In the recent past, a new set of threats have emerged – worms that propagate through vulnerabilities in databases rather than through more traditional operating system or web server holes. Despite their lack of sophistication, these worms have been somewhat successful because of the poor state of

(Amar Kumar Padhi) An application can always be fine-tuned for better performance with the use of better alternatives or with the new features introduced with every release of Oracle. Simply inspecting the code can bring out the bottlenecks eating up your processing time. Using explain plan to f

(Bert Scalzo) I often react to new Oracle releases the way Steve Martin did in the movie The Jerk when a new phone book arrives. I cannot help but get excited about all the new technology that Oracle routinely delivers. But, with the release of Oracle Database 10g, that enthusiasm cannot be overstat

Back to the basics: Everything you always wanted to know about the syntax and options you can use when creating a table in Oracle.

(Ken Atkins) This quick tip is about a little-known (at least I had not known about it!) function in SQL called NVL2 that acts kind of like a combination of NVL and DECODE. It has been available since 8i.

Oracle 8 supports LOBs (Large Objects) which are objects with methods resembling those used for file access, e.g. read, write, length and trim. LOBs are quite powerful but very tricky to use, here is a description of what you need to know to get aquainted. You need DCOracle2 for LOB support (Ora

(Fred Sandsmark) Who are you? It’s a question Oracle users are constantly asked by dozens of login screens every day. “The most important thing in any security consideration is the concept of who—the identity,” says Uppili Srinivasan, director of Oracle’s Identity Management and Security Products. I

With the recent release of the .NET Managed Provider For Oracle, .NET developers finally have a high-performance way to access Oracle data using ADO.NET. In a previous article, it was discussed how to connect to and execute SQL statements against Oracle databases using the Oracle managed provider. N

(James Koopmann) Detection of which tables or indexes are being accessed the most will allow you to fine tune memory structures and access methodologies. Let’s take a look at Oracle’s segment level statistics and determine which objects are being accessed the most by our applications. If you have

(Alorie Gilbert and Charles Cooper) Oracle believes that it can still carry the day, but its battle to acquire PeopleSoft is getting tougher as time goes on. With regulators taking longer than expected to make a decision, government trustbusters are reportedly building a case to challenge the de