Daily Archives Friday, August 2008

Recommending a book

LewisC’s An Expert’s Guide To Oracle Technology

I’m often asked if I can recommend a book for people. I do the occasional review but I think people are more interested in “getting started” types books. I was asked this question in a post earlier today and gave a few examples. So, here is what I am reading, have recently read, or have recently re-read.

<a href=”http://www.apress.com/book/view

Recommending a book

LewisC’s An Expert’s Guide To Oracle Technology

I’m often asked if I can recommend a book for people. I do the occasional review but I think people are more interested in “getting started” types books. I was asked this question in a post earlier today and gave a few examples. So, here is what I am reading, have recently read, or have recently re-read.

<a href=”http://www.apress.com/book/vie

Friday Lulz

I read xkcd and actually get about 75% of the jokes, I think. Anyway, this one popped up in Reader this morning, and it made me laugh, especially in light of our recent discussions about O/S, a.k.a. the “which O/S would win in a fight” thread.

Enjoy, and read xkcd if you don’t already, and don’t [...]

Security can be basic

Sometimes I think that people think of security, especially database security, as a domain for the highly-skilled consultant. However, sometimes it is the most basic little things that need attention and it doesn’t require a high-priced, highly skilled consultant to figure it out.
Case in point: I recently arrived at a new customer site to help [...]

Virtual Columns in Partitions

The basic idea is that you can now define those additional, derived columns but without triggers and data storage. Chet has a more detailed example at the link above. Also, read the comments as Gary makes some good points. The one thing I wanted to add is that you can now define virtual columns in your partitioned tables. I tend to lean toward fully normalizing my data but there are times where…

Virtual Columns in Partitions

LewisC’s An Expert’s Guide To Oracle Technology

OracleNerd posted an entry yesterday about virtual columns. A virtual column is basically a column that is based on an expression, i.e.


CREATE TABLE test_name (
first_name VARCHAR2(25),
last_name VARCHAR2(5

delicious blog ” Oh happy day — the new Delicious is here

The best and most effective redesign I've ever seen

delicious blog ” Oh happy day — the new Delicious is here

The best and most effective redesign I've ever seen

Your First Computer?

Rich’s semi-nostalgic post yesterday has some of our readers reminiscing about their first computers, ones they owned or ones they first used for geeking out, ahem, I mean programming.
For example:

Sounds like Floyd had a Radio Shack/Tandy TRS-80, but he says he worked with card batches in college.
Raimonds used a real classic, the Soviet-made Elektronika BK-0010.
We [...]