Oracle Magazine - March/April 2001

The headline articles of Oracle Magazine for March/April 2001 were on using Oracle 9i Application server to deliver e-business and web based applications. There was some case studies of companies using this technologies including Tantalus Communications, Digital River Commerce System, Tomatoland.com and Oracle themselves.

Other articles included:

• Tom Kyte's column looked at tips on automation, cleanup and database maintenance. Some of the details included index rebuilds, indexing interMedia files, killing and cleaning up sessions, how to specify the column at runtime in an order by, and how to use DBMS_JOB for database maintenance.
• Oracle announces the release of PORTAL.ORACLE.COM and MY.ORACLE.COM.
• Fre Sansmark has an article on Database Benchmarking and discusses what it means and how well they address real-world performance questions.
• Understanding XML Standards gives a brief introduction to what XML is about, explains the three layers of XML Grammar, XML based Protocols and XML Vocabularies. .
• Part 3 of 'Exploring Oracle Text Basics' looks at text searching and comparisons, creating, indexing and loading data.
• Creating Updatable Views explores the various requirements for creating an View that can be used to update data that is based on a single table or based on the joining of multiple tables..
• Linking to Remote Databases explores the basics of Database Links and that the DBA needs to know to setup and manages these..
• Steven Feuerstein's article looks at Advanced Native Dynamic SQL and the use of bind variables and their limitations.

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.

Oracle Magazine - Fall 1987

The headline articles of Oracle Magazine for Fall 1987 (the Second issue) were on Enhancing cellular communications for Canadian Cellular, using Oracle to combat predatory starfish on Australia's Great Barrier Reef and breaking the 640K barrier using powerful microcomputers.
This was a bumper issue in comparison to the very first edition.


Other articles included:

• Oracle (International) User Week was held during week 27th September. This coincided with Oracle's 10th anniversary, and have over 1000 attendees. That is a bit of difference in numbers that Oracle Open World now gets!
• Oracle post record Revenues and Earnings. Fiscal year 1996 had revenue of $55.4 million and fiscal year 1997 had revenue of $131.3 million, with fourth quarter revenue of $50 million.
• AHOLD, a leading Dutch supermarket chain is using the Oracle database to automate 500 of its Albert Heijn (NL) supermarkets.
• Finnish Defense Ministry deploys the Oracle database system.
• SQL*Menu is released. Its main was to all application designers can unify applications build with SQL*Forms, SQL*Report, SQL*Plus and other applications.
• Loews Anatole Hotel in Dallas had recently checked in over 3,100 guests and checked out 2,900 guest in one day. All of this processing what done using an Oracle Database .
• Over 120 competitions in 16 days. More than 2,600 athletes from 51 countries. An estimated 1.6 million spectators. Volunteers, scorers and worldwide media Organising and managing the 1998 Winter Olympics in Calgary was all done using an Oracle database.
• There was an article on writing SQL by Richard Finkelstein, using some of the set operators and how to update data using a nested query.

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.

Oracle Magazine-January/February 2001

The headline articles of Oracle Magazine for January/February 2001 were on how the current set of Oracle products supported the development and deployment of mobile and internet applications.

Other articles included:

• Oracle and HP form an alliance to develop and delivery CRM solutions aimed at helping companies keep up with customers in a world where rapid change is common place.
• In Tom Kyte's regular article he look at and gives examples of using function based indexes, automatically calculating percentages in queries, password protecting the Listener functions, making user lists and securing your data using DBMS_OBFUSCATION_TOOLKIT.
• Oracle announces the release of Oracleportal.com and Oracle Portal Studio.
• Over the past few months Oracle has gone about renaming a number of their products. A full page id give over to this list that maps the old product name to the new product name.
• There was a number of small announcements of collaborations between Oracle and Sun. The start of a beautiful friendship that eventually ended in a marriage.
• Steven Feuerstein had an article on Dynamic Approaches to Multirow Queries. Based on the native dynamic SQL introduced in Oralce 8i he shows us how to handle multiple row results either individually or as a collection.
• In the article on Net8 examples are given showing how net service names are resolved and using LDAP.
• The Oracle 8i Database has components that allow you to take advantage of XML technology. These include XSQL pages, how to install XSQL Servlet, registering the xsql file, processing dynamic xml documents from SQL queries and supporting XSLT tags.

