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Niall's Oracle Pages – Oracle Opinion since 2004

Archive for July, 2004

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DBAs are from Mars, developers are from Venus to paraphrase a well known popular psychology text. Certainly it often seems that way. It doesn’t really help that DBAs have more and more databases and systems to manage each passing quarter (OK for some that would be each week). and that developers have to get the latest code out faster than ever. This article has some interesting thoughts on this and the perenniel debate about where to put what code.

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Written by Niall Litchfield

July 29th, 2004 at 8:52 am

Posted in Uncategorized

Guide to Generic Connectivity

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Connecting to Non-Oracle Systems

I have also this morning uploaded a quick how to on Setting Up Generic Connectivity. This document is a step by stem guide to Oracle’s generic connectivity, which is a free – but little known, database feature for connecting to non-Oracle services. The official documentation (this is the 9i version) details some of the restrictions. Generic Connectivity has 2 advantages over Oracle’s Open System Gateway products (purchase here).

  1. It enables you to connect to any ODBC datasource for which you have a driver and
  2. It is free. The full featured products cost $15k per computer (US list price).   

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Written by Niall Litchfield

July 26th, 2004 at 8:23 am

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Scaling Oracle.

What do you do if your magnum opus was marketed with an Oracle Version number in the title? Who for example would now buy a book with 8i in the title? This was the challenge that faced james morle of scalabilities who has written probably the definitive work on making Oracle scale effectively, and who consults extensively on scaleable solutions. James’ answer – licence the book for free – that’s correct, now one of the best researched and important books on the effective use of Oracle is available here The book is available, and will be updated, online or you can download a pdf version of the book as well.

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Written by Niall Litchfield

July 26th, 2004 at 7:44 am

Posted in Uncategorized

with one comment

A question was asked on Oracle-l regarding indexes and column order. Specifically



Saw a table where the "order of query" on the table and the "order of key"

are different . For faster results shouldn't they be in the same order.

for eg:

Select ... where A.ID = ... and A.Name = ...

The Key order on this table A NOW is Name & ID Order .

Shouldn't they be in the order ID , Name ?..

I have a script that shows the same execution plan regardless of order. The better bet is to put the column used most often first.

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Written by Niall Litchfield

July 13th, 2004 at 3:49 pm

Posted in Uncategorized

without comments

Oracle has released a Statement of Direction regarding its Tools products. This contains some interesting stuff. For example

Oracle recommends that Forms, Reports and Designer customers follow a similar path that it took

with its own E-Business Suite of applications:

  • Move to the Internet,
  • Upgrade to the latest versions of Oracle Forms, Oracle Reports, and Oracle Designer; and
  • Interoperate and coexist these applications with new J2EE applications using Oracle’s Application Server.
  • The news for dedicated designer shops might be even worse. The executive summary here is no new features or enhancements of existing features – presumably JDeveloper or a competitors offering should be looked at carefully for designer shops.



    Oracle Designer will not introduce new features or enhancements but will continue to be fully

    supported and part of Oracle Developer Suite future releases.

    The full document can be found here

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    Written by Niall Litchfield

    July 13th, 2004 at 11:13 am

    Posted in Uncategorized

    without comments

    Wow 2 updates in one night – and on the same subject. I have mentioned Mark Rittman’s blog previously. The Usenet thread here and associated article here exemplifies what I mean by professionalism.

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    Written by Niall Litchfield

    July 12th, 2004 at 8:25 pm

    Posted in Uncategorized

    without comments

    There are very few things in the Oracle world that get me angry – on the whole it isn’t worth it. If you want to run your database in noarchivelog mode on raid5 on windows and tune it by attaining a 99.95% Buffer Cache Hit Ratio then go right ahead.

    Persistently ignoring sound advice and conducting personal abuse on the other hand does get me angry. So congratulations go to The utterly inept Omlet v4 for earning the first Avoid these people award from me.

    Lets keep it professional folks.

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    Written by Niall Litchfield

    July 12th, 2004 at 8:00 pm

    Posted in Uncategorized