This article is a Q & A with Mark Townsend, senior director, product management, Oracle Corp.

(James Koopmann) Many database shops that have more than just Oracle. In fact, SQL Server is gaining popularity and there are many shops that I know of that have this database system within their walls. Oracle has a generic connectivity methodology that allows for the Oracle database server to acces

(Kelli Wiseth) Provisioning storage for a single database instance, let alone an entire enterprise, is complex. Typically, the process runs something like this: Come up with a reasonable estimate of the amount of space you’re likely to need over the long term, map out what you hope will be an optima

(Mohammad Anwar) This tip achieves the same output as the Tip for Week of August 23, 2004. In that tip, the author uses ROWNUM and inline views, whereas I use the analytic function RANK() to do the job.

(Mark A. Williams) Many developers already realize, and many more are beginning to realize, the powerful duo formed by the Oracle Database in conjunction with .NET applications. One of the many powerful features of the Oracle Database is its ability to work with XML. Using the Oracle Data Provid

(Robert Westervelt) Oracle Corp.’s Enterprise Grid Alliance (EGA) has added three new members to its ranks, including its first end user, adding clout to its effort to produce user-friendly tools and grid computing standards. (R)

Regular expressions represent a powerful tool for describing and manipulating text data. These are supported by a wide variety of programming and scripting languages, text editors, and now by Oracle Database 10g SQL and PL/SQL. Regular expressions are extremely useful, because they allow programm

(Kelli Wiseth) These days, no system can afford downtime. Fortunately, many of the new automated management features in Oracle Database 10g are designed to anticipate and prevent downtime. For example, the optimizer now automatically gathers its own statistics and intelligently refreshes them as nee

(Vance McCarthy) Java, ASP and .NET developers working with Oracle, as well as Oracle DBAs, face increasing pressure to find affordable, full-featured tools to help with database integration development projects. One of the most affordable options, Perl scripting, has now become an even more powerfu

(Martha Centeno, Kevin Closson, Olivier Fraimbault, Phil Horwitz and Gregory Verstraeten) How do I implement a database server that can dynamically scale to meet my changing IT requirements? How do I improve the response time and throughput of my database server? How do I deliver availability while