list, and then drag the WAREHOUSES, PRODUCTS, and INVENTORIES tables to the graphical (Model) view. (Note that you may need to enter the first letters of each table name in the Search field to locate them in Query Builder.) To join the WAREHOUSES table to the PRODUCTS table, first click the column selector to the right of the WAREHOUSE_ID column and then click the corresponding column selector in the INVENTORIES table to create the join. Do the same join with the WAREHOUSE_ID column in the PRODUCTS and INVENTORIES tables. Then click Conditions to add in the (:warehouses) condition required for the report parameter. Click SQL to see the generated SQL and Results to see a subset of the query output. Finally, click Save (at the top of the page) to close Query Builder, and copy the resulting SQL onto the Data Set page.
The next step is to define the report parameter and the associated list of values. Create the list of values by selecting the List of Values node in Report Explorer, clicking New, entering a name, and selecting the same datasource as before (oe_ds in our example). You can either manually enter the SQL that retrieves the list of values as follows:
select warehouse_name
from oe.warehouses
or use Query Builder to create the SQL statement as before. Click Save to close Query Builder, and click Save to save the list of values.
To create a report parameter to go with the bind variable added to the report SQL, select the Parameters node and again click New. When you complete the parameter options (see Figure 4), the Identifier value should be the same as the bind variable (:warehouses) specified in the query used to populate the report. Select Menu for Parameter Type and leave Multiple Selections unchecked, which tells Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher to generate a list from which users can make their parameter selections. Click Save to save the parameter values.
Figure 4: Adding a report parameter
You have now completed the initial stage of your report definition. Save your work, and return to the Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher Enterprise page that lists your reports and the folder and report tasks. Do not view your report yet.
Create a Report Template
Now that the report definition is complete, it is time to create an accompanying template that Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher will use to determine how to display the report results. A particular report definition can have many templates associated with it, but for now you will lay out a simple tabular report template by using the Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher add-in to Microsoft Word. To install Template Builder, click the Template Builder link in Folder and Report Tasks (or locate it on the Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher installation disk).
After installing Template Builder and then starting Microsoft Word, connect to the Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher server via the Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher toolbar. Select Oracle BI Publisher -> Log On (see Figure 5).
Figure 5: Logging in to Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher 
Figure 6: The Open Template dialog boxYou can now start laying out your report template.
For this report, create a table of inventory items and stock levels, grouped by the warehouses in which they are held. To do this, select Oracle BI Publisher -> Insert -> Table Wizard in the Word document and then use the wizard to select data items for the table, and optionally the items on which the table is grouped and sorted (see Figure 7). In the case of this table, group the data by warehouse and sort on inventory item.
Add a total to the report to show the total stock on hand for all products in the selected warehouse. To do this, select Oracle BI Publisher -> Insert -> Field, and then in the Field dialog box, select the Quantity on Hand field and the sum calculation.
Now, when you view the report template in Microsoft Word, you can see the report layout and use the built-in formatting features in Microsoft Word to add images, change fonts, add highlighting, and so on.
To upload this template back to the Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher Enterprise server, first save the template as an .rtf file to your file system and then select Oracle BI Publisher -> Publish Template As. Name the template, and click OK to upload it to the server. You can now return to Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher Enterprise and view your new report.
Now that you have defined a report that uses relational data from an Oracle database, you can create a report that uses Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition as the datasource. When working with Oracle Business Intelligence Suite, you can either source your data directly from the Common Enterprise Information Model, the Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition equivalent of Oracle Business Intelligence Discoverer's End User Layer, or you can change the report datasource type to Oracle BI Answers and select a request to use as the report datasource.
Now that the report datasource is specified, as shown in Figure 8, you can add parameters, lists of values, and then a report template in the same way you did before (for the report based on a SQL query).
Figure 8: Using an Oracle BI Answers Request as a datasource
Figure 9: Embedding an Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher report in a dashboard
Summary
This article has introduced features of Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher Enterprise and Template Builder. It has showed how to create both SQL and Oracle Business Intelligence Answers-based reports and defined templates using the familiar Microsoft Word environment. You can define reports against your own application data; add features such as graphs, images, and even bar codes; and start to take advantage of Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher with Oracle E-Business Suite.
