Oracle VM

Tarry Singh at http://www.databasejournal.com/features/oracle/article.php/3712246
writes great article how to install Oracle VM.
It gives a really detailed step by step run through the oracle vm installation with loads of pictures showing the screens you see at each stage of the install.

Don't like to read:
8 minutes and you know all about installing Oracle VM
Check out you tube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_W5_5wJy80

Great series about "Mining Information from the Listener Log" by Arup Nanda

In this article, you will learn how to build an infrastructure to process the listener log and to use it to unearth information on your database operations. The information can be used in different scenarios, as you will see later.

On-line tutorials Oracle 10g, Java, XML and Web Services

Advanced technical tutorials to help you learn Oracle 10g, Java, XML and Web Services.
These online Tutorials are self-paced, self-study lessons that contain numerous working examples and hands-on workshops.

Conditional Column Formatting in APEX

An exmaple:

FREE book: IBM WebSphere Information Analyzer & Data Quality Assessment

This redbook describes a usage scenario that covers all dimensions of profiling, rule building, deployment, and quality monitoring through a data integration lifecycle.

FREE book: Getting Started with DB2 Express-C V9.1

Oracle Database Security Checklist - Nov 2007

Columns to Rows - UNPIVOT (11g)

O-RSS Reader

O-RSS Reader - An Oracle PL/SQL API to enable persistent storage of RSS feeds within an Oracle DB.

1.1.0.1.0 version is now available on sourceforge. In that new version you will find a sample APEX application.

O-RSS can be used on Oracle Database 10g Express Edition

Data Warehouse Project Lifecycle by Dylan Wan

Here is the typical lifecycle for data warehouse deployment project:

0. Project Scoping and Planning
Project Triangle - Scope, Time and Resource.
* Determine the scope of the project - what you would like to accomplish? This can be defined by questions to be answered. The number of logical star and number of the OLTP sources
* Time - What is the target date for the system to be available to the users
* Resource - What is our budget? What is the role and profile requirement of the resources needed to make this happen.

1. Requirement
* What are the business questions? How does the answers of these questions can change the business decision or trigger actions.
* What are the role of the users? How often do they use the system? Do they do any interactive reporting or just view the defined reports in guided navigation?
* How do you measure? What are the metrics?

2. Front-End Design
* The front end design needs for both interactive analysis and the designed analytics workflow.
* How does the user interact with the system?
* What are their analysis process?

3. Warehouse Schema Design
* Dimensional modeling - define the dimensions and fact and define the grain of each star schema.
* Define the physical schema - depending on the technology decision. If you use the relational tecknology, design the database tables

4. OLTP to data warehouse mapping
* Logical mapping - table to table and column to column mapping. Also define the transformation rules
* You may need to perform OLTP data profiling. How often the data changes? What are the data distribution?
* ETL Design -include data staging and the detail ETL process flow.

5. Implementation
* Create the warehouse and ETL staging schema
* Develop the ETL programs
* Create the logical to physical mapping in the repository
* Build the end user dashboard and reports

6. Deployment
* Install the Analytics reporting and the ETL tools.
* Specific Setup and Configuration for OLTP, ETL, and data warehouse.
* Sizing of the system and database
* Performance Tuning and Optimization

7. Management and Maintenance of the system
* Ongoing support of the end-users, including security, training, and enhancing the system.
* You need to monitor the growth of the data.

Article from http://blogs.oracle.com/DylanWan

Better SQL*Plus

rlwrap - is a 'readline wrapper' that uses the GNU readline library to allow the editing of keyboard input for any other command. Now your's commands history is remembered :)

Oracle 11g RAC On Windows 2003 Using VMware Server

11g on Windows (32-bit) is out!

