Tag: dbms

Where’s my cardboard laptop?

Don Burleson points out that Oracle has sent out some Cardboard laptops!

Oracle cardboard laptop


The outside of the laptop which showed up in Andy Armstrong’s mail July 5th read “We’ve taken the idea that the outside world is a dangerous place for unprotected content.” and the inside reads “And shredded it.”

Thanks to Zach for posting the full text of the interior which reads:

“To derive maximum benefit from your business critical content, you need to share it across a wide user base. But the more people who have access to it, the greater the threat of sensitive information leaking to your competitors. That’s just for starters; content proliferation also raises the risk of regulatory non-compliance and escalating management costs. You know you can’t live without your information, but you’d be forgiven for wondering how to live with it.

Oracle’s recently acquired Information Rights Management solution can help. A key component of our Document and Records Management portfolio, it enables you to share your information when and with whom you want – without fear of the outside world.

But it doesn’t stop there. Should the worst happen – and your laptop falls into unsafe hands – we can even scamble your content before anyone works out how to access it.

We’ll be in touch shortly with more details of how to shred your content management worries.”

So what’s the story? What bandwagon is Oracle getting on here? Only time will tell. Burleson thinks it may be another step in their “unbreakable” theme. I think it may be something with Application Express as a content management system. Something to do with enterprise blogs or wiki or some other web 2.0 kind of content management.

wiki, blog, web, web20, web 2.0, oracle, dba, rdbms, dbms, marketing, laptop

SQL to find the last Saturday of the year

Satya commented on my post about finding the first or second Monday in a month asking how to find the last Saturday of a year using SQL. This is a good question as I think it is typical of the battles people fight with dates in Oracle.

So here we go… For this example we’ll use sysdate but you can use a date column or a to_date instead.

SQL> select sysdate from dual;

SYSDATE
---------
13-SEP-06

Now we’ll jump forward a year and start working backwards:

SQL> select sysdate+numtoyminterval(1, 'YEAR') from dual;

SYSDATE+N
---------
13-SEP-07

Now that we’re safely into next year we’ll reel it back to January 1st of next year using the trunc function to truncate the date down to the year.

SQL> select trunc(sysdate+numtoyminterval(1, 'YEAR'), 'YEAR') from dual;

TRUNC(SYS
---------
01-JAN-07

To work with the last week of the year we’ll go back 8 days. We need to go back 8 instead of 7 because we’re going to use the next_day function later which only looks after the date it is passed.

SQL> select trunc(sysdate+numtoyminterval(1, 'YEAR'), 'YEAR') - 8 from dual;

TRUNC(SYS
---------
24-DEC-06

Now we use the next_day function to look for the next Saturday after the date we’ve got.

SQL> select next_day(trunc(sysdate+numtoyminterval(1, 'YEAR'), 'YEAR') - 8, 'SATURDAY') from dual;

NEXT_DAY(
---------
30-DEC-06

So we figured out the last Saturday of this year by taking today’s date, adding one year, going back to January 1 of that year, stepping back 8 days from then and looking for the next Saturday.

Hope this helps Satya! Thanks for the great question.

oracle, dates, database, sql, dba, dbms, database development, database programming

Free Oracle 10g Data Dictionary Poster

Burleson Consulting is offering this free poster of the Oracle 10g data dictionary views

10g Data Dictionary Poster


This is a nice compliment to the Tusc V$Views poster. You pay $5.99 for shipping, but believe me, the first time you use this in a pinch to find the name of one of those pesky dictionary tables it will have paid itself off.

Get yours now from Burleson Consulting and while you’re there check out Burleson Consulting’s Daily Oracle News

oracle, data dictionary, database administration, dba, dbms

ER Diagramming Tools

While investigating tools for generating ER Diagrams for the data warehouse I’m working on I came across this good article on databasejournal.com which compares three of the top CASE (computer aided software engineering) tools for Oracle.

In the article Steve Callan quickly highlights the differences between Microsoft Visio 2003, Oracle Designer and AllFusion ERwin Data Modeler.

What can we take home from this article? Well, Microsoft Visio is (relatively) cheap at $499 and has good reverse engineering abilities, but won’t write database creation code for you.

Oracle Designer is clumsy, but since it’s bundled with Internet Developer Suite you might already own it; otherwise you’re probably not likely to justify the $5,000 cost of entry.

ERwin really seems like the Cadillac solution for database modeling. The $3,995 price tag will put off most, but like they say in the auto industry, if you’re worried about gas mileage you’re not ready for a Cadillac.

Check out the full article for details. Also check out the Oracle section at DatabseJournal.com for some nice series on Oracle related topics.

oracle, database, rdbms, dbms, oracle database, database management, database design, dba, database administration, er diagramming, case, software engineering

Oracle Shared Pool Advisory

Over at the ITToolbox blogs there’s a great entry on the Oracle shared pool advisory in 9iR2. This type of article is great as it presents a tool, describes it, and walks you right through applying the knowledge.

Here’s their description of the advisory:

The shared pool advisory is an Oracle9i feature that keeps track of the library cache’s use of shared pool memory. While doing this it keeps statistics to determine the behavior of differently sized shared pools. Typically, the advisory will keep a bucket of statistics for shared pool sizes that range from 50% below your current setting to 200% of your current setting. It is then up to us as database administrators to use these statistics to determine what the size of the shared pool should be through the use of the view V$SHARED_POOL_ADVICE.

Check out the article for more information on how to enable and use the advisory.

oracle, oracle database, dba, dbms, oracle dbms, database tuning, database administration