Weblog for the AMIS Technology corner
Archive for July, 2005
Oracle Warehouse Builder – 10gR2 Paris release – Even if you do not build warehouses…
Jul 29th
AMIS is participating in the Oracle Warehouse Builder Paris Release Beta program. Unfortunately I have not had too much time for in depth involvement myself. However, from what I have done and seen, from the work my colleagues were doing as well, I am pretty – t0 use an Americanism – excited. (A more British way of putting it probably would be ‘well, it’s interesting’. But that is really to say the least. If for no other reason that organizations who have licenses for the 10gDS or 9iDS developer suites – for example because of Oracle Forms or Oracle Designer – also have the right to use Oracle Warehouse Builder! That’s a lot of tool for very little money – actually in those cases no money at all.
For quite some time I have been telling people about OWB and how its name may throw you of track: yes, it is an excellent tool for designing and building warehouses and BI applications, but it is an excellent tool for doing Data Management and several types of Data Integration tasks as well. With this new Paris release of OWB, that has become even more evident.
Designing and building ETL-processes – for Extracting, Transforming and Loading data – from a data source (a table, queue, file, ERP application etc.) to a data target (a table, a queue, a file, etc.) is a breeze with OWB, even if you do not have a DWH as a target. You can perform aggregation during the ETL process, but you do not have to. You can implement – design and generate – many different ways of transforming the data that is on the flow, but these transformation can be targeted at operational systems just as easily as at data warehouses! Read the rest of this entry »
New shipment of books – the Summer 2005 shipment is in
Jul 29th
It is getting harder and harder to keep track of all the books coming into and going out of our library. The shelves never get full as all new books are immediately taken home or to desks to browse and read. Which of course is the whole point of ordering books in the first place. And to be honest, yesterday I took home three of them. So who am I to complain. I started reading the Head First Design Patterns, and I really enjoyed it. So it seems like a definite recommendation. OK, what books did we order: Read the rest of this entry »
PLDOC, documenting your PL/SQL directly from the database
Jul 25th
Ever asked a PL/SQL code developer to create documentation for his code, the way Javadoc is able to create for Java code? It is possible using the open-source tool PLDoc. And now I hear: “PLDoc what is that?”. Read the rest of this entry »
New HTML Form element: Radio Select – Combining Radio Button and Select items
Jul 24th
It has always been a bit of a tricky discussion, when to use a group of Radio Buttons and when to use a Select (List) in an HTML Form. Radio Buttons are easier to select. Besides, all available values are displayed without user action. However, for more than up to four or five values, radio groups typically take too much place in the page.
I sat down considering this dilemma, especially since in many cases where the user is allowed to choose from more than five options, he typically uses only some of them in the majority of cases. So I figured: why not combine the radio buttons for these most popular values (say the first three or so) with a select element for the other values (up to 15 or so; above that number you are probably better off with a popup window with a List of Values). I have not seen this combination before, so in my own way I have invented it. However, that is not to say it does not already exist. In that case, forgive me my smugness.
In this article I will explain how you can pretty easily combine Radio Buttons and Select to provide a single element from which the user can select an element. I will show this using plain HTML and JavaScript as well as in the context of a Struts JSP.
Read the rest of this entry »
Feuerstein is coming to Amsterdam
Jul 21st
On september 8, 2005 Quest Software will organize a training seminar in Amsterdam by Steven Feuerstein. It will cover two topics: 1. Correcting PL/SQL Worst Practices and 2. Survey of Oracle Database 10g PL/SQL New Features. Without doubt his sessions are worthwhile, entertaining and memorable.
Hacking web apps
Jul 20th
On JavaPolis 2004 Erwin Geirnaert did a very nice presentation on hacking Web Applications. He gives an overview of how this can be achieved and then he gives some very nice examples for WebSphere and Weblogic. But my favorite is the website where he only changes the parameter patientId=12345 to patientId=* and gets the data of all patients. It is stunning to see how easy it can be to actually get access to the server itself or to retrieve confidential information and it should be a warning to all application server administrators and web developers. The presentation can be viewed on line.
Running UltraSearch
Jul 18th
Oracle UltraSearch is a web-based search application based on Oracle Text. It can be used to index a wide variety of datasources like websites, databases, files etc. and to make these available for searching. It is available with a database, an application server or a collaboration suite installation. I’ll describe in this article how to get it up and running (as part of a database installation). This is a summary of the instructions on OTN.
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Using Oracle Enterprise Search (Text Searches)
Jul 18th
Last week I attended a Theme meeting of the Dutch Oracle Usergroup (OGH). The topic was called “Zoek en Gij zult Vinden” (“Search and you will find”) by Wouter van de Weghe of Oracle.
My colleague Aino wrote a detailed blog on the evening. Oracle Text, Ultra Search and Enterprise Search were covered this evening.
An interesting question came up at the end of the session. “If the document searches in Oracle are so great, then why is it almost impossible to find a document on Oracle Tech Net? Even if you have all the details, such as title, author and publication date?”
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Oracle High Availability Concepts
Jul 15th
Definitions
| Oracle Dataguard | Group of services who guarantee HA, data protection and disaster recovery for Oracle databases |
| Oracle Standby Database | The name used for Oracle Dataguard until version 9.0.1. Dataguard == Standby Database |
| Phystdb | Physical standby database |
| Lostdb | Logical standby database |
| Rman | Oracle recovery manager |
Concepts
The concept of Dataguard is, that a shadow database exists next to a primary database. It protects against dataloss and/or loss of availability.
Two types of standby databases are defined: Read the rest of this entry »
Oracle text
Jul 15th
The Dutch Oracle Usergroup (OgH) organized a session about (text) searching capabilities of Oracle technology. The presentation was done by Wouter van de Weghe of Oracle and consisted of three parts: explaining Oracle Text, discussing UltraSearch and introducing Enterprise Search.
Read the rest of this entry »