From: Oracle
>> Integrating Oracle Spatial with Google Earth
Integrating Oracle Spatial with Google Earth
Learn how to use Oracle Locator/Oracle Spatial, GeoServer, and Google Earth to create a seamless, robust system for location-enabled BI.The world is flocking to location technologies. Whether people are searching for their houses on Google Earth, tracking their kids with GPS-enabled cell phones, or utilizing the inherent location-enabling capabilities built in to their enterprise Oracle architectures, it seems that not only is everyone interested in location but their lives and businesses also depend on it. However, as with any other set of burgeoning technologies, as technology choices grow, so does the number of data formats and complexities. This is where the open source community comes in.
The open source community for geospatial technologies is not unlike other open source communities. It is fed by academics, engineers, and architects with the common purpose of creating powerful and easy-to-use frameworks and technologies that help bridge the gaps created by commercial resources.
For instance, when it comes to sharing data across the digital divide, with or without maps, Confluence GeoServer - an open source server that can be used to connect disparate geospatial data sources - excels. GeoServer developers consider their project the ideal "glue" for the geospatial Web.
GeoServer is amazingly simple in principle. Say you have some data stored in an Oracle Spatial database and you want to publish that data to the Web in a format that can be used by other software packages, such as Google Earth. To do this, you could certainly define an XML stylesheet or some other output process to translate the source data into KML (Google Earth's standard markup language). However, to do this effectively, you would probably want to account for all of the known geometry types as well as any metadata and/or data associated with the geometries (the stuff that really matters).
For a one-off project, this might not be so bad, but if you wanted to apply your homegrown transformation engine to several data sets and data designs, you would have to do a lot of work to first create a transformation framework capable of handling all of the complexities of both your data source and Google Earxth and then handling the actual transformations.
And what do you do when your needs or data (sources and output) changes? GeoServer makes this entire process a lot easier. By providing basic connectivity to Oracle Locator/Oracle Spatial feature tables in Oracle Database, GeoServer can perform simple Oracle Spatial bounding box queries (primary-filter queries), transform the results into KML, and provide the KML output as a service for Goggle Earth to render on a map. This is an attractive, low-cost solution for simple geospatial queries.
This article shows you how to use Oracle Locator/Oracle Spatial, GeoServer, and Google Earth to create a seamless, robust system for location-enabled business intelligence. In the end, I hope you can come away from this exercise with a better understanding of how to use open source technologies to extend the way you use commercial technologies.
Oracle Locator/Oracle Spatial Primer
One of the most powerful but least understood features of the Oracle relational database management system (Oracle Express Edition through Oracle Enterprise Edition) is Oracle Locator. By definition, "Oracle Locator is a feature of Oracle Database 10g Standard and Enterprise Editions that provides core location functionality needed by most customer applications." However, Oracle Locator offers a lot more than this. At face value, Oracle Locator gives users the option of storing location information (geospatial or otherwise), such as longitudes and latitudes, in the same tables and rows as the rest of data. Yet Oracle Locator goes much further: using this standard feature, users can also perform location analysis on the same data.
So when you simply want to return all information about something that happens to exist within some distance of something else, why go to a map or a GIS? Oracle Locator can do this for you right in the database. And, of course, with regards to Oracle Spatial (an option of Oracle Enterprise Edition), the rabbit hole gets deeper-much deeper. Fundamentally, Oracle Locator and Oracle Spatial are really the same. They share the same core object type (SDO_GEOMETRY) as well as the same metadata and indexing scheme.
However, whereas Oracle Locator provides impressive core location analysis functionality (such as the ability to find all the data that has some kind of topological relationship to other data), Oracle Spatial builds on top of this the capability to store and manage image and gridded raster data and metadata; create and analyze linear-referenced, network, and topology data models; turn text-based address information into longitude/latitude with geocoding; provide driving directions via an integrated routing engine; and perform deep, multidimensional spatial analysis and mining on location and other data. The name of the game for both Oracle Locator and Oracle Spatial is that data and analyses are available to any client that can connect to and query from an Oracle database.
Load the Counties Data Set
The sample data set included in the sample code, counties.dmp, comprises two tables, COUNTIES and STATES, as well as Oracle Spatial metadata and associated indexes. To load this data set into your Oracle database, do the following:
Log in to your Oracle database instance as a user with system privileges: $> SQLPLUS system/password.
Create a new database user (call it whatever you like-I call mine ORAGIS): SQL> create user oragis identified by oragis.
Grant your new user resource and connect privileges: SQL> grant resource,connect to oragis.
Log out of Oracle: SQL> exit.
Import the COUNTIES dump (export) file into the ORAGIS (or your user's) schema: $> imp oragis/oragis file=counties.dmp full=y.
