Oracle Magazine September/October 2000

Posted on June 23, 2014

The headline articles of Oracle Magazine for September/October 2000 were on e-Business Integration, including online healthy prescription for online retailing, streamlineing the pulp and fiber industries, and the health care industry. Plus there was lots and lots of articles and news items all on businesses delivering solutions via the internet.

As this was the Oracle Open World edition (and you see the label on the cover saying Biggest Ever) you can imagine there was a LOT of advertisements and sponsored articles. The following of other articles below will not cover these and will only look at the main content articles.

Other articles included:

• Tom Kyte’s article is on Tips for Migrating, Indexing and Using Packaged Procedures. In his article he gives some tips for migrating to Oracle 8.1i. He also discusses some scenarios around creating (or not) indexes on foreign keys. He also looks at the scenario of compiling linked procedures and how the use of packages avoids the identified issues.
• Do you remember the Internet File System. There was an article that gave an overview of this that was available in Oracle 8i and was capable of managing over 150 different file types.
• Autodesk releaseed OnSite, an enterprise solution for bringing design and location based information to the point of work via mobile devices. Autodesk On Site used Oracle 8i Lite and the Palm OS platform to provide an interactive, two way communication environment between the mobile worker and the overall decision support system.
• The Oracle Academic Initiative began in 1997. In 2000 Oracle donated software licences, support services and Oracle training material to 17 educational institutions valued at $60 million
• There was page after page, after page of announcements and news from various Oracle Partners.
• Douglas Scherer gives the first part of an article that looks at how you can use Oracle 8i interMedia for managing and deploying content rich data on the internet.
• Managing Your Resources looks at some of the new Oracle 8i EE helps DBAs to define plan, assign users to groups and prioritise resource allocations.
• With the release of Oracle 8.1.6 came the new Statspack. Connie Dialeris and Graham Wood give an overview of the main features of Statspack, providing some guidance on how to use it in a proactive manner and gives a step-by-step guide to how you can trouble shoot performance problems with Statspack.
• The final article was on Oracle Warehouse Builder (OWB). This was an overview type of article and gave an overview of the main components and gives some guidelines for setting up some different types of integration.

To view the cover page and the table of contents click on the image at the top of this post or click here.
My Oracle Magazine Collection can be found here. You will find links to my blog posts on previous editions and a PDF for the very first Oracle Magazine from June 1987.

Review of Oracle Magazine-July/August 1999

Posted on May 15, 2013

The headline articles for the July/August 1999 edition of Oracle Magazine were focused on Business Intelligence and included topics on architectures, business plans, data integration, portals, dashboards, Oracle Express, data marts and data warehouses.

Other articles included:

• 15 Rules for Enterprise Portals
• Gear it to casual users
• Use intuitive classifications and searching
• Allow access to a publish/subscribe engine
• Enable universal connectivity to information resources
• Provide dynamic access to information resources
• Set up intelligent routing
• Integrate a business intelligence toolset
• Use a server based architecture
• Build in distributed, multithreaded services
• Enable flexible permission granting
• Append external interfaces
• Provide programmatic interfaces
• Establish internet security
• Make it cost effective to deploy
• Ensure that it can be customized and personalized
• Oracle Application Server release 4.0.8 was available for beta testing and includes support for Enterprise JavaBeans. Java Servlets, Java Server Pages and allows developers to build robust self service applications quickly
• Oracle and MapInfo joined forces to release an internet-based spatial-data analysis solution to help organizations to understand and visualize data and to identify patterns and customer trends
• Oracle makes available Oracle iTV platform, that is a solution that makes it possible for broadcast, cable and telecommunications providers to deliver interactive services .
• Nine tips for using Oracle Discover included:
• Us the decode statement
• Implement summary redirection
• create optional conditions (filters)
• use query statistics
• perform regular maintenance on the query statistics tables
• familiarize yourself with the EUL tables
• make regular backups
• modify registry settings
• delete objects with care
• Standardizing your interfaces. The first of a three part article on creating interfaces to the database. This article focused on showing how to setup and use UTL_FILE for loading data into and getting data out of the database.
• Creating a Virtual Private Database in Oracle 8i describes how to approach such a project to implement fine grained access control and gives the following steps for setting up a VPD
• create the application context
• create a package that sets the context
• create the policy function
• associate the policy function with a table or view

To view the cover page and the table of contents click on the image at the top of this post or click here.

