A list of Oracle Strategic acquisitions by category.

Documentation of Oracle wait groups and their wait events.

Oracle is preparing a public-relations onslaught, intended to change the perception of Oracle as cloud critic.

Oracle has agreed to acquire AmberPoint, a leader in Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) Management.

This Security Alert addresses security issue CVE-2010-0073, a vulnerability in the Node Manager component of Oracle WebLogic Server. This vulnerability may be remotely exploitable without authentication, i.e. it may be exploited over a network without the need for a username and password. A knowledgeable and malicious remote user can exploit this vulnerability which can result in impacting the availability, integrity and confidentiality of the targeted system.

Can you trust the leading open-source database engines, PostgreSQL and MySQL, to deliver the performance and features that the Oracles, SQL Servers, and DB2s of the world do? Not just yet, but they could offer enough to meet your needs. Find out how they stack up against each other, as well as against the commercial alternatives.

On Friday, Ken Jacobs announced his resignation from Oracle to key members of the MySQL team via e-mail. Jacobs, a 28-year Oracle veteran and one of its first 20 hires, has been Oracle's liaison with the MySQL community for the past several years, ever since Oracle acquired the popular MySQL storage engine, InnoDB.

SAP CEO Leo Apotheker resigned on Feb. 7 after he and the SAP Supervisory Board "reached a mutual agreement" not to extend Apotheker’s contract as a member of the SAP Executive Board, SAP named Bill McDermott, head of SAP’s field organization and Jim Hagermann Snabe, head of product development as co-CEOs replacing Apotheker as sole CEO.

Oracle’s Larry Ellison threw down the gauntlet recently when he made claims about the superiority of Oracle over DB2. IBM has, of course, responded. Here are the Oracle claims and the IBM rebuttals.

It is an interesting case of coincidental timing that within a week of the Oracle Sun deal being finalised by the EU1 that the Blackhat conference in DC should publish David Litchfield’s research for NGS Software 2, on how to escalate privilege using the Java functionality built into the Oracle DB 3. David’s research is not patched yet so would normally have only been made privy to the Administrators at Oracle’s SecAlert, but it has been made “Public” so it is now risk mitigation time. Thankfully these Java related Oracle vulnerabilities have been discussed privately for a number of months beforehand, thus giving the Author time to fix them with a provably low risk of affecting other Oracle functionality. In the absence of a patch from Oracle this paper provides information on how to fix the Java related vulnerabilities in both 10g and 11g which were detailed in David’s Blackhat presentation on February 2nd 2010.

This is a somewhat complicated example that builds a couple of sample tables, uses a SQL statement with the Oracle analytic function LEAD submitted through ADO in an Excel macro, and then presents the information on an Excel worksheet. When the user clicks one of three buttons on the Excel worksheet, an Excel macro executes that then build charts using disconnected row sources – a disconnected ADO recordset is used to sort the data categories before pushing that data into the charts that are built on the fly.

Problems once again wracked Oracle's new My Oracle Support portal this week, with some users reporting difficulties accessing the site.

Recursive database processing, also called the bill of materials or parts explosion problem, is applicable to many application domains including human resources, manufacturing, financial markets, and academia. Data involved in such processing are referred to as tree structured or hierarchical. Oracle Database has long supported recursion through a proprietary syntax, the CONNECT BY clause. Oracle Database 11g Release 2 supports recursion through subquery factoring resulting in a new and potentially better way to deal with an old problem: querying hierarchical data.

This article takes a step by step approach to create a table with a nested table and then query that table while showing some key DBA views we can use to describe the structures.

This post demonstrates by way of examples, some of the most common XPath expressions.

This web-site is where Andrew Barry, an Oracle DBA, keeps some of the scripts and procedures that he's written over the years.

This book offers detailed instructions for installing, configuring, and effectively using Oracle SQL Developer. You will learn how to utilize every feature of this development tool and make the most out of it. While none of the tasks are complex, the book progresses from the easy, most commonly used features, such as browsing objects and writing queries in the SQL Worksheet, to the more involved and possibly less frequently used features, such as Tuning and Testing SQL and PL/SQL, and adding User Extensions, and finally to those features used by a smaller more targeted audience, such as Migrations, Oracle APEX, and the Data Modeler. Throughout the book there are tips and suggestions gathered as a result of working with the current SQL Developer user base. This book will also show you how to assess the health of your database with built-in as well as customized reports.

If the My Oracle Support portal is unavailable and you need to log an SR you can call the 800# number (http://www.oracle.com/support/contact.html) and the SR will be logged for you and routed to the appropriate team.

The Oracle APEX URL construct can be a bit cryptic for the uninvited, people and spiders alike. Here is a (a, not THE) technique to alleviate this. It is loosely based on a similar solution I made for an ancient Oracle Portal solution quite a few years back. You need an Apache (OHS/OAS or regular Apache) in front for this to work. The API is tested for Apache 2.2 and Oracle XE/11g, but it should run equally well on OHS/OAS (Apache 1.3-2.0).

People have asked over and over about the differences between OAM, OEM, and AMP. Let me try to explain what they are, how they relate to each other, and how they are different.

when designing databases, what is the preferred way to handle tables that have multiple columns that are just storing true / false values as just a single either or value (e.g. "Y/N: or "0/1")? Likewise, are there some issues that might arise between different databases (e.g. Oracle and SQL Server) that might affect how the columns are handled?

While working through SQL Server 2008 Jonathan Lewis came across a few really cute things that he’d like to see in Oracle.

Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse makes developing applications for the Spring Framework and/or for Oracle WebLogic Server easier. Here's how.

Tanel Poder's PerfSheet tool to visualize Statspack reports.

