(Cathleen Moore) Who says open source can’t measure up to commercial software for mission-critical applications? Far from being a mere quick fix or low-cost alternative, open-source software is helping real-world companies solve their most pressing IT problems.
Other News
Data Access Strategies Using ADO.NET and SQL
(John Papa) When your goal is a scalable and efficient enterprise solution, you need to develop an efficient data-access strategy. You can’t just do some testing on your production machines and rely on the results. While an application can exhibit excellent response times when serving a few users, p
Speeding Up Queries with Semi-Joins and Anti-Joins: How Oracle Evaluates EXISTS, NOT EXISTS, IN, and NOT IN
(Roger Schrag) Optimizing SQL usually gives the most significant results when DBAs are called upon to “make the system run faster.” Using tools like Statspack or Enterprise Manager, it is often easy to find the slow SQL. But how do you make the queries run faster? That is the challenge! In this
I’m OK, You’re Abnormal
(Philip Greenspun) Normalization is a way of splitting up data until each table represents propositions about a single type of thing. Normalization is a beloved subject in academic courses on database management systems and in job interviews because (1) it has a patina of formalism, and (2) it is ea
Interview Questions for Oracle, DBA, Developer Candidates
This article contains a list of questions and answers for Oracle job interviews.
Difference between Access path and Open data path
(Kent Milligan) What is the difference between Access path and Open data path? (R)
Autonomic Computing: Products and Applications (Sample Chapter)
(Richard Murch) In this chapter, we shall review some examples of autonomic products and their applications. This will illustrate the benefits and advantages of autonomic computing, which is in use today, not just in commercial enterprises, but in other industries, such as space exploration, where a
Responsive User-interface
(Andrew Flick and Devin Rader) Providing users with a responsive Web user interface has been a consistent problem because of the fact that once a page has been loaded, connection to the server is severed. This causes lengthy trips back to the server, requiring visible postbacks for everything from t
SQL Server 2005 – Setup and Deployment
(Marcin Policht) So far, in our series of articles, we have presented the most significant new and enhanced features available in Microsoft’s SQL Server 2005 Beta 2, but neglected to provide you with information regarding its installation. While it is more than likely that, by now, you already have
Overcoming decades-old legacy systems with XSLT and Muenchian grouping
The implementation of B2B Web services is sometimes complicated by their need to interact with entrenched legacy systems. While the flexibility of XML can often be enough to compensate for the limitations of these systems, it is not always the only technology required. One method developers can use