(John K. Waters) About two-and-a-half years ago, Tony Jedlinski, VP of administration and warehouse operations at Roman, found himself with an application maintenance backlog he was sure he’d never catch up. Roman had decided 18 years earlier to build its own applications—a logical choice for on

(Jagadish Chatarji) This article introduces the concept of explicit cursor. We will also examine different approaches to work with explicit cursor. This builds on the concept or cursors, which I looked at in my previous article along with looking at SQL cursor and cursor attributes.

(Scott Stephens) Oracle Spatial is a powerful set of Oracle objects for storing, manipulating, and querying graphical shapes. There are many transformation functions to find complicated results such as the intersection or union of two graphical shapes. There are also functions that return the area a

(Parthasarathy Mandayam) Stored procedures offer several distinct advantages over embedding queries in your Graphical User Interface (GUI). Your first thought may be: “Why tolerate the added development overhead?” After seeing the advantages, you may change your mind. (R)

(Noel Davis) Welcome to Security Alerts, an overview of recent Unix and open source security advisories. In this column, we look at problems in Oracle Reports, Skype for Linux, MediaWiki, Kate, Kwrite, Shorewall, ekg, libgadu, PHPNews, phpSurveyor, Affix, Heartbeat, and phpPgAdmin.

(Jim Czuprynski) As a DBA and as an applications developer, I have worked with DB2, Teradata, Informix, Sybase, and SQLServer databases. I have to admit that Oracle’s extensions to standard ANSI Structured Query Language (SQL) have always impressed me as some of the most powerful query and data main

(Vincent Chan) For those with limited hands-on experience, implementing Oracle RAC 10g can be an intimidating prospect. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

(Steve Callan) In this final part of the series, we will look at some additional resources for HTML DB, which are freely available. The resources include training documentation, blogs and news feeds, a free workspace (hosted by Oracle), and a user forum. Oracle Corporation typically posts a statemen

(Fairlie Rego) Oracle Automatic Storage Management (ASM), introduced in Oracle Database 10g Release 1, is a special-purpose cluster filesystem embedded into the Oracle kernel; it removes the need for a third-party volume manager and filesystem. Many more details are available, but suffice to say her

(Chris Schalk) You may have heard that Oracle’s ADF Faces has a built in “skinning” technology. “Skinning” is the ability to define an overall application look and feel. Microsoft ASP.Net has this capability, but there isn’t yet a standard J2EE technology for this, however Oracle’s ADF Faces does pr