(Jonathan Lewis) In the previous chapter, I warned you that the clustering_factor was an important factor in the cost of using a B-tree index for a range scan and could easily be the biggest cause of errors in the calculation of cost. It’s time to find out why things can go wrong. (pdf)

(Renee Boucher Ferguson) Oracle is developing a new service-oriented architecture strategy that could overtake the momentum around its Fusion Applications initiative, according to sources close to the company.

(Mark Brunelli) Oracle is set to release JD Edwards World A9.1 — the newest version of its full-service ERP suite for IBM iSeries — at Collaborate ’07 Oracle users conference in Las Vegas. (R)

(Alan Joch) J2EE or .NET. Mashups or portals. PL/SQL or PHP. Developers don’t lack for choices when they need to build applications. There also aren’t any shortages of architectures, frameworks, and platforms.

Integrigy has released an advisory regarding an undisclosed security vulnerability in Oracle Applications 11i that may allow an unauthenticated, internal attacker to obtain Oracle Applications’ user account encrypted password strings, which in turn can be decrypted using previously published informa

You can grant users various privileges to tables. These privileges can be any combination of select, insert, update, delete, references, alter, and index. Below is an explanation of what each privilege means.

(yas) There are some important things to consider when interpreting sql trace files. One of the most important ones is the read consistency trap as it is called in the documentation.

(Peter Ebell) Ever since Microsoft introduced long filenames back in whenever, using spaces in file or directory names has always been tricky. As I found out recently, even with modern software like the BPEL Designer in JDeveloper, using spaces in your directory structure might come back to haunt yo

(Steve Callan) When Oracle gave up the ghost on client-server Forms several years ago, one of the built-in’s that went by the wayside was related to feeding parameters into an alert message function. If you handled errors or missing input (as you should), part of the Forms migration process involved

This is a brief analysis of the pre-release announcement for the upcoming April 2007 Critical Patch Update (CPU).