Business software maker Oracle Corp. beat out German rival SAP AG in its bid to buy Retek Inc., reaching an agreement to purchase the retail software maker for about $670 million, Oracle said.

You connect to an Oracle database by using the Microsoft OLE DB Provider for Oracle (MSDAORA), and then you end the connection on the server side. When you open a new connection to the Oracle database from your application, you receive the following exception error message: System.Data.OleDb.OleD

(Kris Rice, Carl Backstrom and Raj Mattamal)Many end users need the ability to produce print-quality reports from Web-based reports. With Oracle HTML DB 1.6, developers can use Javascript and Formatting Objects Processor (FOP), a print formatter application provided by The Apache Software Foundation

(Robin Schumacher) Historically, in trying to achieve maximum database performance, Oracle DBAs and performance analysts have fought an uphill battle to obtain solid response time metrics for system as well as user session activity. The problem facing DBAs has always had two facets: first, deter

(Mike Lehmann) In my last column, I introduced WS-Security and its implementation in Oracle Application Server 10g Release 10.1.3. The focus was on the basic WS-Security conceptual model, where security—specifically authentication—was carried in the SOAP message rather than in reuse of HTTP protocol

(Sanjeev Malik) Today’s enterprise-wide systems are becoming increasingly sophisticated with a variety of operating systems and software development platforms. This presents the constant challenge of integration, which requires creative ways of configuring products from multiple vendors to work in t

(V. Benjamin Livshits) J2EE allows developers to create large, complex enterprise systems relatively quickly. However, applications using comprehensive, multi-layer libraries such as provided by J2EE are prone to performance bottlenecks. That’s why it’s especially important for developers to profile

Oracle Chief Financial Officer Harry You is leaving the company after just eight months, creating a key void as the business software maker continues to digest its $10.3 billion acquisition of PeopleSoft.

(James Koopmann) Ever since I was a newbie to databases I never questioned how sorting occurred in a database. I just knew that there was a predefined order to the character set (English) and I never thought much more of it. We all get too complacent about equating predicates in a WHERE clause or ad

(Sanjay Mishra and Alan Beaulieu) In this introductory chapter, we explore the origin and utility of the SQL language, demonstrate some of the more useful features of the language, and define a simple database design from which most examples in the book are derived.