Queensland Ingres
User Group Events 2002


The Queensland Ingres User Group Inc meets the last Wednesday of each odd numbered month.

All are welcome, however because we are a self-funded group, non-members will be encouraged to join. 

The QIUG Management Committee has tabled the following events for the 2002 calendar year:

26 November 2002

 

 

Annual General Meeting and Christmas party

Date:           Tue 26th November 2002

Time:           3:30pm for a 3:45pm start

Venue:         Conference Room
                     Level 5, AXA Building
                     144 Edward Street, Brisbane

Agenda:      Managing INGRES with UniCenter (45 minutes)

Steven Whichelo, Computer Associates

The presentation will include an overview of Unicenter management concepts, looking at how Unicenter can be used to manage end to end business applications and how this can assist in problem diagnosis.

The focus of this presentation will be the use of the Unicenter Ingres Agent, providing advice for using Unicenter to manage and automate administrative tasks within Ingres databases, including examples and a live demo.

Questions and Answer Session (10 mins)

Annual General Meeting (20 mins)

President's Address - summary of Annual Report etc

Appointment of the Auditor for 2003

Election of Management Committee for 2003

QIUG Christmas Party

Prizes

Lucky draw from all member presenters this year:
* First prize: $80 book voucher from McGills
* Second prize: $50 worth of Movie Tickets

Most meetings attended - A pack of goodies from CA

Major Lucky Door prize - $30 book voucher from McGills

2 x Minor Lucky Door prizes - A bottle of wine each

Followed by food, drink and good company ...

24 September 2002

 

Date:           Tue 24th September 2002

Time:           3:30pm for a 3:45pm start

Venue:         Conference Room
                     Level 5, AXA Building
                     144 Edward Street, Brisbane

Agenda:      The Theme of the Presentations is "Configuration Management of Database Objects"

What Can Go Wrong - Phil James

Phil will present a short case study on what can happen when configuration management of database objects is not considered important.

ABF and INGRES Configuration Management at Porgera

Tony Shellshear, Software Design Consultants

Tony will present a short case study on the config / schema management used in the Porgera database environment for managing the Ingres DBMS / ABF applications in production on Sun machines. This will include an overview of the environment structure used, and the scripts used to automate the modification / migration aspects of the database management.

NRM Database Support Team Approaches

Adilia Murabito, Natural Resources and Mines

Adilia will explain several approaches that the NRM Database Support Team uses to changes to database objects, including
- baselines/releases of database objects including ABF
- automated database release upgrades
- comparison tool to check database schema
- centralised deployment of database maintenance scripts
- configuration management database

Schema Management in an Out of Control World

Trevor Hames

Trevor will present a short case study on the configuration management used in a very large environment -
- 7 production databases between 5 and 120GB - with inconsistent schemas
- 60 development/migration databases based on the production database
schema(s) with regular incoming changes
- developers spread over England, Ireland and the US
- near 24x7 accessibility requirement

The QVAS Approach

Jeff Hill, Natural Resources and Mines

The QVAS Project at NRM uses ERWIN, VSS (Visual SourceSafe), Replicator and a number of UNIX scripts to produce and manage the database objects for the 5 databases constituting the QVAS System.  All changes to the Database Objects are managed using Quality Management principles.

The building of the databases from the ERWIN model requires the running of 3 UNIX scripts.  Once the databases are built, a comparison is made between this newly built environment and an existing environment and all differences accounted for before this new Schema is accepted as the new baseline. The Schema is put into VSS and then extracted to the Master Build environment - CurrentDB location. From there, any development environment can be built with the need to extract from VSS to the local environment.

The operation of the Production system has been made dependent on Replication, the databases being intact and the use of a large number of rules and procedures. As part of the start up of the system after the backups, checks are made that replication is working and all the database rules are in place.  If these checks fail then the system is shutdown and the DBA alerted.

At NR&M, the QVAS Project manages their database objects from conception right through to the day to day running of the Production system.

DIFFMate - A Schema Differencing Tool

Robert Walter, Thentec

Robert gave an overview and a live demonstration of DiffMATE, a tool comparing the definitions of database objects across two schemas.

