Oracle Magazine-Sept/Oct 1998

The headline articles for the Sept/Oct1998 edition of Oracle Magazine were on all on how to build and deploy intranets within an organisation, using Oracle products. There were a few case studies illustrating the benefits that using intranets can bring to an organisation

Other articles included:

• Project Webview was the codename for a new project (part of Oracle 8i) whose aim was to provide and end-to-end solution for instantly building, deploying and proactively monitoring database applications and content driven websites. This was a very early start to what we call APEX now.
• Oracle 8i would be available any day now during the fall of 1998!
• Oracle Applications R11 now has a Business Intelligence system integrated into it. It comes with preconfigured standard performance indicators and with the ability to perform what-if analysis
• Oracle purchases Price Waterhouse ACTIVA Software. ACTIVA is a strategic software solution for activity management, process improvement, activity based budgeting and performance measurement
• You can not install and use Oracle Lite on a Palm Pilot, allowing replication with an enterprise Oracle 8i database.
• There was some useful tips given for companies who are looking to issue and RFP (Request for Proposal)
  • Realize that everything costs money
  • Provide a complete description of your current state
  • Be clear, definitive, comprehensive and complete about your requirements
  • Require the vendor to take a position on each and every requirement
  • Whenever you ask vendors to provide costs, also ask them to list their assumptions
  • Give vendors room to be creative and make suggestions on good alternatives
• When designing your data marts don’t be afraid to add more dimensions than you think are required for the initial spec. By adding more dimensions gives your users greater flexibility with slicing and dicing
• There are 7 simple ways to take advantage of Oracle 8
  • New Table partitioning option.
  • New Index partitioning
  • Improved backup and recovery
  • New Parallel data-manipulation language ability
  • New and improved networking features
  • A better optimizer
  • Reduced resource consumption
• Using array process with dynamic SQL using the following steps
  • Open a cursor
  • Parse the cursor with the PL/SQL statement
  • Associate a PL/SQL type table_var with the cursor, by using a DEFINE_ARRAY for each variable in the select statement
  • Execute the fetch in a loop
  • Associate each variable in the select statement using a COLUMN_VALUE with the PL/SQL TABLE_VAR
  • Use the PL/SQL table variable for any processing

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.