Paul Brookes: Oracle, APEX, and other musings.........

In my previous  post a couple of days back, I demonstrated a simple Apex demo with D3 pulling dynamic data from the database in the form of a bubble chart.  I promised to share the code so here it is. It's really quite simple.  In short, i've created a table, D3_COUNTRIES, which contains 10 sets of rows each with a country code, name and a value.  The Javascript code on the page has an interval that runs every 2 seconds, and each time calls an Ajax callback process to get another set of country data.  The code then uses D3 to create a bubble chart for that data, using a nice transition between each set. First of all create the table and upload the data.  Here's the DDL to create the D3_COUNTRIES table. CREATE TABLE "D3_COUNTRIES" ( "ID" NUMBER(10,0), "COUNTRY_CODE" VARCHAR2(2) NOT NULL ENABLE, "COUNTRY_NAME" VARCHAR2(100) NOT NULL ENABLE, "CREATED_DATE" DATE, "

I'm on a train up to Liverpool for the UK Oracle User Group Tech 14 conference, and decided it's about time for a post showing something I've been working on.  I don't post often these days, which I blame on work and family commitments, but is probably just down to pure laziness.  Anyhow, I'm feeling in the mood so I'll just get on with it in case the desire to catch some zzz's becomes overwhelming.  Also it takes my mind of the bad coffee served up on the train. So, I've been getting into  D3  a little, which if you don't already know is a JavaScript library for manipulating data to create interactive graphs and charts.  Some of the stuff people are creating using D3 is amazing, including this dynamic bubble chart example.  I thought I would use this example as the basis for creating a bubble chart in Apex, that dynamically updates with some cool transitions, using data from the database rather than the real time API in the example. The demo ca

It's finally here, for Linux & Solaris at least: Oracle 12c Database

Here's a link to a nice write up in Forbes on something that I was involved with over the last few years: Thomson Reuters Eikon - Mapping The World's Energy On The Move

If you already use Oracle Spatial or Locator then you probably already know Simon Greeners SpatialDB Advisor blog, but if not then I can recommend it as an invaluable source of Spatial nuggets.  Whether you are just starting out with Spatial or have some level of experience with it you will find something there which will knock your socks off! When I was helping a client with creating a geo-spatial database I found it confusing with regard to what is included as part of the Locator licence ('free' with Enterprise Edition) instead of the additional fee option of Spatial.  One of Simons posts  really makes it clear what is and isn't included with Locator, and thus I was able to ascertain that the client only really needed the functionality available within Locator, resulting in a considerable saving on licence fees for the Spatial extension.

I was recently asked by a client to create a quick POC in Apex to demonstrate how relationships between physical assets (in this case oil refineries) could be maintained using a graphical tool.  So I looked at a number of different Javascript graphing libraries  and chose MXGraph from JGraph  which seemed to have the most features and looked relatively easy to integrate.   It's worth mentioning that it is not Open Source and has a fairly hefty licence fee. The requirement was to be able to show the process flow between units in a particular oil refinery with relationships representing the refined output from one processing unit and the input into another.  The idea is to build out quite detailed maps of the process flows within refineries and then use this with other 3rd party outage data to predict the affect on production and thus ultimately the change in price of crude and refined oil products. The POC was quite simple, as you can see from the screenshot below, and was real