(connormcdonald) Jonathan Lewis just published a blog post about NVL and COALESCE and the optimizer costings for each.

(stewashton) I have been meaning to update my COMPARE_SYNC package for some time. I want to change the interface and the functionality a bit, so I am leaving the existing package alone and creating a new one called COMP_SYNC.

(Frits Hoogland) This is the third part of a series of blogposts on how the Oracle database handles redo. The previous part talked about the memory area that stores redo strand information:

(Job Oprel) After an upgrade of Oracle Enterprise Manager from 12.1.0.5 to 13.2, I wanted to deploy a new version of the plugin oracle.sysman.db.

(Dirk Nachbar) Many people struggle with the configuration and execution of the SOA Purge functionality under Oracle SOA Suite 12c.

(ilmarkerm) Some background info: We need to provide direct database access to many developers and data analysts. On database side managing so many different users securely means you have to use the same authentication source as all the other systems in the company, for example Active Directory.

(Martien van den Akker) This week I got to do a SAML2 implementation again for APEX against ADFS. Actually the same setup as last year. One pitfall I fell into with open eyes, was the Redirect URI on the ‘Web SSO Partner Provider’. I entered /ords/f*, but it had to be with out the wild-card: /ords/f

(Christian Antognini) If you run TKPROF without arguments, you get a complete list of its arguments with a short description for each of them (here the output generated by version 18.1.0):

(Peter Raganitsch) For the Analyse Webserver Logfile Application (AWL) I wanted to show better information instead of just the Useragent String, because they are a mess and contain confusing information.

(Zahid Anwar) In an OLTP environment, it is crucial to have fast response times to redo log writes i.e. low latency.