April 13 - 17, 2008
Colorado Convention Center - Denver, CO

COLLABORATE 08 will be an event like you've never seen before. Celebrating their third year, the Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG), the Oracle Applications Users Group (OAUG) and Quest International Users Group (Quest) have combined resources and ideas to bring you a global event in one location.

This event will deliver the same exceptional content that has become the standard for which the COLLABORATE conferences are known. COLLABORATE 08 will bring you the best practices and user-driven training that the OAUG and IOUG offers for the full suite of Oracle products, as well as access to the greater Oracle community.

TUSC has three Oracle ACE Directors delivering presentations at COLLABORATE this year in a variety of topics and tracks. The following is a list of all the session presentations that will be given at the conference by TUSC Oracle ACE Directors, as well as other TUSC experts.

April 13, 2008

Developing New and Using Existing Web Services
9:00 AM - 5:00 PM; IOUG, Development - Service Oriented Architecture
This full-day session will cover Web Services end to end. Web Services are the next logical step in application development and provide a major step forward in the Internet computing model. There are so many components and continual research going on in this area that the amount of information can be overwhelming. This presentation will focus on the things you really need to know and care about with Web Services, while providing a practical example of a Web Service application of the future. Having ventured down the path of a full bore implementation of internal and external application integration using Web Services, attendees will receive the benefit of the presenter's hindsight introspections.

April 14, 2008

10g Tuning - Tuning Oracle has Radically Changed
9:15 AM - 11:30 AM; IOUG, Database - Performance Tuning
This presentation focuses on tuning Oracle10g. We will briefly review how Oracle has changed over the years and demonstrate the company's current direction with 10g. We'll look at RAC and how it can prepare you for moving to grid computing, how Enterprise Manager lets you manage the entire environment and some other tuning features. We will also cover statspack tuning in detail, demonstrating how to use statspack to evaluate and fix issues related to the top five wait events, load profile, instance efficiency ratios, latch waits, top SQL, instance activity, and file i/o issues. Finally, we'll look at some helpful V$ views and X$ tables when you need to dig deeper that can help as well. The presentation outline follows below.

I. Oracle...Always in the fast lane
     a. Why Oracle?
     b. Oracle Innovation
II. Consolidation
     a. Moving to centralized computing
     b. Cost savings c. Where grid fits in
III. Grid Computing and 10g new features
     a. Data Pump
     b. Rename Tablespace
     c. DBMS_ADVANCED_REWRITE
     d. Flush

The ABCs of Outside Processing with R12 - A Guide to Get Up and Running
10:30 AM - 11:30 AM; OAUG, Manufacturing
As companies continue to strive to reduce costs and improve customer service, more and more companies are streamlining their manufacturing operations with outside processing. This presentation will focus on the essentials to utilizing outside processing within the Discrete Manufacturing module. Attendees will learn the required steps to set up and configure this functionality while highlighting each area and offering tips and tricks to introduce this powerful functionality.

Your Success Extends Beyond Technical Excellence - The Non-Technical Side
10:30 AM - 11:30 AM; IOUG, Professional Development - Personal Skills
This presentation focuses on the keys to being successful at your job by applying non-technical skills. Far too often, employees become technically proficient through education, but they are never educated on the other half of the equation - namely, the non-technical skills. These critical skills should not be overlooked. This presentation reviews a variety of skills that can be applied to your work environment to make you and your company more effective. The presentation covers the following areas: customer service, change, effective meetings, listening, responding to situations, building a winning team and effective communication. These areas are each covered with examples.

Project Management Strategies to Ensure a Successful Global Implementation
1:00 PM - 2:00 PM; OAUG, Professional Development
This presentation will focus on several vital areas of project management that are often difficult to manage effectively during a global project. Often, much focus and attention is directed at a project plan and the local implementation team, while support teams based in remote areas or other countries are overlooked and under valued. This presentation focuses on several key areas to ensure a global team remains a true team, from preparing the user community, managing the CRP process, handling communication and sharing the success.

Understanding LDAP
2:15 PM - 4:30 PM; IOUG, Middleware - Security
While the LDAP standard has existed for quite some time, it is a relatively new concept for most administrators and developers who work with Oracle. This presentation will detail what LDAP is, how it works, what LDAP means to developers and administrators, and how Oracle has chosen to implement LDAP as part of the Oracle Application Server.

Uncommon Leaders of IT
3:30 PM - 4:30 PM; OAUG, Professional Development
The IT leader is now a pivotal position in an organization's business plan. This presentation will focus on the attributes that a leader must have from a character perspective to complement technical prowess. As the IT leader, you must build qualities into your team including: integrity, moral courage, physical courage, tact, loyalty, unselfishness, initiative, enthusiasm, knowledge, respect, self control, and humility. This presentation will teach you how to refine these attributes and allow the uncommon leader within you to emerge.

