In earlier versions of Oracle, it was not efficient to process collections that contained sparse element collections. Without the save exceptions clause specified, the statement being executed would terminate when it reached the first deleted element. With save exceptions specified, the operation wo

(Alex Nuijten) Riddle me this: Can an object exist in all_objects before it is created? Well no, of course not.

(Garry Robinson) Column-level VPD policies can be used to either restrict rows containing sensitive column data (the default behaviour) or show NULLs in the secure column (Column masking behaviour). Column level VPD can only apply to tables and views, not synonyms.

(John Coggeshall) The ability to provide data and functionality to other Internet-based Web applications via Web services is quickly becoming a requirement for serious development. While Oracle does provide a number of ways to host Web services, doing so is not always the most effective approach if

(Brian Peasland) At what stage can you safely delete archive logs? (R)

(Marcos M. Campos) I recently came across the following question: How can I find the most typical record in a group or cluster of records? For example, suppose we have a set of customer records, what is the customer that best typifies the group or cluster? The answer to this question can be used for

(Mark Brunelli) The protective wrapping around the programming language used to write procedures and commands in the Oracle Corp. database — PL/SQL — isn’t as ironclad as some might expect, says Pete Finnigan, a well known Oracle database security guru and blogger. In fact, says Finnigan, who also

(Rich Schwerin) If you’ve ever used Google Maps to get directions or Flickr to share photos, you’ve seen how today’s dynamic Web applications blur the line between traditional Web and desktop applications—with no browser plug-ins or proprietary browser features required. Two of the technologies resp

(Kailash Awati and Arati Apte) This article is a brief introduction to dates in Oracle, with a focus on date manipulation using SQL. The topics I discuss include the following: –Date display formats. –Date arithmetic and date functions.

(Nicole Alexander, Xavier Lopez, Siva Ravada, Susie Stephens and Jack Wang) The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a language for representing information about resources in the World Wide Web. To describe information in RDF, statements are essentially broken into triples: {subject/resource, p