(Kimberly Floss) It’s not unusual to spend hours tuning SQL statements in hopes of getting better SQL performance, often relying on methods that are time-consuming at best or, worse, border on guesswork or wizardry. However, with the new SQL tuning tools available in Oracle Database 10g—specifically
Other News
Index Creation Guidelines
(Leo Peysakhovich) Often times index placement is a confusing task for many SQL Server developers. We all have been told that indexes do boost performance. The problem is how to select the ideal type of index, the number of columns to index, and which columns should be indexed, and how to answer all
DB2 Application Development with Stinger
Have you considered how the latest database technology can improve your development productivity? If so, the database that has helped many developers is DB2 UDB — for mixed environments including Linux and Windows. There are many new features available to developers and DBAs in the next release of D
Combating Complexity: Eight Architects Tell You How
(Sudhakar Ramakrishnan) Over the past few months, our series on Middleware Architecture has shared with you the insights of eight highly experienced software architects — and given you the opportunity to learn lessons both small and large. Taken individually, each article in the series gives you use
Ask Oracle: How do I set up a Virtual Private Database?
(Richard Rendell) How do I set up a virtual private database in Oracle? Within a single database, the virtual private database (VPD) enables data access control by user through dynamically rewriting the users SQL statements to include and additional WHERE clause predicate. A security policy func
Oracle Pipelined Table Functions
Basically, when you would like a PLSQL (or java or c) routine to be the «source» of data — instead of a table — you would use a pipelined function. PIPELINED functions will operate like a table.
IBM gets heuristic in database wars
(Angus Kidman) The technology, codenamed mineLink and developed at the company’s research centre in Almaden, uses heuristic techniques to identify data fields which contain related information even though they may be labelled differently. For instance, a field labelled ‘Surname’ in one database may
IBM Cloudscape: Understanding Java class path
(Jean Anderson and Susan Cline) IBM Cloudscape is a small-footprint Java database that doesn’t require any installation or administration. However, since Cloudscape is implemented entirely in Java, understanding the Java class path is the key to a trouble free — and not a troublesome! — installati
Read File Transformation
(Allan Mitchell) This article was inspired again by a newsgroup post asking how a directory of files could be read and the filenames be entered into a SQL Server table along with the file itself. In this article we shall be making use of code we have used previously in other articles along with t
Taking a Proactive Approach with SQL Server Agent
(Frank Garcia) SQL Server agent plays an important role in the day-to-day tasks of a database administrator (DBA). It is often overlooked as one of the main tools for SQL Server management. Its purpose is to ease the implementation of tasks for the DBA, with its full-function scheduling engine, whic