(Daniel Rubio) With leading internet portals offering extremely detailed mapping services, end users now expect a lot when encountering a digital map—and with it, the bar for developing these types of applications has raised considerably.

(Woody Hutsell) This whitepaper discusses methods for improving Oracle database performance using solid state disks to accelerate the most resource]intensive data that slows performance across the board. (pdf)

(Mark Brunelli) The new version of Oracle Enterprise Manager offers wider support for third parties and will soon offer the ability to manage SAP applications through an Oracle partnership with Nimsoft. (R)

(Sam Alapati) In this week’s part of a multi-part series covering OC4J and J2EE applications, you will learn how to deploy J2EE applications, create data sources, and more.

(Rudy Limeback) How could I sort a query result according to a specific order (not ascending or descending) that I will be supplying from the values of the column to be sorted? (R)

(Kevin Closson) The multiple buffer pools feature of Oracle has always seemed much underappreciated. Back in the late 90s we found the feature invaluable when running audited TPC-C benchmarks on Sequent gear. With that workload it is critical to be able to size blocks according to the row size and m

(Tarry Singh) VMware has this very cute VCB utility. Although on the ESX 3.0.1 server where I am currently building my RAC, I just use FTP/SCP to copy the files to some network drive. This is handy, as I need to do all kinds of things, like remove a node, simulate rebuilding and recovering RAC files

(Edmon Begoli) Continuing on review of the Oracle’s XMLDB native XML features. In this entry I will look at some pros and cons of this product. I am still in a learning phase of Oracle XMLDB therefore my assessment of its pros and cons will be subjective and somehow incomplete. Think of this entry a

(Bob Watkins) XML has become a common standard for information interchange. XQuery 1.0 is a standard language for querying data expressed in XML form. It is often called the SQL of XML because it performs the same function for XML that the SQL language does for relational data.

(Steve Callan) One of Oracle’s most critical and important functions is how it keeps track of events. Even within a single processor, “simple” database system, keeping track of events is just as important as recording and maintaining the proper order of events in a distributed system. Recording the