This will be interesting: these two keynotes are happening almost at the same time.

Apple are about to announce their latest creation.

Oracle are about to announce their roadmap for Sun integrating into Oracle.

Which one will generate more column inches do you suspect?

They took their sweet time, but Oracle 11g is now finally EAL4 accredited. The only downside from my point of view is that it is release 1 that has been taken through the process whereas I was hoping it would have been release 2.

The title says it all. It will be interesting to see what happens at the presentation on the 27th.

The most significant component is the unit testing framework. From the Press Release:

Oracle SQL Developer Release 2.1 introduces a unit-testing framework that enables developers to build and share unit tests and test suites that can be run in batch mode and from command line against different databases. PL/SQL Unit Testing offers database developers powerful, prebuilt capabilities with which to develop and run regression tests for their database code resulting in higher quality database development while reducing the need for writing scripts for unit testing.

Unit Testing PL/SQL code has traditionally been poorly and incompletely done. It is difficult to do, there are a lot of issues to take into account and lots of boundary cases where frameworks just don’t or can’t help. Many have tried before (Wikipedia has a list) and had partial success. I have never heard of any serious project that has been able to use a particular framework for all test cases.

My experience of these tools is limited, having opted to ‘role my own’ in the past almost every time. It will be interesting to see if Oracle’s idea of unit testing pl/sql code will catch on and become the de-facto method. I’ll measure that by if/when I start seeing it on a significant number of Oracle specialists’ CVs.

My understanding is that this has been a work in progress for some time. What I don’t know is if it has been built on the foundations of one of the existing ‘solutions’ or if Oracle have built it from the ground up.

Wow. I didn’t expect the EU commission to push them that hard.

This is a pretty big deal for Oracle.

Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Master Data Management (MDM) of Product Data positions Oracle in the Leaders quadrant. The Gartner Magic Quadrant positions vendors within a particular market segment based on their completeness of vision and their ability to execute on that vision.

">Gartner magic quadrants are keenly watched by anyone in the consultancy industry (buying or selling). MDM is one of the latest buzzwords in the BI and data management industries. It basically means having a single understanding of your data across your enterprise, but it lives on a foundation of common definitions (what do you mean by ‘Customer’ and ‘Order’ and do all of your systems, databases and employees have the same understanding of the term?).

Unfortunately I can’t say exactly where in the top right quadrant Oracle is, or where the competitors are, without paying a hefty sum to Gartner to see the info and an astronomical sum to be able to share the info. Suffice to say that getting into that quadrant is hard enough, regardless of who else may be playing in the same space.

If you can interpret M Faroult’s very thick French accent, this is a good little intro into how Oracle database is put together in terms of processes and memory.

Without a control file, your database is dead.

His background (presumably working in France) leads him to pronounce the ORACLE_SID as ‘Oracle S.I.D’ (as letters), whereas all the Oracle consultants I have had the privilege of working with have spoken it as ‘Oracle Sid’, as in the first syllable of Sydney. My French is undoubtedly not as good as his English however.

The month of May has indeed been a truly exciting time for Oracle. From the announced surprise purchase of Sun after IBM dropped out of the running, through to what seems to have been a successful Collaberate ‘09 conference.