How to Give Your System a Break from Oracle XE

How to install 10g on various Linux Distributions

# 10g Release 2 on Centos 5 (and hence on RHEL5 generally)
# 10g Release 2 64-bit on 64-bit Linux (the one exception to the above rule!)
# 10g Release 2 on Fedora 7 64-bit
# 10g Release 2 on Oracle Enterprise Linux
# 10g Release 2 on Solaris 10 (x86)
# 10g Release 2 on Centos 4.x (and hence RHEL4 generally)
# 10g Release 2 on Suse 10 (works unchanged for Suse 10.1 and 10.2, too)
# 10g Release 2 on Ubuntu (describes Ubuntu 5.10 and 6.06)
# 10g Release 2 on Fedora Core 5

Installing Oracle 11g RAC on virtual servers using VMware

This post describes the installation of Oracle 11g RAC on virtual servers.

Backing Up Apex Application(s)

Are you looking for a way to automate the task of exporting applications?
1. Automatically Backing Up Your Apex Application(s)
2. Java export utility

How to install Oracle 11g on various Linux Distributions

11g on Redhat EL 4, 5
11g on Ubuntu 7.4
11g on Enterprise Linux
11g on Debian
11g on Centos 4.5
11g on Xubuntu 7.04

Pivot in 11g

Pivoting is a key technique in data warehouses. In it, you transform multiple rows of input into fewer and generally wider rows in the data warehouse. When pivoting, an aggregation operator is applied for each item in the pivot column value list. The pivot column cannot contain an arbitrary expression. If you need to pivot on an expression, then you should alias the expression in a view before the PIVOT operation. The basic syntax is as follows:

SELECT ....
FROM
PIVOT
(
aggregate-function()
FOR IN (, ,..., )
) AS
WHERE .....

Example: Pivoting

The following statement illustrates a typical pivot on the channel column:

SELECT * FROM
(SELECT product, channel, amount_sold
FROM sales_view
) S PIVOT (SUM(amount_sold)
FOR CHANNEL IN (3 AS DIRECT_SALES, 4 AS INTERNET_SALES,
5 AS CATALOG_SALES, 9 AS TELESALES))
ORDER BY product;

PRODUCT DIRECT­_SALES INTERNET_SALES CATALOG_SALES TELESALES
---------------------- ------------ -------------- ------------- ---------
...
Internal 6X CD-ROM 229512.97 26249.55
Internal 8X CD-ROM 286291.49 42809.44
Keyboard Wrist Rest 200959.84 38695.36 1522.73

Documentation here

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Implementing AJAX into APEX applications

Create dynamic interfaces that minimize page refresh with Oracle Application Express.
Step-by-Step Instructions for Adding Tooltips

Free Oracle trainings and on-line tutorials

Log Miner Implementation Summary

"Log Miner is a powerful tool and all DBA's should know and master it."
- read more -

How manage database without spending a fortune

Very good article in Computerworld discussing how DBAs manage their systems.

New Oracle Linux Test (OLT) Kit

What is OLT?

Oracle Linux Tests are designed to verify Linux kernel functionality and stability essential for the Oracle Database. The Oracle Linux Test (OLT) kit, which is distributed as a set of rpms, provides an automated mechanism to define, execute and analyze tests. The kit contains tools such as DBT2 and DBT3 workloads against Oracle single instance or clustered databases, as well as specialized workload simulators. OLT can be used for running tests on Oracle Enterprise Linux, RHEL and SLES distributions and a variety of topologies ( storage attached network, network attached storage).
project site

Building pages with APEX using spatial data

All about using Oracle Spatial with Google Maps.

- The Official Guide to using Oracle Spatial with Google Maps
- HTML DB and MapViewer: A Perfect Match
- Integrating APEX with Oracle AS 10g
- Oracle APEX/Spatial How to's
- Integration of Google Maps, Oracle Maps, ... into APEX
- Oracle Application Server MapViewer Sample Code and Demonstrations

-(Great tutorial) Google Maps in APEX on XE with spatial data

MySQL vs MS SQL Server

Step by Step build RAC

Part 1 : Install VMWare and Linux
Part 2 : Install virtual disk and network card
Part 3 : Install Oracle Clusterware and Cluster Database

Oracle 10g RAC On Linux Using NFS
Oracle 10g RAC On Windows 2003 Using VMware Server

Oracle 10g RAC Series

Server Monitoring With munin And monit On Debian Etch

In this article Falko Timme describes how you can monitor your Debian Etch server with munin and monit. Munin produces nifty little graphics about nearly every aspect of your server (load average, memory usage, CPU usage, MySQL throughput, eth0 traffic, etc.) without much configuration, whereas monit checks the availability of services like Apache, MySQL, Postfix ...

