Author: Patrick Sinke

Another word for authentication is acces control. Authentication is the mechanism to verify the user’s identity and provide access to a system or application based on the credentials entered …

Thanks to a completed messed-up Windows (I managed to demolish my network connections beyond repair) and a helpful tutorial from Dizwell’s blog (thank you oh so very much!) I …

Some time ago I’ve been experimenting with the Apex 3.0 feature that migrates entire Access applications to Application Express. It took me a lot of time because I found …

The live demo presented by Carl Backstrom as presented to the attendees of the Apex European Training Days is now publicly available! You can review at Carl’s blog , …

Why bother using Google if you know you will find the answer on this blog anyway? It would be a nice feature if you could search directly from your …

Ever wondered how they Easter date is determined? And, even more important, how it is to be maintained in you application. Manually updating the date every year is an …

The changelog of Apex 3.0 mentions something about featuring shuttleboxes. Don’t get too enthousiastic, you still have to do a lot of work yourself. And it’s pretty limited, because …

Allright, that is an exaggeration. Hugely. But it cost me some headache before I realised what was my problem. I still had HTML DB 1.6 running and I thought …

Sometimes you are writing some codes and things really come together well. Let’s imagine, you are writing a little tool in ApEx for registering hours on a project. The …

Assume you have a table with contaminated data (in this example: non-unique values on col1 and col2), for instance because no unique key was implemented. col1 col2 value 2 …

Recently, Oracle announced and released it’s Enterprise linux. Time to check out what’s it all about! While downloading the software from OTN, I was surprised to see there were …

Although bitmap indexes are already available in Oracle 8i or even before (some sources even say 7.3!!!), they are still surrounded by many myths. Time for some clearing up. …

This is probably described many times before, but you just can’t have enough example code snippets. Imagine you want to restrict users to update records which end-dates are in …

If you’re ever asked to export some data from the database into an Excel file (or vice versa), do check if you have ApEx installed on your server. There …

This is just a simple trick which is not well-known but makes life easier when using the good ol’ SQL*Plus commandprompt (and many people still do!). If you set …

When defining sequences, you can choose to set a cache size or disable the sequence cache: create sequence tst_nc2  start with 1 increment by 1 nocycle nocache; create sequence …

Oracle just released ApEx version 2.2. Here is the list of changes. Most of the changes do not come as a surprise as they were already mentioned in the …

We all are at least a bit aware of the awkward behaviour of NULL in Oracle. But it still is difficult every time we encounter it in a function …

Joomla! is open source portal software and content management software in one. The software is easy to install and highly customizable.

Using CLOBs, conversion to and from VARCHAR2 may give you a headache.

 It took a few months, but I finally start appreciating the Oracle SQL Developer developed by Oracle (The Project Formerly Known As Raptor). There are still some bugs, for …

Many people have a dislike of Dbms_job. Setting the right parameters requires good knowledge of the input parameters and you probably need a calculator too! In Oracle 10g, a …

Historically, when you wanted to connect to an Oracle database you could not get around downloading and installing a bulky Oracle client. Since 2 years already an alternative exists: …

It is not well-known how the Oracle built-in Soundex exactly works. This article explains the basics and also describes the Dutch variation of this algorithm.

At the end of january, Oracle announced that Oracle HTML DB was renamed to Oracle Application Express. At the same time they published a roadmap for the next year. …

Last week I visited the Oaktable Seminar “Performance by Design” by Jonathan Lewis, held in Utrecht. I would like to share some of the topics of the seminar which …

Audience: DBA’s, infrastructure architects. A brief explanation of the Oracle Dataguard and High Availability concepts.

The Adobe SVG Viewer is a viewer for Scalable Vector Graphics like charts and graphics and, as I found out, is used by Oracle in web-applications. It’s downloadable at …