Posts
This is the entry point for the Oracle World - a static page that indexes all the pages on this and other sites.
If you want to use the more traditional web pages entry point you can bookmark this URL for ordinary postings. This is also the URL for the page referenced to the right called All Postings.
Email:
bhargavtripathi@yahoo.com [ 4 any queries mails are most welcomed ]
bhargavtripathi@live.com
Homepage: http://bhargavtripathi.blogspot.com
A few Inspirational Thoughts:
Neils Bohr:: An expert is someone who has made all the mistakes that can be made, but in a very narrow field
Michael Shermer: We have evolved brains that pay attention to anecdotes because false positives (believing there is a connection between A and B when there is not) are usually harmless, whereas false negatives (believing there is no connection between A and B when there is) may take you out of the gene pool.
Stephen Hawking:The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.
Erwin Schrödinger: Thus, the task is, not so much to see what no one has yet seen; but to think what nobody has yet thought, about that which everybody sees.
Richard Dawkins: Science has no methods for deciding what is ethical. That is a matter for individuals and for societies. But science can clarify the questions being asked, and can clear up obfuscating misunderstandings. This usually amounts to the useful: “you cannot have it both ways” style of arguing.
Granny Weatherwax (auth: Terry Pratchett): Trouble is, just because things are obvious doesn’t mean they’re true.
Albert Einstein: Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.
Carl Sagan: You can’t convince a believer of anything; for their belief is not based on evidence, it’s based on a deep seated need to believe.
Charles Darwin: Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.
Richard Feynman: It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.
Stephen Jay Gould: The invalid assumption that correlation implies cause is probably among the two or three most serious and common errors of human reasoning.
History of Oracle
Way back in June 1970, Dr E F Codd published a paper entitled A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks. This relational model, sponsored by IBM, then came to be accepted as the definitive model for relational database management systems – RDBMS. The language developed by IBM to manipulate the data stored within Codd's model was originally called Structured English Query Language, or SEQUEL, with the word 'English' later being dropped in favor Structured Query Language – SQL.
In 1979 a company called Relational Software, Inc. released the first commercially available implementation of SQL. Relational Software later came to be known as Oracle Corporation.
Oracle Version 8
You'll find versions of Oracle8 available for many of today's popular computing environments, in particular Windows, UNIX and Linux. This is one of the reasons why it's so popular, and luckily for us as developers, doesn't make that much of a difference which platform it is running on.
The original version of Oracle8 was designed to support applications in the up-and-coming network-computing era, ranging from a small departmental application right up to a high-volume enterprise-wide system. In order to provide this level of flexibility, Oracle8 comes in two different editions:
Both editions actually share the same code base, but the difference is that the standard edition (referred to simply as Oracle8) is aimed at smaller applications, whereas its big brother, the Enterprise Edition, comes with a number of high-end features that allows it to support the thousands of users of larger enterprise-wide applications. The Enterprise Edition provides greater support for very large databases containing hundreds of terabytes of data, whilst the number of columns per table and maximum database size, for both editions, has been increased compared to previous versions of Oracle.
In order to support large numbers of users , both the Oracle8 and Oracle8 Enterprise Edition servers provide a method of connection pooling that temporarily drops and then re-uses a physical connection for those users that are idle, in conjunction with its networking software Net8. With this type of technology there is no reason why an Oracle server cannot support many thousands of concurrent users.
With that said, it's worth remembering that our ASP-based applications, if designed correctly, should connect and disconnect from the Oracle database as soon as they have completed a certain task, rather than hold onto a database connection for the life of the user's session. Don't forget that Microsoft Transaction Server and OLE DB also offer connection-pooling techniques to save the valuable time taken to initialize database connections.
Traditional client/server applications that maintain a user's connection, until the application has closed, will more than likely utilize Oracle's own connection pooling rather than that of OLE DB which pools connections based on the same username and password combination.
The actual edition of Oracle8 that we connect to again makes little practical difference to the front-end applications that we develop, as we use the same query language and networking software to manipulate the data.
Both editions of Oracle8 provide support for the emerging SQL-3 standard for object-type definition. SQL-3 allows us to create object types that, for example, define a person's address that we could then use directly in our database, and access through our programs.
For a full investigation into Oracle's object support, check out the Oracle TechNet at http://technet.oracle.com.
Oracle Version 8i
Oracle8i is the latest incarnation of the Oracle8 data server . If you hadn't already guessed it,
the 'i' in Oracle8i refers to the Internet. Oracle Corporation bills Oracle8i as "the database for
Internet computing".
All of the above Oracle8 features apply just the same to the new Oracle8i, with the Oracle8i data server also being available in two editions – the standard edition, Oracle8i, and the high-end version, Oracle8i Enterprise Edition.
The major change to the Oracle8i Enterprise Edition is the inclusion of support for the Java Virtual Machine allowing developers to execute Java code directly from within the database engine. Whereas previously, the only way to procedurally manipulate Oracle data was through its PL/SQL language, you can now use Java to do exactly the same job.