Question and Answer Session

Networking and Refreshments Sponsored by Computer Associates

30 July 2002

 

Date:           Tue 30th July 2002

Time:           3:30pm for a 3:45pm start

Venue:         Conference Room
                     Level 5, AXA Building
                     144 Edward Street, Brisbane

Agenda:     Bea WebLogic, Java and INGRES (40 mins)
by Luke Glen, BEA Systems

Luke gave an overview of the BEA Platform including Bea WebLogic and how to integrate with INGRES applications. He covered JDBC integration with INGRES Databases as well as JCA adapters available for INGRES. This allows a company to maintain their investment in INGRES while leveraging INGRES databases in a Java world.

He quickly covered Portals and Workflow integrating with INGRES
Databases as part of the workflow. He will also explain/demonstrate how a JCA adapter could be used to build/host a WebService that accesses an INGRES database
.

Allocation in Modify Generated by copydb  (20 mins)
Alan Brown, Polymorphic Solutions Pty Ltd

Alan's presentation covered the "copydb" command with emphasis on the following topics:
- Tracking Free Space
Preallocation Of Space
- Loading Data
- Modify to table_debug.

Questions and Answer Session (20 mins)

Questions forwarded by QIUG members were addressed in the meeting by the membership.

Networking and refreshments sponsored by Computer Associates

28 May 2002

 

Date:           Tue 28th May 2002

Time:           3:30pm for a 3:45pm start

Venue:         Conference Room
                     Level 5, AXA Building
                     144 Edward Street, Brisbane

Agenda:     CA World 2002 Update (20 mins)

Bill Allen - Computer Associates, Brisbane

Bill recently attended the CA World conference in Olando, Florida. Bill will present an update from the conference, with particular focus on Ingres and OpenROAD news and developments.

Java Development with INGRES

Dennis Doolette, Computer Associates, Australia

Dennis will present an overview of JDBC and discuss the Ingres (and hence EDBC) support for JDBC.  He will look at the application deployment architecture and the application development aspects of using the Ingres JDBC driver.  Dennis will also cover the enhancements to the JDBC driver for Ingres 2.6. This presentation includes demonstrations.

Questions and Answer Session  (10 mins)

Networking and refreshments sponsored by Computer Associates

26 March 2002

 

Date:           Tue 26th March 2002

Time:           3:30pm for a 3:45pm start

Venue:         Conference Room
                     Level 5, AXA Building
                     144 Edward Street, Brisbane

Agenda:      Impacts of the New Privacy Act (25 mins)
by Allan Maraj - Thentec Group

Allan practiced law for 18 years before moving into the Information Technology industry. He has practiced both in the public sector as a Crown prosecutor and Crown counsel and in the private sector. He has also taught at the University of Canberra and been involved in research projects with other Universities in Australia and overseas.

He looked at the 10 National Privacy Principles which apply to the private sector and the 11 Information Privacy Principles as they apply to the public sector in Queensland. The National Privacy Principles came into effect on the 21st December 2001 and have the force of law. The Information Privacy Principles have been adopted by the Queensland Government. He will focus on the implications that the Privacy Principles have for database design and maintenance as well as security issues.

Interfacing of Graphical Mining Packages to the INGRES Database (25 mins)

Tony Shellshear - Software Design Consultants

The mineral resources industries make extensive use of a variety of graphical 3D packages (such as Datamine, Vulcan, Minemap, Gemcom, and Minestar) to evaluate and display many aspects of the mineral deposits, opencut and underground mines, and the other infrastructure such as waste dumps associated with the mine. These packages rely on a sophisticated 3 or 4D binary file structure as their internal source of data for the 3 dimensional display and calculations they perform.

By default creating this internal file has involved the loading of 5 to 10 ASCII files of surface location, down-hole survey, geological, assay, geotechnical and environmental data. These files are then ‘desurveyed’ within the package to produce arrays of data points each with 3d coordinates. Finally these are merged into the large binary source file used for display.

At Porgeara in PNG, this base data is managed by an INGRES / ABF database application of some 250 tables. The load process is typically very involved and takes up to 12 hours of hands on work to produce, each time there is a significant addition to the database.

This presentation will discussed SDC’s work in deciphering the internal binary file, and producing it directly from the Ingres database, a process which now takes ten minutes.

Networking and refreshments sponsored by Computer Associates

Meeting agendas of other years:

2008 Meetings

2007 Meetings

2006 Meetings

2005 Meetings

2004 Meetings

2003 Meetings

A Notice of Meeting is mailed to our members prior to each meeting. Click here for more information on membership.