(Brian Fonseca) The city of San Francisco will join IBM on Wednesday to unveil CrimeMaps, a new application designed to simplify how local police officers track crime patterns to help alert the public of potential threats in the area. More than one year in the making and built upon IBM’s DB2 tec
Other News
Introduction to Database and Application Worms
In the recent past, a new set of threats have emerged – worms that propagate through vulnerabilities in databases rather than through more traditional operating system or web server holes. Despite their lack of sophistication, these worms have been somewhat successful because of the poor state of
7 Steps to SSL Encryption
(Gary Zaika) In SQL Server 2000, Microsoft introduced new features to satisfy its customers’ growing concerns about data security. One little-understood feature is automatic support of Secure Sockets Layer (SSL)-encrypted network traffic between the clients and the server. Encryption slightly slows
More efficient XML parsing with the Streaming API for XML
(Berthold Daum) This tip shows how to parse XML documents efficiently with the Streaming API for XML (StAX), using the StAX reference implementation deployed with the specification. Berthold Daum explains the two API layers available with StAX: the iterator-style API and the cursor-based API. XML
HOW TO: Return Multiple Columns in a DTS Lookup Query
With the Data Transformation Services (DTS) Lookup object, you can retrieve data from locations other than the immediate source. A query and a connection is associated with the lookup. If the query returns more than a single column, the Lookup object returns the results in a zero-based array.
Exploring DB2 Data Access via Web and Internet
Over the past year, many of our customers have been asking us for advice on designing applications that access DB2 using the World Wide Web, or via Internet/intranet. Customers are either considering applications to run in Microsoft Windows environments, or trying to remain platform independent b
An Introduction to Schematron
(Eddie Robertsson) The Schematron schema language differs from most other XML schema languages in that it is a rule-based language that uses path expressions instead of grammars. This means that instead of creating a grammar for an XML document, a Schematron schema makes assertions applied to a spec
A Technical Overview of XBRL
(Srinivas Pandrangi) This article provides a technical overview of the XBRL standard, with emphasis on the architecture of the standard and the potential applications surrounding the business reporting functionality it supports. Business reporting has been the focus of discussion over the last f
Oracle’s DBMS_PROFILER: PL/SQL Performance Tuning
(Amar Kumar Padhi) An application can always be fine-tuned for better performance with the use of better alternatives or with the new features introduced with every release of Oracle. Simply inspecting the code can bring out the bottlenecks eating up your processing time. Using explain plan to f
Calculating dates and times doesn’t have to be tricky
(Itzik Ben-Gan) Temporal calculations—that is, calculations based on dates and times—are often hard to put together. One reason they’re so tricky is that more than one convention exists for expressing starting and ending dates and times. For example, we generally accept that January is the first mon