So are they doing away with PL/SQL? This does seem to be the general trend if you consider that the next version of SQL Server (the one after version 2000) will allow stored procedures written in any .Net language and that DB2 already provides support for Java stored procedures. SQL is here for the foreseeable future, but maybe for the benefit of ODBC and OLE DB access .
Oracle8i includes the Internet File System, iFS, a Java application that brings the combination of an integrated file system and database into one server to provide text searches and querying of files and data stored within iFS.
Another new technology in Oracle8i is Oracle WebDB that allows dynamic web sites to be built and deployed from within the Oracle database. WebDB provides an HTML interface so that non-programmers can develop their own web-based database applications. It includes a lightweight HTTP listener that can act as a web server and a PL/SQL interface to the database. As web developers,
we might want to discourage non-programmers from developing their own web sites; this is not just because of our own job security, but also due to the fact that small in-house projects have a tendency
to grow into large projects that may not have been designed with scalability in mind through poor programming techniques.
Oracle8i's new interMedia feature provides additional support for multimedia content such as image, video, text, and audio. interMedia allows users to query data held within common document formats such as HTML, Adobe Acrobat (PDF) and the Microsoft Office applications such as Word documents and Excel spreadsheets, and provides support for the delivery of streaming media in conjunction with common streaming servers such as Oracle Video Server and RealVideo.
Release 2 of Oracle8i (version 8.1.6) also brings native support for XML .
Oracle OpenWorld 2009 Call for Papers
By justin.kestelyn
For the first time in many years, a public call-for-papers has been issued for Oracle OpenWorld.
Can anyone remember the last time this happened, if ever? Not in my tenure here (since 2003).
You have until April 19 to submit your paper; every submission will be carefully considered - and those lucky few will be notified on June 9. Some sessions that are not picked for the show will available for public voting via Oracle Mix starting in early June. After three weeks of voting, winners will be announced.
The Oracle OpenWord blog has some useful suggestions for getting your paper noticed herehttp://www.oracle.com/openworld/index.html
Very good advice...
I've been reading Seth Godin's Web page for many years. He is a 'marketing' person, with a lot of good old fashioned common sense. I agree with most of what he writes - and he just did a longish post (for Seth Godin it was long). It was on Slack.
His two points in these unique times - if you find yourself unexpectedly with more free time than you had anticipated you should consider:
a) Continuing your education, learn something new. As you go to interview and look around, people will ask you what you've been doing with your time. If you can arrive at an interview with "I've been learning X in my free time" and be really excited about it - be able to converse about it, that'll be a really positive thing.
b) Participate - join the forums - become known. I've said that myself many times in the past.
So think about that if you find you have more time on your hands than you anticipated having... Not bad ideas. Even if you don't have a sudden abundance of free time - maybe find the time to do these two things..
You can use the SqlDataSource control to connect to an Oracle database. You connect the control to an Oracle database by first establishing connection information in the Web.config file, and then by referencing the connection information in a SqlDataSource control.
Note
The System.Data.OracleClient provider requires Oracle client software version 8.1.7 or later to be installed on the computer that connects to the Oracle database; in this case, on the computer that runs ASP.NET pages.
To use the SqlDataSource control to connect to an Oracle database
1. Open the page from which you want to connect to an Oracle database.
2. Switch to Design view.
3. From the Data tab of the Toolbox, drag a SqlDataSource control onto your page.
4. If the SqlDataSource Tasks smart tag does not appear, right-click the control and click Show Smart Tag.
5. In the SqlDataSource Tasks list, click Configure Data Source.
6. In the Configure Data Source dialog box, click New Connection.
The Choose Data Source dialog box is displayed.
7. In the Data source list, click Oracle Database and then click Continue.
The Add Connection dialog box is displayed.
8. In the Server name box, type the name of the Oracle server.
9. Type the user name and password to connect with the database.
10. Select the Save my password box to save authentication information as part of the connection string, and then click OK.
Note
If you include explicit authentication information in a connection string, you should encrypt the ConnectionStrings section of the Web.config file. For details, see Encrypting Configuration Information Using Protected Configuration.
You are returned to the Configure Data Source dialog with the new connection string information displayed.
11. Click Next.
12. Make sure that the Yes, save this connection check box is selected, change the name of the connection string if you want, and then click Next to have the connection string information saved in the application's Web.config file.
The Configure the Select Statement pane appears.
13. Click Specify a custom SQL statement or stored procedure if you want to type in your own SQL statement, or Specify columns from a table or view to use the wizard to create the query.
14. If you clicked Specify columns from a table or view, in the Name list click the name of the table or view to use, and then in the Columns list select the columns to return.
Note
To generate update statements, click Advanced and then click Generate INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE statements.
15.If you clicked Specify a custom SQL statement or stored procedure, click Next to move to the Define Custom Statements or Stored Procedures pane to write your query.
Note
To define update statements, click the UPDATE, INSERT, and DELETE tabs and specify the SQL command or stored procedure to use for each operation.
16. Click Next.
17. Click the Test Query button to test your query against the database, and then click Finish.