by Jon Udell – When the mainstream trade press first started writing about XML, one of the key benefits invariably cited was precise search. You don’t hear much about that any more. It wasn’t, and still isn’t, the wrong idea, but XML-savvy search requires an investment in data preparation that virtu
Other News
Oracle sets its sights on BEA users
Oracle has declared war on BEA Systems with its Switch and Save migration programme, designed to nudge BEA WebLogic customers towards the new Oracle9i Application Server Java Edition.
Dividing an Update into Batches
I want to update a large table in 5,000-row batches, but I don’t know how to split up the data. The table doesn’t include an incremental numeric or integer primary key. How can I perform the update while maintaining good performance?
SQL MINUS when you need it
(Patrick Sand) When your SQL Server syntax doesn’t support the MINUS operator for finding the difference between two sets, you can use the following two queries, based on left/right outer joins to do the equivalent. My problem was to find new data (new in the current data but not in the previous mon
Dynamic Ref Cursor with Dynamic Fetch
by Zlatko Sirotic – Suppose you’ve got a function that is based on a dynamically generated query that returns a ref cursor variable. Now suppose you want to use this ref cursor variable in your procedure, but you don’t know the record structure. So how do you make a “FETCH l_ref_cur INTO record_vari
New Spec Surfaces for Orchestrating Web Services
By Darryl K. Taft – IBM, Microsoft Corp. and BEA Systems Inc. are on tap to submit the Business Processing Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS) specification to the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Systems (OASIS), marking yet another standard for orchestrating Web
Extreme XML: XPath Querying Over Objects with ObjectXPathNavigator
Steve Saxon introduces the ObjectXPathNavigator, which provides the power and flexibility of the XML programming model without the serialization overhead.
JavaCC, parse trees, and the XQuery grammar, Part 2
By Howard Katz – Part 1 of this article took an introductory look at grammars, parsers, and BNF. It then introduced JavaCC, a popular parser generator. Part 2 shows you how to modify the sample code in Part 1 so that you can use an additional tool, JJTree, to build a parse tree representation of the
OLAP for Developers
This intro to OLAP for developers from SQL Server Magazine shows you how to implement drillthrough and actions in SQL Analysis Services.
Get Set for Web Services Now
By Joe McKendrick – Will Web services ever move from vaporware to reality? Web services has been the “in” topic of vendors’ announcements, analysts’ pronouncements, and trade press articles for some time. While the complete technology architecture has not been implemented in any meaningful way in pr