Logger 2.1.0 - Text Length > 4000 Characters

In preparation for the release of Logger 2.1.0 I've decided to write a few posts highlighting some of the new features.

I must thank Juergen Schuster for suggestion the following change to Logger. He sent me an email with this request and though it took a while to get in, I'm glad to finally see it in this release of Logger.

In the main Logger procedures the first parameter, p_text, is a varchar2 data type. This means that in PL/SQL you can pass in strings up to 32767 characters however the max table size (pre 12c) for a varchar2 is 4000 characters. As you can imagine it caused some people some unexpected runtime errors when they passed in large blocks of text. The only way to get around this was either check the size of text before logging it (if you were unsure of it's final size) or store it in the EXTRA (clob) column.

Starting in 2.1.0, Logger will gracefully handle text entries larger than 4000 characters. If the text is larger than 4000 characters it will automatically be appended to the EXTRA column and a message, "*** Content moved to EXTRA column ***" will be displayed in the TEXT column. I hope this resolves some unforeseen runtime errors that may have occurred in the past.

With 12c finally released (and its ability to have varchar2 columns of 32767 length) this functionality is bound to change / become obsolete. A new issue has been created to address this in a future release of Logger.

5 Years Later...

I was working on another post today and noticed that I had just exceed the 400,000 pageviews milestone! The next thing that caught my eye is that it has been 5 years to the day since my first post. So I thought I'd write an article reflecting the past five years.

I started this blog (initially called apex-smb.blogspot.com) to simply post some of code I was working on and elicit feedback from the community. Seemed simple to me: post some code and get free feedback. Over the life of this blog I certainly did get a lot of feedback. I also got a lot more than I had imagined. Since my initial post I have achieved many milestones that I didn't think were possible or hadn't even thought of when I first started. These include:

- Co-founding ClariFit
- Writing several books
- Becoming an Oracle ACE, then later ACE Director
- Working on various open source projects

By far the best outcome is the relationships I've built with people in the Oracle community around the world. This is especially true with the people that I looked up to (and still do) when I first started working with APEX (called HTMLDB back then).

I'm not going to say that this blog is the sole reason for everything that took place over the past 5 years. There were a lot of people that helped support and encourage me along the way. Without their continued support I don't think I'd be in the positive situation that I am in today.

This blog started out as a fun side project with no real motive other than to share code and help improve my writing skills. Turns out it changed a lot for me and went well past its initial intentions. The only "negative" thing (and I use the term very loosely) is that over the past few years I haven't had the same amount of time that I would like to allocate to writing articles at the same pace when I first started. This is primarily due to running a company, writing various books, working on open source projects, and my speaking engagements (and yes I realize that these are all "first world problems").

Going forward I plan to still continue writing. It's something that I really enjoy doing and I hope you, as a reader of this blog, enjoy as well.

Looking forward to the next 5 years!

- Martin

APEXposed en Montreal - Sept 10/11

This fall ODTUG will be in Montreal for the 2nd annual APEXposed conference. Like last year, there's a star-studded lineup of speakers including Oracle's Director of Software Development, APEX's product manager, and Oracle ACE and ACE Directors. The one difference compared with last year is that we have some local speakers from Montreal and Toronto.

Some of the presentations that I'm looking forward to are:

- Joel Kallman's (Oracle Director of Software Development) talk on APEX 5.0, giving us an inside look of what's coming up in the near future.
- David Peake's (APEX Product Manager) talk on how to leverage some of the new features in 12c with APEX.
- Roel Hartman's (Director at APEX Evangelists) presentation on building mobile applications in APEX.
- Steve Feuerstein's (Dell) keynote. I just talked to him about it, should be great!

And, as shameless plug, I'll be giving two talks: "Instrumenting your PL/SQL and APEX Applications" and "APEX Development Best Practices". I'm really excited about the talk on code instrumentation as I'll be highlighted some of the new features that I've integrated into the 2.0.0 version of Logger and also share some of the new upcoming features.

If you're interested and yet haven't already registered for the conference you're in luck. It's still not to late to sign up for this 2 day (September 10th and 11th) conference. To register simply go to http://www.odtug.com/apexposed and sign up.

See you in Montreal!

It's up to You - Oracle and APEX Open Source Projects

At ODTUG Kscope 13 last week I got to moderate the APEX Lunch & Learn experts panel. One of the questions that came up was when a certain feature was going to be added to Peter Raganitsch's  APEX Developer Addon.

This sparked a bit of conversation around open source projects in the Oracle and APEX communities. They're a few people who create and maintain these open source projects. Unfortunately they're not a lot of other people who contribute to these projects. Because of this, projects don't get upgraded and enhanced as quickly as they could.

It's up to all of us in the community to enhance open source projects. Next time you need a new feature added to a project, instead of asking for it, I encourage everyone to add it yourself then contact the developer with the changes so it can be implemented to the project.

On a personal note, I'm heavily involved with several open source projects. The two most popular ones are Logger and the ClariFit APEX Plugins. I just moved the ClariFit APEX Plugins to GitHub yesterday to make it easier for others to contribute to.

Logger 2.0.0 - Released!

After several months in Beta, I'm please to announce that Logger 2.0.0 is now officially released! You can download the zip file from the 2.0.0 release page.

Over the past few months I've blogged about some of the significant changes we've made to Logger. Here are all the articles describing some of the new functionality:

• Alpha (contains some high level change notes)
• Beta (contains some installation upgrade notes)
• Enable Session Specific Logging
• Session Specific Logging - Advanced Features
• Logging Parameters

The upgraded help document on the main Github page contains all the detailed information about Logger as well as examples. In the future, I'll be looking at moving it towards the Wiki page for better organization but for now it should do.

If you've never used it before check it out, best of all it's free and open source!