by Predrag Radovic – In our daily practice of managing space usage, we most often tend to focus on our largest objects when trying to forecast the amount of space we need to allocate for the future growth. Yet unpleasant surprises can often come from the side of smaller objects that are about to req

By Robert Jaques – Oracle has announced support for AMD’s latest Opteron processor with a release of its 9i Database running 32-bit Linux designed for the processor architecture.

By Barbara Darrow and Steven Burke – Microsoft may be pulling out all the stops for its 64-bit database Thursday, but if you ask Oracle, this is a non-event.While Microsoft is scaling its database up for use on bigger iron–SMP boxes running the latest-generation 64-bit Itanium chips–Oracle

By Siva Val – Though Oracle provides an internal function to generate random numbers, there is no function that gives a random number between any two given integers. Sometimes this is needed to pull random data for test cases. The following function generates a random number between any given two in

By Vincent Ryan – Oracle 9i Standard Edition carries a base list price of US$300 per user. SQL Server, by contrast, sells for $2,249 for 10 clients, or about $225 per client. On the high end of the spectrum, IBM’s DB2 Workgroup Server sells for about $870 per user.

(Ellen O’Brien) Oracle and Microsoft this week both announced victories in the world of online analytical processing (OLAP), one boasting the results of benchmark tests and the other heralding the results of an annual market share report. (R)

Oracle has declared war on BEA Systems with its Switch and Save migration programme, designed to nudge BEA WebLogic customers towards the new Oracle9i Application Server Java Edition.

by Zlatko Sirotic – Suppose you’ve got a function that is based on a dynamically generated query that returns a ref cursor variable. Now suppose you want to use this ref cursor variable in your procedure, but you don’t know the record structure. So how do you make a “FETCH l_ref_cur INTO record_vari

Oracle9i and SQL Server 2000 add enhancements to the standard SQL language that enable you to use the database to implement your business rules and processes—SQL Server with Transact-SQL and Oracle with PL/SQL. Find out why the Oracle database engine is better suited for this role.

By James Koopmann – Oracle has given us a new parameter STATISTICS_LEVEL for collecting database statistics. James Koopmann takes a deeper look at what to expect from your database system when this parameter is set and statistics are being gathered.