Oracle 11g R1/R2 Real Application Clusters Essentials Book (Review – Sort Of)

From An Expert's Guide to Oracle Technology

So, I got an email from Packt asking if I wanted to review an Oracle RAC book. I only have a couple of those in my library so I thought sure, that might be an interest

Oracle XE 11gR2 General Availability

From An Expert's Guide to Oracle Technology

Yeah, I know. I'm late with the news. Still, just in case you haven't already seen it blogged, tweeted or linkedin'ed, Oracle XE 11gR2 has moved out of beta and into production.

Why Apple Will Survive

Do bind variables matter?

From An Expert's Guide to Oracle Technology

That title is somewhat facetious. Even without a performance benefit using bind variables is more secure and easier to maintain but do they really make a difference in performance?

I still hear, on occassion, that using bind varaibles is somehow slower. I think mostly it's just makes the coding slowe

NVL versus Coalesce

From An Expert's Guide to Oracle Technology

I'm doing some PL/SQL tuning and I'm examining several existing stored procedures to see how I can speed them up. While I won't share my clients structures or code, I will talk about some of the interesting things I'm doing.

While not the biggest time sink, a particular piece of code is using NVL ver

PL/SQL Expert Practices from Apress

A simple example of a secure context

From An Expert's Guide to Oracle Technology

This simple example isn't much different that one I did quite a while back but it's more complete. If you have your own database, you can run this and get a working example of using a secure context.

I was asked for an example and I was blocked from my blog from work so I had to code a new one. I tho

A Sampling of Virtathon 2011 Sessions

Leave a Tip

From An Expert's Guide to Oracle Technology

Today I am doing something a little different. Leave a tip in the comments below, or if you see a tip in the comments that you like or help you, leave a comment and let me know. I will take any well-commented tips and post them in a future entry.

If you'd like to expand on a tip (more than a comment

Virtathon 2011 July 16 – 21

Virtathon 2011 is a free 6 day online conference covering the full stack of Oracle technology. From databases (Oracle and MySQL) to Middle Tier to Clients (I'm doing a debugging with SQL Developer session) to the Cloud (me too), this is not to be missed.

Because it is online, you can do it right from your desk. Or stay home and do it all day long. Read into that whatever you want.

My Toolbox

An Expert’s Guide to Oracle Technology

I was reading a PHP blog the other day and the author discussed his tool set. I thought that would be a pretty good topic for me. I tend to work on a lot of different platforms and do many different kinds of tasks. Here is my toolbox.<

Because it makes the customer happy

From An Expert's Guide to Oracle Technology

I like my electric company. It's TECO here in Tampa, FL. This morning my power went out. I don't like them because my power went out. I like them in spite of my power going out. Actually, I like them because their rates are not unreasonable. I like them even more because of the way they respond when the power goes out.

I wai

Speaking at Oracle OpenWorld 2011

From An Expert's Guide to Oracle Technology

I just got the email. I will be presenting in San Francisco in October at the Oracle OpenWorld 2011 super conference. It's really an honor to be selected for such a huge conference. I have avoided even trying so far so I can attend as much great content as possible. I decided to give it a go this year.

My session will be:

Oracle on Amazon – is that new?

From An Expert's Guide to Oracle Technology

So, the latest headlines have been about Amazon RDS for Oracle.You might be wondering why that's headline news. Oracle has been running on AWS for some time.

RDS is a bit different than what has been offered up to this point. In the past, you chose an Amazon Machine

Duke Nukem Goes Gold

From An Expert's Guide to Oracle Technology

I have always been a big computer game fan. I owned an Atari 2600 way back when and I have enjoyed playing games ever since. In the 90s, some co-workers and me used to get together at work (after hours of course) and death match Doom II and Duke Nukem. 

I play a lot less now but I still enjoy it now and then. My prefered t

A Very Cool Project

From An Expert's Guide to Oracle Technology

Next tuesday will be the final implementation of one of the coolest projects I have ever worked on. I say final implementation because it is a distributed system that impacts multiple databases and multiple systems. It is also fully redundant, active-active, in two different data centers.

I think I mentioned it briefly in one of

New Webinar: DBMS_SCHEDULER in SQL Developer 3.0

From An Expert's Guide to Oracle Technology

For a long time after DBMS_SCHEDULER came out, I kind of avoided it. DBMS_JOB still did pretty much everything I needed it to and was a lot easier to use. A quick anonymous block and my job was running. Intervals were fairly easy to figure out if you followed some best practices.

However, when I started needing to do resource man

A simple SUBSTR and INSTR tip

From An Expert's Guide to Oracle Technology

A developer was recently looking at some of my code and pointed something out to me that was not making sense to him.

I had SUBSTR(variable, -2) in a part of the code. The variable was rather large so even when he extracted the value out, it wasn't making sense.

When using SUBSTR, what you will normally see is SUBSTR(varia

What is Lewis Doing in May 2011?

The Ringling Museum

Oracle XE 11.2 Beta

From An Expert's Guide to Oracle Technology

If you've read this blog for any length of time, you know that I have always been a huge proponent of the Express Edition (XE) of Oracle. I've written about it,