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If you have a lot of PL/SQL packages, it should be real easy to publish them as Web Services - after all, JDeveloper contains a nice wizard for exactly this purpose.

I expected that a lot of people were already using this functionality, so I was very surprised to find a fairly trivial bug in the code built by JDeveloper. I found it reasonable enough to have a stored procedure taking a PL/SQL VARCHAR2 collection as input and calling it with non-ascii characters in the collection elements, but my application server disagreed. The message was ORA-01460: unimplemented or unreasonable conversion requested.

After some investigation, we found that this is caused by defective code built by the JDeveloper wizard. It builds a call to OracleCallableStatement.setPlsqlIndexTable() where the last parameter (elemMaxLen) is set to zero. This is a request for the JDBC driver to automatically figure out the max length - but it doesn’t work. You can fix it by manually changing the zero to a large value like 4000.

Oracle has registered this issue as bug 7503269.

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Preparing for my own presentation, I missed Grant Ronalds presentation on declarative development with JDeveloper. But he showed that it’s possible to build a complete ADF Faces application without writing a single line of code.

I saw Scott Spendolini give a very good presentation on some relatively cheap 3rd party components that you could integrate into you APEX application. At the PL/SQL expert panel they gave out a quiz to all developers. Steven Feuerstein had found a lot of interesting corners - it seems I don’t know PL/SQL as well as I thought…

At the Oracle ACE Directors briefing, Duncan Mills and Clemens Utschig told us about Oracles strategy, new releases etc., Unfortunately, we are not allowed to talk about much of it until July 1st… The focus was on the BEA aquisition, which seems to be progressing nicely with some interesting parts being integrated into the Oracle product palette. After the Oracle presentations, Oracle ACE Directors Eric Marcoux, Andrejus Baranovskis and Lucas Jellema presented some of the things whey are working on, including a big WebCenter-based application and a Forms to ADF Faces migration.

After the briefing, I gave my own presentation “What’s Hot and What’s Not”, trying to explain all the choices available to Oracle developers today. I’ve been talking to a lot of people at this conference and have had to conclude that ADF Swing is simply not being used much. So ADF Swing has been downgraded from dark green green to a yellow (see my Oracle Tools page).

Then it was off to first the Oracle ACE panel moderated by Justin Kestelyn of OTN for an interesting discussion about the role of the ACEs, followed by the Meet the ACEs reception. After reception, I headed to Arnaud’s for the Oracle ACE dinner. Amazingly, among the eight people at our table, we had Europe, Africa, Asia, North and South America and Australia represented - only Antarctica was missing. The Oracle ACE program is truly global!

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