Martin Giffy D’Souza has created some of the most popular plug-ins available on the APEX plug-in community page. He has learned a lot about the architecture and what it takes to make a robust plug-in. In this video, Martin will help get you started with creating your first APEX plug-in. He will also provide you with some tips and usefu… Read more
Oracle 10.2.0.1 (I know, version out-of-date) on Windows 2003: The other day one of my stored procedures error’ed out with: ORA-01801: date format is too long for internal buffer somewhere near a line in which I was doing the following assignment: d := to_char(c.date_field,’YYYYMMDD’); Where d is of type varchar2, and c is a row from a cursor for loop,… Read more
I was recently teaching an Intro to APEX course and the students had some questions about what to put in the Expression 1 text area for different conditions and validations based on the Type selected. If you’re new to APEX the various options can be confusing. To help clear things up I have covered various APEX conditions and validations along with code that demonstrates… Read more
I have been in this industry long enough to remember the bad old days, when every developer and DBA had a pile of dusty Oracle user guides on their desks and, every time their database or application coughed up an error, would thumb through the books with mounting desperation. Fortunately, the times have moved on and we now all outsourc… Read more
Michelle Malcher (Oracle Ace Director and a representative on the Oracle Security Customer Advisor Council for the Independent Oracle User Group) presents practical ways to look at security and implementing standards and procedures around the database environment to account for the security outside of the users, including secured environments for regulations and compliance. Oracle 11g provides transparent data encryption at… Read more
It has been a common practice and relatively a tough task for almost every individual Oracle DBA to decide whether to proceed or not with the upgrade whenever Oracle releases new version. The core objective of this presentation is to share my experience of upgrading 4 Cluster environments with nearly 200 databases to Oracle 11gR2. The presentation is best suited… Read more
Overview Virtualization is a hot topic in the IT world. What is virtualization and why is it so popular? First of all, virtualization is not a new concept. It was introduced in the 60s to partition large mainframes in order to utilize their full power. These partitions allowed mainframes to “multitask”. Today’s systems can also benefit from virtualization, not so… Read more
Never trust a computer you can’t throw out of a window. Steve Wozniak Deterministic Function Caching A function is considered deterministic if the outcome is the same if the input values are the same. Another thing is that the program should have no side effects. All the program changes are the return value and any out parameters. It is becaus… Read more
From time to time a request for a query to “show the current SQL” for each session appears on the internet. It’s not really difficult to write something suitable, but this particular request is an interesting demonstration of how much inertia there is in the Oracle world. Here’s a recent suggestion of what the query should look like: select sess.sid,… Read more
There is a series of posts on my blog where I focussed on getting information out of E-Business Suite and use it in my APEX application. This is especially useful for people using APEX. Here is a complete overview of those posts: Calling EBS Webservices from APEX Using EBS Open Interface from APEX Debugging EBS API calls in APEX Updating EBS data… Read more
If you follow me on my blog you might wonder if I let you get away without an actual test case, and of course I won’t do so. Here is a simple test case that demonstrates Dynamic Sampling in action: set echo on timing on time on drop table t; purge table t; — Create a sample table create tab… Read more
This was a last minute request to move five databases on two servers from an old failing storage system to a new one. There was a total of 5.6 terabytes to move and the databases were in heavy use by the development team. The DBA who usually supported these systems was unavailable so I started working with the storage team… Read more
Welcome to my first post on AllThingsOracle.com! This is the initial part of a series highlighting different aspects of “Dynamic Sampling”. So what is Dynamic Sampling? Probably most of you have already heard of it as a feature that deals with tables that don’t have any statistics gathered for – so it’s a feature of the Cost-Based Optimizer that has been… Read more
This week I attended a webinar by Cary Millsap, organized by Red Gate. It was called “Real Developers DO use Tools” and was focussed on, well, tools. At the end of Cary’s talk, James Murtagh showed a demo of their Schema Compare tool. The demo wasn’t flawless, but he recovered nicely 🙂 (note to self: don’t do live demo’s). And… Read more
Kindness is the beginning of cruelty Frank Herbert Syntax If you check the syntax for the different program objects you can see that the entire program is defined either using definer or invoker rights. The default is definer rights, so if you don’t supply the clause, the program will be defined using definer rights. This means you don’t have to… Read more
I have just learnt a couple of new methods to obtain an Optimizer (10053) trace for any sql statement that is already in the cache, without actually executing it and also enabling ‘events infrastructure’. With 11gR2 onwards, you can either use the DBMS_SQLDIAG.DUMP_TRACE package procedure or use new diagnostic events infrastructure to obtain the 10053 trace for a given sql_id… Read more
Have you ever just sat there watching all of the processes running against the database, just waiting for something to happen? Of course not! We are database administrators, architects, developers and we don’t have time for that! We also might get bored wondering why there seems to be millions of the same query running against the database – a discussion… Read more
You may be familiar with Martin Giffy D’Souza’s blog talkapex.com (if you’re not, check it out – it’s really worthwhile). But wouldn’t it be nice to not only talk about APEX, but also to APEX? The only thing you need is a recent version of Chrome (11 or up) and a microphone. And then… Read more
In the fairy tale, The Shoemaker and The Elves, a poor cobbler works to the best of his ability; and somehow, when he isn’t looking, magical beings would sneak in and polish and perfect his handiwork. It seems the people at Oracle are up on their fairy tales. Perfectly-tuned queries are the Holy Grail to developers and DBAs; we ar… Read more
Last weeks I ran into some issues with APEX, so let’s take some time to write something about them. The most recent is about heterogeneous services (also referenced as HS). Here is the case: We have an Oracle DB instance with some APEX applications and in one of those applications I need data from a MS SQL server database. Not… Read more