It could be something that helps you upgrade to later versions? Maybe a new feature which will allow Forms to more easily use a feature of the platform? Could it be you want your end Forms application to look and behave differently? Something to help debugging or tracing your code?

In Oracle Database 11g, the partitioning schemes have been greatly expanded to offer more functionality, including the ability to define new composite partitioning, choose a partition interval, specify a foreign key to inherit the partitioning key of its parent table, and partition on virtual columns.

Prior to 11g, Oracle did not have a simple table pivot feature. 11g has changed that, and the pivot clause is certainly useful. It requires, however, an aggregation calculation in the intersection. But what if you already have the data to populate in the intersection area? Or, you may no longer have the raw data to aggregate it again. In that case, you are forced to trick it to get an aggregation in.

A computer security expert has uncovered what he says are flaws in widely used software from Oracle Corp that could let hackers remotely access sensitive information in corporate and government databases.

IT professionals looking to find new employment or upgrade their current positions should investigate job opportunities that address growing demand for technologies such as virtualization, cloud, network security and social computing skills.

Now that Sun has become a wholly owned subsidiary of Oracle, it appears that there will be some changes to the way Sun bloggers operate.

It's the NOT NULL constraint because NULL values are not included in a normal B-TREE index, but the GROUP BY has to include NULL as a grouping "value" in your query. By telling the optimizer that there are no NULLs in col it is free to use the much more efficient index . This is a classic example of how metadata can influence the optimizer.

Almost every company uses a database as the driving force behind their Web site. FathomDB administers a relational database on the cloud for customers and absorbs the responsibility of maintaining a database server.

SQL_TRACE parameter is no longer valid – it is deprecated as of Oracle 10g Release 2 in favour of DBMS_MONITOR subprograms.

Examples of typical data-processing requirements and how you might tune them with pipelined functions.

This book is an anthology of effective database management techniques representing the collective wisdom of the OakTable Network. With an emphasis upon performance—but also branching into security, national language, and other issues—the book helps you deliver the most value for your company’s investment in Oracle Database technologies. You’ll learn to effectively plan for and monitor performance, to troubleshoot systematically when things go wrong, and to manage your database rather than letting it manage you.

Five trends we see in most troubled enterprise software implementations: Lack of software fit, unrealistic implementation expectations, lack of executive buy-in and support, propensity to customize software rather than leverage standard functionality and lack of ERP software implementation expertise.

Oracle has won a battle regarding the way damages can be calculated in its intellectual property lawsuit against SAP, according to a ruling filed January 28 in US District Court for the Northern District of California.

Use the resource manager. With that you can either set up a proactive rule or use a resource plan that limits the amount of resources they can use.

These cheat sheets will help you get started using ADF Faces rich client components. The cheat sheets are grouped by component type and/or functionality, and work together with the Web User Interface Developer's Guide for ADF and the ADF Faces Tag Library documentation and ADF Faces demo application.

You certainly can use Function Result Cache to optimize retrieval of data from tables on which you have specified access control through Oracle VPD. You will, however, likely need to change the parameter list of your function to ensure that the correct data is always returned by Function Result Cache.

Example of how to send data from your APEX application to an external website (like PHP) through the POST method.

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The SQL Performance Analyzer offers a comprehensive solution to enable users to forecast and analyze how a system change will impact SQL query plans and run time performance, so they can tune their system before they make the change in production. The SQL Performance Analyzer identifies potential problems that may occur and makes suggestions for avoiding any SQL performance degradation. It provides quantitative estimates of the system’s performance in the new environment with high confidence and performs a comparative analysis of the response time of the SQL workload thus allowing for an easy assessment of the change. In this paper we describe the architecture of the SQL Performance Analyzer, its usage model, and its integration points with other Oracle database components to form an end-to-end change management solution.

Tim created a documentation search page. If you specify your search it gives you a URL you can pass to others. When they use the URL it shows them what they could have done rather than bug you.

Toon demonstrates how a UI page can be serviced by the DBMS via a pipelined table function. Pipelined table functions are a great enabler of pushing business logic into the DBMS tier while at the same time enabling a SQL-based contract of the UI-layer with the DBMS.

Read this before deciding whether or not to implement a large block size (or a very small block size), or add either a larger or smaller than default block size tablespace.

No, although NetBeans is a very capable and well featured development environment there are no plans for it to replace Oracle JDeveloper. Oracle JDeveloper will continue to be an end-to-end enterprise development environment including Java, Java EE, XML, enterprise portal development, SOA development and orchestration and database development. NetBeans will be a choice for developers looking for an open-source, full-featured Java SE/EE/Mobile/FX/TV environment. This aligns well with Oracle's "Productivity with Choice" vision.

Quick article that answers some common questions around the use of smartphones and other mobile devices with the E-Business Suite.

In this segment of a two-part video series, Joel Goodman – Global Team leader of the Oracle DBA certification exam development team – gives some great insight to Oracle's philosophy to why certification is important to professionals and their employers.

Unless you really know what you’re doing when it comes to computer systems and performance you should read these articles by Cary Millsap.

Which execution plan is better? Are the plans the same? How are they the same, and how do they differ?

This article shows some of the ways for generating execution plans, and some of the problems that might be encountered when attempting to obtain the “correct” execution plan.

Oracle has laid out its strategy for integrating Sun's resources – Human and Technological – into their own company infrastructure. The company plans to invest $4.3 billion in R&D this year, and between last year's Oracle OpenWorld and now, the message is the same – Java and its developer tools are safe.

If you are interested in trying out the Oracle SOA Suite from the perspective of someone who is familiar with GlassFish ESB, then attached are several documents which will get you started.

The proliferation of tools created to support Twitter is astounding due to the early adoption and usage of the Twitter API by developers worldwide.  While