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Daily Archives Thursday, April 2008

The Emotional Nature of Software

We’ve all felt the extreme frustration that using a computer can cause.
Maybe you spent several hours updating a Word document, assuming it was autosaving, only to have Word collapse in a heap, erasing all your changes.
Maybe your IT department has an antivirus scan scheduled to run weekly that mysteriously starts in the morning. You can’t [...]

Posted 03 April 2008 † Jake § Uncategorized ‡ Comments Off °

Free Oracle Clusterware for Linux Support Customers

Oracle Technology Network announces that “Oracle Unbreakable Linux support customers at the Basic and Premier support levels now can download and deploy Oracle Clusterware at no additional license fee or support cost.”
   Oracle Unbreakable Linux.
 Before this the clusterware needed at least one Standard Edition License.
Now you can download the clusterware and use it as an extension of your [...]

Posted 03 April 2008 † Lutz Hartmann § Uncategorized ‡ Comments Off °

State of the Database 2008 - Ingres

LewisC’s An Expert’s Guide To Oracle Technology

Previous: State of the
Database 2008 - Desktop Databases

The first database I am covering (outside of the limited scope of desktop databases) is Ingres. For a very brief overview of Ingres, see th

Posted 03 April 2008 † An Expert's Guide to Oracle Technology § Uncategorized ‡ Comments Off °

Side effect of cursor sharing

Cursor sharing transform strings in bind variable.
So if you do
SELECT * FROM EMP WHERE ENAME=’SCOTT’;
it will be transformed in
SELECT * FROM EMP WHERE ENAME=:sys_b0;
This sometimes improved performance of application that do not use binds, for instance.
Now let’s imagine your application generates trace files. The application generates a
SELECT ‘LSC-11.1011.000.1110.1.0100.000.110′ FROM DUAL;
. Ok, let’s [...]

Posted 03 April 2008 † Laurent Schneider § Uncategorized ‡ Comments Off °

Fine-Grained Access to Network Services in 11g…

Continuing my OCP 11g upgrade campaign, I’ve been looking at Fine-Grained Access to Network Services in Oracle Database 11g Release 1.
This represents a pretty major security improvement for Oracle 11g. In previous versions the all-or-nothing security associated with database callouts was a little ham-fisted to say the least.
On the down side, I think it will [...]

Posted 03 April 2008 † Tim... § Uncategorized ‡ Comments Off °

Check These SQL Beauties Out

Participation in the Obfuscated SQL Code Contest expired on April 1st. The SQL code that was submitted was not only obfuscated but also beautiful and artful.

When the contest started, I thought that we could just vote on the entries and select the most popular as the winner. But after seeing the entries, I believe that [...]

Posted 03 April 2008 † Eddie Awad § Uncategorized ‡ Comments Off °

250,000 Tests for Uniqueness Per Second — Ain’t No Biggie

When you’re designing ETL processes the mantra of “do it in SQL” realy gets engrained in your way of thinking. PL/SQL-based processing as a method of handling business logic is anathema, as the principle of “row-by-row equals slow-by-slow” is very well highlighted by the processing of millions of rows.
Very recently though I found a case where [...]

Posted 03 April 2008 † David Aldridge § Uncategorized ‡ Comments Off °