More Info: http://www.oracle.com/technology/pub/articles/lokitz-spatial-geoserver.html
>> Is Oracle's Best Good Enough
Oracle's Best Good Enough
Norm Fjeldheim had a lot to worry about last year when Oracle completed its hostile takeover of PeopleSoft, after an acrimonious 18-month battle.
The chief information officer of Qualcomm, a communications equipment manufacturer, has multimillion-dollar investments in both Oracle and PeopleSoft software, but he feared the bad feelings between the companies would make his PeopleSoft investment moot.
However, Fjeldheim says, he was "pleasantly surprised." Employees from PeopleSoft are integrating key recordkeeping and tracking pieces of Qualcomm's PeopleSoft applications into Oracle's next-generation applications suite, called Fusion. "I thought it would be a battle," he says.
Ray Barnard, the cio of Fluor Corp., had a similar revelation. The engineering and construction giant uses enterprise resource planning systems from sap and JD Edwards--which PeopleSoft acquired in 2003—along with Oracle database and engineering applications. But about six months ago, Oracle called Barnard to ask his advice. That had not happened before. "I appreciate being included," he says.
One year into its takeover of PeopleSoft—a deal worth $10.3 billion when it closed in January 2005—customers say Oracle is listening to them, in contrast to the company's past behavior. And while some expressed reservations about Oracle's product plans, they're happy with the new level of service.
Part of the reason for the changes, according to Fjeldheim and others, is the current management team.
Larry Ellison remain chief executive officer, although in 2004 he relinquished his chairman title and appointed two co-presidents—Charles Phillips, who came from Morgan Stanley in 2003, and Safra Catz, who came from Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette in 1999.
Oracle veterans John Wookey and Keith Block head application development and sales, respectively. Fjeldheim calls the current Oracle team "the best I've seen since 1989."
But they'd better be good—they have a lot to do. Since acquiring PeopleSoft, Oracle has picked up retail software vendors Retek and ProfitLogic, identity management vendor Oblix, banking software vendor i-Flex Solutions and database vendor TimesTen, among others, and was set to close a deal for Siebel, the $1.3 billion vendor of customer relationship management software, on Jan. 31.
Parts or at least ideas from all this software are being melded into Fusion, which Oracle plans to ship in 2008. The trick will be to persuade customers to stick with Oracle and upgrade to Fusion.
Most PeopleSoft customers have not committed to the new software, says Jim Shepherd, a vice president at amr Research. He adds that new licensing revenue since Oracle acquired PeopleSoft is "not very healthy." For the six months ended Nov. 30, 2005, it was $1.7 billion, a 10% gain over 2004. SAP, on the other hand, saw its second-half 2005 license revenue go up 18.5%, to $3.26 billion.
In January, Oracle publicly demonstrated some features of its current applications that will become part of Fusion. Executives showed, for example, how they could use one console to pull an order out of PeopleSoft ERP and route it through a different supplier, based on information on the supplier's performance called from an Oracle data warehouse. Wookey stressed that Fusion is based on open standards rather than proprietary Oracle standards.
But some CIOs—including Fjeldheim and Barnard—have reservations about the concept behind Fusion, which is called Service Oriented Architecture. SOA is a software architecture in which applications dynamically interact with each other over the Web.
There's a lot of software in corporate America. And platforms from Oracle, IBM, Microsoft and SAP don't work well together, these CIOs say, and basic requirements like version control—necessary for Sarbanes-Oxley compliance—are still missing. "I'm not going to invest a lot of money in it," Barnard says.
Another customer who uses both Oracle and PeopleSoft products, Stanford University, isn't thinking much about SOA—it is still wrestling with current versions of Oracle Financials.
However, controller Susan Calandra says she is far happier with Oracle now than she was in mid-2004, when she complained to Oracle about getting the school's Oracle applications to work with its PeopleSoft software. Oracle assigned Stanford senior vice president Steve Miranda, who speaks with Calandra every four to six weeks.
"Today, we have Oracle's ear," Calandra says. "The PeopleSoft applications are running fine."
Stanford has not decided what to do about Fusion, Calandra says. "We don't know how Fusion is going to work," she points out.
But Oracle's acquisition spree has made one thing easier for customers: there are fewer vendors to go after when something goes wrong. Fluor, for example, acquires four or five companies a year, and Barnard says that every one of them uses some version of Oracle or PeopleSoft. "I need throats to choke, and I hate to chase 20," he says. "Now I can chase three or four."
From: findarticles