By Shawn Wildermuth – I like to think I am open minded about technology. I have used a variety of database engines in the last seventeen years; xBase, Access, SQL Server, Sybase, Oracle, and DB2 to name a few. I like the direction Oracle 9i is taking and hope that Microsoft’s SQL Server takes some o

By David Baum and Ed Baum – With its highly interactive, online game, The Sims Online, Electronic Arts is changing the way people play. To support this online world, the company built a secure, scalable foundation based on Oracle9iAS RAC and Linux.

By Ellen O’Brien – The gap between front-runner Oracle and competitor IBM in the database market is closing, and Microsoft last year gained more market share than either, according to a new report by Framingham, Mass.-based International Data Corp.

By MARC L. SONGINI – Oracle has been trying since early last year to make its E-Business Suite 11i applications less complex to install, and some users at the company’s AppsWorld conference said the effort may be paying off.

By Mark Hutain – ERP application schemas have thousands of tables and views. At our company, it was taking a full hour to “Drop User Cascade.” By using 1 Drop_master session and 3 drop_slave sessions, the time was cut in half. These procedures allow multiple sessions to drop tables and views simulta

Steven Feuerstein and Bryn Llewellyn continue their series on new Oracle 9i features with an article on how to use Utl_Http to implement a requestor in a B2B implementation.

by Loay AbuZaineh – Sometimes after killing a session on NT, the status of the session will be changed to KILLED and it will keep this status for a very long time before it dies.A faster way to remove it is killing the session thread from NT itself after using the “alter system …” command.

By David Kelly – Application integration consistently ranks as one of the top three concerns of CIOs in Morgan Stanley’s monthly surveys of Fortune 1000 IT executives. Possessing the ability to respond more quickly to business change, connecting more closely with partners and customers, and squeezin

by Keshav Chennakeshav – In OLTP applications, data gets created and updated. An audit trail is often required to know who created a record and who updated it. A “SELECT NVL(user, SYS.login_user) FROM DUAL” query shows the database login account. The function below is helpful when the database login

By David Watson – Oracle’s promise of “unbreakable” databases and application servers has yet again found to be wanting, but New Zealand’s Oracle User Group (NZOUG) president says the company has actually been very clever.