(Jeff Spicer) The need to manage user IDs and their associated characteristics and credentials almost certainly arose when the very first IDs were assigned to the very first business computer users. After all, to be useful, even those first rudimentary user IDs would have needed access rights and a

(Prabhu Kapaleeswaran) J2EE application servers have become a vital enterprise component recently, with users frequently interacting with them to get the data they need. These “self-service” enterprise systems are often further improved by extending the availability of data to the right people at th

When you use OLE DB with databases that support very large numeric types (for example, Oracle’s NUMBER data type which supports up to 38 digits), OLE DB returns DBTYPE_VARNUMERIC as the column’s data type. These large numbers can be stored and retrieved by using the OLE DB DB_VARNUMERIC structure, w

(James Koopmann) Simply stated, the system global area (SGA) is just shared memory structures that are created at instance startup, hold information about the instance and control its behavior. The following table gives a brief synopsis of the particular components of the SGA, the variables that con

(Jim Czuprynski) Oracle 10g’s new DBMS_SCHEDULER package offers significant improvements over DBMS_JOB for scheduling jobs and tasks. This article – the first in a series – provides an overview of the new functionalities that the Oracle Scheduler provides for DBAs.

(Kelli Wiseth) As the first commercial U.S. airline to compete on price, Southwest Airlines has brought many innovations to air travel since its first Boeing 737 left the tarmac, in 1971. Its no-seat-assignment boarding process, for example, provides efficiency on the ground, helping Southwest a

(Bill Brenner) Oracle Corp. released fixes Tuesday for multiple security holes in Enterprise Manager, Database Server and Application Server. It was the first security update in the company’s new monthly patching cycle. (R)

(Scott Stephens) Oracle9i Release 2 offers powerful enhancements to PL/SQL collections, which can make code maintenance across releases easier. For instance, you can use PL/SQL collections in Release 2 as single arguments rather than using long lists of individual fields. (R)

(Kenny Smith) I have been working with Oracle products for a decade now — primarily as a development DBA. In that time, I’ve come across some valuable goodies I’d like to pass around. Also, I’ve run across misunderstandings of Oracle terms and functionality. Many of these misconceptions, I’ve h

When you choose to create a preconfigured database during the Oracle 10g installation, you can select the Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM) interface that you want to use to manage the database.