Oracle Database Insider Blog

The 2009 Oracle Spatial User Conference was held in Tampa April 23, following GITA's Geospatial Infrastructure Solutions Conference. Attendance was on par with last year's event despite the global economic malaise, with 112 registrants from the United States, Canada, the UK, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Australia, Mexico, Columbia, Brazil, Chile, and Australia. An enthusiastic audience absorbed product presentations from Oracle experts on Oracle Spatial, Locator and MapViewer, and real-world case studies by a wide variety of users of Oracle's spatial and location technology.

A related item: Directions Media published a great article by Korem's Pierre Lavoie, "Is There a GIS in Your Database?" which presents a positive and practical treatment of Oracle's spatial and location technology products and the leadership role Oracle plays in the industry. Read this article.

You can review the Oracle Spatial User Conference program and Materials here, where copies of slide presentations from the event are posted for downloading.

Learn more about Oracle Spatial:
oracle.com/database/spatial.html (general information)
oracle.com/technology/products/spatial (more detailed information)

Looking for ways to cut costs? Discover new revenue potential? Accelerate business processes? Many organizations have a wealth of location-related information that could release a flood of opportunities to achieve these objectives. But how to get started? Don't enterprise location or geospatial initiatives entail a lot of expensive software, specialized training, integration challenges? Not necessarily.

On Thursday May 7 at 11:00AM Pacific time, Directions Media presented a live webinar that shows how easy it can be to prototype and develop location-based applications using technology tools that, in many cases, organizations already have as part of their Oracle Database and Oracle Fusion Middleware environment, such as Oracle Locator, APEX, and MapViewer. Xavier Lopez from Oracle Spatial product management and Steven Pierce from system integration/consulting partner Johnston McLamb discuss approaches for rapidly building prototypes to generate executive buy-in and support for enterprise geospatial projects that can produce immediate benefits.

This is a must-see for anyone interested in tapping the value potential of location intelligence within the enterprise. You can still watch this webinar even if you missed the live event. Play the webinar here.

For more information on Oracle's spatial and location technology:
oracle.com/database/spatial.html (general information)
oracle.com/technology/products/spatial (more detailed information)

Australian retail distributor Metcash, owner of IGA distribution and IGA Fresh, discusses its upgrade to Oracle Database 11g earlier this year with ZDNet Australia.

Metcash highlights some of the benefits it realized from its upgrade, including reducing batch report production time, cutting out the use of Excel spreadsheets, and the ability to store more data online. It also realized other performance benefits from query caching, which helped avoid duplicating retrieval as well as the ability to make structural changes to the database without having to rebuild the "materialised database view aggregate" — a process that used to take 24 hours.

Read the full article from ZDNet Australia here.

Here’s the Database Insider report from TWDI’s spring conference provided by Voltaire Yap of Oracle Events Marketing:

Attendees lined up at the Oracle booth for signed copies of Frank Buytendijk’s book, Performance Leadership: The Next Practices to Motivate Your People, Align Stakeholders and Lead Your Industry. Frank, a Vice President, in the Enterprise Performance Management group at Oracle, delivered a riveting keynote Performance Comes from Venus, and Management from Mars to a full house. Instead of PowerPoint slides, Frank relied on his gift for story telling by relating how his use of the Nike chip to collect data from his daily runs has inspired him to keep running, much like a good BI tool can do for your organization.

Crowds also gathered to hear data warehousing guru Bob Stackowiak, a Vice President in the Business Intelligence group at Oracle, and get signed copies of his book, Oracle Essentials: Oracle Database 11g.

As always, education was a key theme at TDWI. With that in mind, Oracle held over 15 mini-theatre sessions in its booth to educate attendees on the technical and business benefits of Oracle’s Business Intelligence, Data Integration and Data Warehousing solutions. In addition, Oracle product manager Maria Colgan hosted a free 2-hour training session, Oracle Data Warehousing Best Practices, Wednesday evening to very positive reviews.

We are already gearing up for the TDWI World Conference this summer in San Diego, so stay tuned for more information.

Oracle Application Express (Oracle APEX) is a rapid Web application development tool for the Oracle database. Using only a Web browser and limited programming experience, our hero can develop and deploy professional applications that are both fast and secure. Will his colleague, the Spreadsheet Master, ever learn his lesson?

Allegro Group is the number one e-commerce company in Eastern Europe and, the second largest online auction business in the world. Millions of auctions are open on their trading platform every day, and growing over 40 percent year-on-year. Listen to this podcast interview with Christian Maar, CIO, who discusses why Allegro Group selected the HP Oracle Database Machine to support its fast-growing enterprise data warehouse.