Weblog for the AMIS Technology corner
Archive for February, 2005
Book Review: Mastering Oracle SQL
Feb 28th
Title: Mastering Oracle SQL, 2nd Edition
Authors: Sanjay Mishra, Alan Beaulieu
ISBN:0-596-00632-2
Publication Date: June 2004
More info can be found at website of O’reilly. There’s also a sample chapter for download.
This weekend I finished reading this book on Oracle SQL. So it’s time to write a review.
After following the 7Up workshop given at AMIS (see: Description Oracle 7Up Workshop in Dutch) I was triggered to read more on the new syntax since Oracle 7.
Read the rest of this entry »
Migration from MySQL to Oracle – using Oracle Migration Workbench
Feb 27th
All statistics on the visits to the posts in the AMIS Technology Weblog are gathered in a MySQL database that sist underneath WordPress. We would like to do some analysis on these statistics, for several reasons: to try out the Oracle Warehouse Builder 10gR2 Beta Paris Release we have currently available, to develop a number of articles and demos around Oracle BI technology in general and of course to learn more about the visitors to our weblog: where do they come from, what days of the week do they visit, which times of the day (when is the best time for us to do maintenance, like an upgrade of Wordpress to release 1.5), what topics are they primarily interested in, which browsers do they use etc. This analysis for obvious reasons is to take place from within an Oracle database. That means we have to migrate the data from MySQL to Oracle. In this post, I will roughly describe how such a migration can be done quite easily using the Oracle Migration Workbench (OMWB). Read the rest of this entry »
BC4J (ADF Business Components) logging and debugging – great blog from Sandra!
Feb 26th
The JHeadstart Blog just published a very good blog by my former colleague Sandra Muller: ADF Business Components Diagnostics. Previously, I knew to find a few remarks on this topic in the Trouble Shooting chapter in the JHeadstart Developer’s Guide, and it has saved my life more than once. I remember the time where an application that tested perfectly crashed i the production environment. The BC4J logging – which I learned how to turn on from the JHeadstart Developer’s guide – told us that BC4J was running in statefulll mode and attempted to ‘dehydrate’ (that’s a term I learned from Oracle BPEL Process Manager) the Application Module’s state to the database. In order to do so, it needed to create a couple of tables in the database and the Application’s Database User did not have the CREATE TABLE privilege in the Production Database! Read the rest of this entry »
PHP goes Pro
Feb 25th
Just read on http://uk.builder.com/webdevelopment/scripting/0,39026636,39238117,00.htm
that IBM is officially going to support PHP (Personal Home Page). The agreement between IBM and Zend also means that IBM will dedicate a part of it’s developers website to PHP. IBM will also implement new features for PHP.
This agreement will be good for the further development of the very popular PHP language. PHP comes in place when you are looking for a powerfull web development language without the overhead of J2EE of .NET. It will never replace J2EE of .NET since these two are much more suitable for enterprice level applications.
PHP is easy to learn and powerfull. It includes everyting from generating pictures, database access etc. It’s an ideal language when you want to develop web applications the easy way.
I am not against Java; far from that (allthough that’s not allways what you hear when you hear me talking -). But I like to have an open mind. Use the right tool for the right job, that’s what I believe in. Java and PHP both have their own purposes usable in different environments.
Little Gold Nugget: SQL*Plus COPY Command
Feb 25th
Although not a “new” command in SQL*Plus, it’s very cool.
Recently I had to move some data from one table to another in a different database. The Source table structure included a LONG column. In the Target Database the column was a CLOB.
Luckily for me Oracle provides a TO_LOB function. However… LONG columns and Database Links don’t mix. There must be another way… Read the rest of this entry »
Tom Kyte a true Oracle Guru.
Feb 23rd
My impressions from the Oak table seminar with Tom Kyte.
I knew Tomas Kyte only from the book ‘Effective Oracle by Design’ and was interested to hear from him live. The contents of the seminar did have a lot of stuff which can also be found in the already mentioned book. But I did hear some interesting new things.
Most impressive I found the way Tom was able to explain the most complex things. Having a few examples and small test cases with only using SQL plus made things very clear.
Before the seminar I had never visited his site ‘ask Tom Since the seminar I have visited it several times and I must say the answers you get there are as cristal clear as it can be.
Things I found the most interesting:
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Background on the read and write consistency in an Oracle database and the way it influences the firing of before or after row triggers. Never use code in those triggers that cannot be rolled back, because you may end up with unexpected behaviour!!
Pipelining 10g Database Export and Import
Feb 23rd
A very interesting feature in the Oracle 10g Data Pump I becase recently aware of is the option to link an Export job in one database to an Import job in another (or presumably the same) database through a pipe. This allows for direct data transfer without the creation of the intermediate dmp file. 
It also allows the Import to start processing as soon as the Export has started, without having to wait for the Export to complete. I just stumbled across an Oracle Magazine article that discusses this feature in much more detail:Tuning: Speed and Simplify Data Movement
Export and Import Over the Network Read the rest of this entry »
First impression of Oracle jDeveloper BPEL Beta2
Feb 23rd
The last few days a colleague and I have been looking into a beta release of Oracle’s BPEL designer for jDeveloper. This tool enables you to orchestrate single web services into complete enterprise workflows using the Business Process Execution Language. First we went through a tutorial that was written for the Eclipse version of the BPEL designer. This way we were able to learn the concepts of BPEL. We were able to implement almost everything in the tutorial even though the JDeveloper version is slightly different from the Eclipse version.
Our first impression of the tools is that it is stable. We didn’t encounter big problems so far. We started with beta1 and are currently working with beta2 of the product. Beta2 gave us the possibility to make the database adapter work.
Read the rest of this entry »
Debugging JavaScript – article from DevShed – Introducing Venkman
Feb 23rd
Debugging JavaScript code – an all too familiar nightmare. Yesterday I was told about Venkman for FireFox, today I found this article in DevShed: Debugging in Javascript, Contributed by Chris Root – 2005-02-16.
Venkman
If you have the newest version of Mozilla you can utilize a tool called Venkman. It is a Mozilla extension that provides a full blown debugger environment with variable monitoring, break points and many other features seen in debuggers from other languages.Venkman in conjunction with Mozilla isn’t really a complete IDE like Visual Basic or Delphi, but it’s as close as it gets. if you’re curious and want to try Venkman go to the Venkman project home page and also try a Google search for “using venkman.” You’ll find all the information you need to get started.
The article goes on to discuss DIY JavaScript debugging – almost obsolete for FireFox users I would say. Still, an interesting read.
From the Venkman’s Project Home Page: Read the rest of this entry »
ADF Faces – Heeft Java dan eindelijk zijn Oracle Forms (deel 2)?
Feb 23rd
In een serie van drie artikelen lopen we door de wereld van Java Server Faces. Het vorige deel gaf een introductie op de basis elementen binnen de JSF standaard. Het volgende deel gaat in op andere JSF componenten libraries zoals Apache MyFaces en ICEFaces, het combineren van verschillende libraries en de ontwikkeling van eigen JSF componenten. In deze aflevering kijken we naar de Oracle JSF implementatie: ADF Faces. We kijken ondermeer naar de ingebouwde AJAX faciliteiten van ADF Faces. Ook bespreken we de data-binding faciliteiten van ADF Faces. Als IDE maken we gebruik van Oracle JDeveloper 10.1.3.2. Hoewel enige Java achtergrond nuttig is, zijn de artikelen toegankelijk voor alle Oracle ontwikkelaars.