Access migration to Application Express

The only requirement, is that you have SQL access to any Oracle database (9iR2+), because the workbench is driven using an underlying migration repository. You could use the Express Edition of Oracle for this purpose, which is totally free, if you didn't have SQL access to an existing Oracle database.
Full text

Custom APEX Authentication / Authorisation Schemes

Duncan Mein has created a nice How-to for setting up Custom Authentication (Part 1).

Top 15 free SQL Injection Scanners

SQL Injection is perhaps the most common web-application hacking technique which attempts to pass SQL commands through a web application for execution by the back-end database.

More...

Store MS Word Documents in Oracle

Follow the following steps..... :)

1) Create a table
CREATE TABLE my_docs (
name VARCHAR2(200) NOT NULL,
doc BLOB NOT NULL
);

2)Create a directory object which stores all your doc
CREATE OR REPLACE DIRECTORY documents AS 'C:\work';

3)Create a procedure
CREATE OR REPLACE PROCEDURE load_file_to_my_docs (p_file_name IN my_docs.name%TYPE)
AS
v_bfile BFILE;
v_blob BLOB;
BEGIN
INSERT INTO my_docs (name, doc)
VALUES ( p_file_name, empty_blob())
RETURN doc INTO v_blob;
v_bfile := BFILENAME('documents', p_file_name);
Dbms_Lob.Fileopen(v_bfile, Dbms_Lob.File_Readonly);
Dbms_Lob.Loadfromfile(v_blob, v_bfile, Dbms_Lob.Getlength(v_bfile));
Dbms_Lob.Fileclose(v_bfile);
COMMIT;
END;
/
4)Execute the db procedure...

[This is sgalaxy solution form Oracle forum]

Hacking SQL Server

In this presentation at the Jacksonville SQL Server Users Group, Bayer White playS the part of a developer protecting his application and Brian Knight attempts to hack his application using SQL Injection and cross-site scripting. Then, Bayer will show you how to protect yourself from the hacker and then Brian tries again. Back and forth the chess match goes until someone wins!

Understanding Relationships in E-R Diagrams

Few articles about E-R diagrams worth to read:

Understanding Relationships in E-R Diagrams (part 1, 2, 3)
Documenting Entities, Attributes & Relationships
E-R Diagram Relationship Integrity Constraints
Interpreting Cardinality and Dependency on an E-R Diagram
Guidelines for Naming E-R Attributes
Recursion in E-R Relationships
Notations on Entity-Relationship Models
Entity-Relationship Diagram Checklist

Mini data generator

Will Hitchcock proposed a PL/SQL approach for generating the 1000 rows:

declare
i number := 1;
begin
for i in 0..999 loop
insert into pivot values (i);
end loop;
end;
/

Oracle Menu (om) is only a shell script.

Oracle Menu is only a shell script.

What does it do?
It just helps with often performed tasks and navigating around the file system and can give you useful information quickly.
It can help you perform some of the more monotonous tasks a DBA has to perform without having to know too much.
It can help you if you work between many sites often as it can hide some of the underlying differences, such as filesystem layout etc.

Drupal + Oracle: Inside the OraDrup Project

In this case study, it is described the OraDrup Project, which has the goal of combining the popular open-source Drupal CMS with Oracle Database.

Link 1
Link 2

Oracle RAC 10g on Oracle Enterprise Linux Using VMware Server

In this guide, you will learn how to install and configure two nodes on running Oracle RAC 10g Release 2 on Enterprise Linux and VMware Server. Note that this guide is intended for educational/evaluation purposes only; neither Oracle nor any other vendor will support this configuration.