Oracle Magazine-September/October 1999

The headline articles in the September/October 1999 edition of Oracle Magazine focused on how the Oracle technology can be used to educate staff and to keep their skills up to date. either on site or remote via on-demand training resources.

Other articles included:

• Oracle announce that they have acquired Thinking Machine’s data mining business. This data mining product was called Darwin and is now called Oracle Data Mining. I will have a separate blog post for this announcement.
• Oracle 8i Lite has shipped and comes with three component: Oracle Lite a single user (50K to 750K foot print), Web-to-Go allows users to access the same data and web applications both online and offline, iConnect that was a flexible architecture that enables reliable and scalable bi-directional synchronization of data and applications. Oracle 8i Lite was supported on MS Windows 95, 98 and NT, Windows CE, Palm OS and EPOC 32.
• Oracle XML Parser for C and Oracle XML Parser for C++ are released and supports DOM and Simple API for XML (SAX) interfaces.
• Oracle XML SQL utilities and XSQL Servlet facilitates the reading and writing of XML information from and to the Oracle database.
• Siemens announce that they plan to build an Oracle 8i Applicance on its Primergy line of servers, based on Intel Pentium II Xeon processors.
• Singapore Telecom’s Magix Server delivers the World’s first nationwide video on demand service. Their 12,000 subscriber were able to use a web-browser to select a video from the Megix Web side and SingTel automates the streaming of them to their computer.
• Oracle 8i comes with some improvements in PL/SQL. These included Autonomous Transactions, Native Dynamic SQL, Invoker rights procedures, user-defined operators, new operators, bulk binds.
• Part 2 of the article on exporting an Oracle Database to a Flat File. In this part of the article it looks at how you can use the UTL_FILE package.
• How you can speed up query response times by using a Materialized Views. The article suggests the following steps to analyze the performance impact:
  • Configure the server parameters
  • Grant privileges to the appropriate schema
  • Create a materialized view
  • Refresh the optimizer statistics
  • Confirm that the materialized view is being used
  • Manually refresh a materialized view
• Oracle introduces Oracle Log Miner to allow a DBA to analyze the REDO log files