April 15, 2008

My Adventures Tuning Oracle Applications on RAC with Grid Control
1:45 PM - 2:45 PM; OAUG, Database
This presentation will focus on experiences of tuning Oracle Applications on RAC using Oracle Grid Control (Enterprise Manager Grid Conrol). Areas to be covered include:

1. Grid basics
2. How Oracle Applications changed the playing field
3. Quick tuning quick tips using AWR Report
4. Using Grid Control to monitor Oracle Applications
5. Using Grid Control to tune systems
6. Other Oracle Applications-specific issues
7. Summary

Using Free Tools to Load Test Your Web-Based Application
4:45 PM - 5:45 PM; IOUG, Middleware - Performance Tuning
Oracle provides many powerful tools for developing and deploying your Web-based applications. An aspect of deployment that many developers and system architects struggle with is how to effectively load test their application. Many commercial tools are prohibitively expensive. This presentation will show participants how to use two of the free load testing tools available today: JMeter and OpenSTA.

April 16, 2008

The PL/SQL Challenge: 15 Key Tips Everyone Must Know
11:00 AM - 12:00 PM; IOUG, Development - Database Programming
This presentation will cover 15 top Oracle PL/SQL tips and features. There are many features that have been incorporated into Oracle PL/SQL over the past 15 years and many that have been covered in various presentations. This presentation highlights 15 of the top features and tips and educates attendees on the usefulness and power of these top 15. Each feature and tip is supported with examples throughout the presentation.

Manager's Guide to 11g New Features
1:30 PM - 2:30 PM; IOUG, Database - 11g Features
This presentation will look at which 11g new features should be investigated for use by managers. The presenter will discuss when and why to use the following new features:

Memory Target
Partition Advisor
Security Enhancements
Read-only Tables
DDL Lock Timeout
The Invisible Index
The Virtual Column
Automatic Diagnostics Repository
SQL Plan Baselines
The Result Cache
Workload Capture and Replay
SQL Repair Advisor
ADDM Enhancements
Interval Partitioning
Partition Compression

BPEL 101
3:15 PM - 4:15 PM; IOUG, Middleware - Integration Process (BPEL) and Data (Data Integrator)
Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) has been identified by Oracle as a key technology for the future. Oracle's recent versions of the Application Server have all included SOA technologies, and its specifications for Oracle Application Server 11g indicate that Oracle is committed to SOA. As Oracle's development tools (JDeveloper, Application Express, Portal) focus more and more on Web-centric implementations, the Application Server will become a staple in most organizations committed to Oracle technologies. As such, understanding and being able to implement BPEL-based solutions will become a prerequisite for developers, administrators and system architects. This presentation will explain Oracle's BPEL implementation and how to use it effectively when architecting Web-based solutions.

Catapult to the New PL/SQL: 10gR1 and 10gR2 Key Features
3:15 PM - 4:15 PM; IOUG, Development - Database Programming
This presentation will cover the new key PL/SQL-related features specific to Oracle 10g release 1 and release 2. The new features to be covered include: new conditional compilation, new PL/SQL commands (regular expressions), new and enhanced Oracle supplied packages (dbms_output, dbms_ddl wrap procedure, dbms_warning, dbms_stats), new functions, and new enhanced SQL commands (flashback table, etc.). Each of the features covered will include example code to enforce the new feature's capabilities and usefulness.

Tony's Top 10 Oracle Tips and Tricks for Developers
4:30 PM - 5:30 PM; IOUG, Development - Best Practices
This presentation will highlight 10 tips and techniques that assist with the development of Oracle-based custom applications. These tips and tricks can be used to improve application performance, streamline code and create higher-quality applications.

The presenter will describe each topic in detail and provide real world examples of how to use the tips most effectively.

April 17, 2008

Tuning the Oracle Grid
8:30 AM - 10:45 AM; IOUG, Database - Performance Tuning
This presentation will cover the top ten tips to make tuning your architecture for grid computing easier. Oracle has come a long way from when it first introduced clustering. The tools continue to improve and installation continues to get easier. This presentation will focus on showing many of the Grid Control screen shots so that attendees can understand the depth of the product. The outline for this presentation follows below.

1. Know the basics; Introduction to RAC
2. Oracle direction
3. Market direction - Consolidation
4. Grid basics - Start with RAC
5. Grid basics - Scaling it
6. The interconnect and block coordination
7. Tuning quick tips using Statspack & AWR Report
8. Using Grid Control to monitor
9. Grid Control for multi-node systems
10. Using Grid Control to tune systems
11. Where does ASM fit in?
12. Other tips - Partitioning and block size

Take the Plunge: Top New 11g PL/SQL Features
11:00 AM - 12:00 PM; IOUG, Development - Database Programming
This presentation will cover the new key PL/SQL-related features specific to Oracle 11g. The new features covered include: new conditional compilation, new PL/SQL commands, new and enhanced Oracle supplied packages, new functions, new enhanced SQL commands, etc. Each of the features covered will include example code to enforce the new feature's capabilities and usefulness.

Vendor Awareness Session
12:15 PM - 1:15 PM; OAUG, Vendor Awareness
A look behind the scenes - Remote DBA, Database, OS Support, and Oracle E-Business Support.