My Oracle Magazine Collection can be found here. You will find links to my blog posts on previous editions and a PDF for the very first Oracle Magazine from June 1987.

Oracle Magazine-September/October 1999

Posted on April 25, 2013

The headline articles in the September/October 1999 edition of Oracle Magazine focused on how the Oracle technology can be used to educate staff and to keep their skills up to date. either on site or remote via on-demand training resources.

Other articles included:

• Oracle announce that they have acquired Thinking Machine’s data mining business. This data mining product was called Darwin and is now called Oracle Data Mining. I will have a separate blog post for this announcement.
• Oracle 8i Lite has shipped and comes with three component: Oracle Lite a single user (50K to 750K foot print), Web-to-Go allows users to access the same data and web applications both online and offline, iConnect that was a flexible architecture that enables reliable and scalable bi-directional synchronization of data and applications. Oracle 8i Lite was supported on MS Windows 95, 98 and NT, Windows CE, Palm OS and EPOC 32.
• Oracle XML Parser for C and Oracle XML Parser for C++ are released and supports DOM and Simple API for XML (SAX) interfaces.
• Oracle XML SQL utilities and XSQL Servlet facilitates the reading and writing of XML information from and to the Oracle database.
• Siemens announce that they plan to build an Oracle 8i Applicance on its Primergy line of servers, based on Intel Pentium II Xeon processors.
• Singapore Telecom’s Magix Server delivers the World’s first nationwide video on demand service. Their 12,000 subscriber were able to use a web-browser to select a video from the Megix Web side and SingTel automates the streaming of them to their computer.
• Oracle 8i comes with some improvements in PL/SQL. These included Autonomous Transactions, Native Dynamic SQL, Invoker rights procedures, user-defined operators, new operators, bulk binds.
• Part 2 of the article on exporting an Oracle Database to a Flat File. In this part of the article it looks at how you can use the UTL_FILE package.
• How you can speed up query response times by using a Materialized Views. The article suggests the following steps to analyze the performance impact:
  • Configure the server parameters
  • Grant privileges to the appropriate schema
  • Create a materialized view
  • Refresh the optimizer statistics
  • Confirm that the materialized view is being used
  • Manually refresh a materialized view
• Oracle introduces Oracle Log Miner to allow a DBA to analyze the REDO log files

Review of Oracle Magazine–May/June 1999

Posted on March 25, 2013

The headline articles for the May/June 1999 edition of Oracle Magazine were focused on using internet technologies to allow businesses to work together more efficiently.

Other articles included:

• Oracle and Hewlett-Packard announce the a prebuild Oralce 8i appliance. This had a code-name of Raw Iron.
• Oracle announce a $100million venture fund to promote innovation by companies developing products and services based on Oracle 8i
• Oracle 8i comes with the an enhanced feature that automatically keeps a standby database synchronized with the production database. This is called the Automated Standby Databases (ASD) and hopes to reduce the amount of manual work DBAs need to perform.
• Some helpful suggestions on how to go about implementing parallel DML in Oracle 8.
• Rules for Parallel Insert
• The insert statement must be of the form ‘insert into table_name select …’
• The table being modified must have a specified parallel declaration or you must specify a parallel hint directive in the insert statement
• You can perform parallel insert on non-partitioned as well as partitioned tables
• After the parallel DML is complete no other SQL statements can access the same table until a Commit is issued.
• Rules for Parallel Update and Delete
• Table table must have a parallel declaration specified or you must specify a parallel hint directive in the update/delete statement
• You can perform parallel update or delete on partitioned tables only
• You cannot see the result of the parallel update or delete during the transaction
• By using the parallel options, data intensive SQL statements, database recovery, and data loads can be executed by multiple processes simultaneously. All the following operations can be executed in parallel
• table scan
• sort merge join
• Not In
• select distinct
• aggregation
• cube
• create table as select
• rebuild index partition
• move partition
• update
• Insert ….. select
• Enable constraint
• PL/SQL functions called from SQL
• Nested loop join
• Hash join
• Group by
• Union and union all
• Order by
• Rollup
• Create index
• Rebuild index
• Split partition
• Delete
• Star transformation

To view the cover page and the table of contents click on the image at the top of this post or click here.

My Oracle Magazine Collection can be found here. You will find links to my blog posts on previous editions and a PDF for the very first Oracle Magazine from June 1987.