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.

Oracle Magazine September/October 2000

The headline articles of Oracle Magazine for September/October 2000 were on e-Business Integration, including online healthy prescription for online retailing, streamlineing the pulp and fiber industries, and the health care industry. Plus there was lots and lots of articles and news items all on businesses delivering solutions via the internet.

As this was the Oracle Open World edition (and you see the label on the cover saying Biggest Ever) you can imagine there was a LOT of advertisements and sponsored articles. The following of other articles below will not cover these and will only look at the main content articles.

Other articles included:

• Tom Kyte's article is on Tips for Migrating, Indexing and Using Packaged Procedures. In his article he gives some tips for migrating to Oracle 8.1i. He also discusses some scenarios around creating (or not) indexes on foreign keys. He also looks at the scenario of compiling linked procedures and how the use of packages avoids the identified issues.
• Do you remember the Internet File System. There was an article that gave an overview of this that was available in Oracle 8i and was capable of managing over 150 different file types.
• Autodesk releaseed OnSite, an enterprise solution for bringing design and location based information to the point of work via mobile devices. Autodesk On Site used Oracle 8i Lite and the Palm OS platform to provide an interactive, two way communication environment between the mobile worker and the overall decision support system.
• The Oracle Academic Initiative began in 1997. In 2000 Oracle donated software licences, support services and Oracle training material to 17 educational institutions valued at $60 million
• There was page after page, after page of announcements and news from various Oracle Partners.
• Douglas Scherer gives the first part of an article that looks at how you can use Oracle 8i interMedia for managing and deploying content rich data on the internet.
• Managing Your Resources looks at some of the new Oracle 8i EE helps DBAs to define plan, assign users to groups and prioritise resource allocations.
• With the release of Oracle 8.1.6 came the new Statspack. Connie Dialeris and Graham Wood give an overview of the main features of Statspack, providing some guidance on how to use it in a proactive manner and gives a step-by-step guide to how you can trouble shoot performance problems with Statspack.
• The final article was on Oracle Warehouse Builder (OWB). This was an overview type of article and gave an overview of the main components and gives some guidelines for setting up some different types of integration.

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.

Oracle Magazine-July/August 2000

The headline articles of Oracle Magazine for July/August 2000 were on business intelligence, architectures for BI and how companies like NetFlix m drug-store.com and health insurances companies are using BI to better understand their customers.

Other articles included:

• Tom Kyte has an article on Back to Basic for DBAs to ensure robust performance and scalability. He looks at sizing and some of the different aspects involved in this, some of the hot backup methods and the resizing redo log files.
• Oracle Jdeveloper 3.1 is released and there is a new component of the Oracle XML Developer's Kit (Oracle XDK), which offers end-to-end XML support and provides developers with an integrated, full-featured application development tool for delivering business-to-business applications in Java and XML.
• Oracle and IBM plan to offer Oracle Internet Directory within AIX and Monterey/64 as a directory option to customers.
• Over 5 pages of press releases from Oracle Partners.
• The Common Warehouse Model (CWM) is an open standard by which DWs can share meta-data. Oracle the the OMG are working on defining a standard for sharing metadata.
• Kevin Loney has an article on transportable tablespaces in Oracle 8i. He discusses issues around generating a transportable tablespace set, plugging in the transportable tablespace set, some management issues and some things to consider with partitions
• The is a modelling article that looks at the differences between using Relational and an Object-Based model. Taking a real world example the article walks through how to use the relation and then the object model.
• Richard Niemiec gives the second part of his article on Tuning Problems Queries. In this article he covers using hints, using joins effectively, using the parallel query option and using some mathematical techniques to anticipate query performance.
• Jonathan Gennick outlines a 6 step incremental approach to developing good SQL queries
• The final article was an interview with Ari Kaplan who was at the time and Oracle DBA, Oracle book author and talks about his analytics projects with a number of baseball clubs.

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.

Oracle Magazine review–May/June 2000

The headline articles of Oracle Magazine for May/June 2000 were on the evolution of organisations into adopting a e-business model. It included 8 steps on evolving to e-business, how to use the Oracle Internet Platform, Web Portal and Java technology.

Other articles included:

• Tom Kyte has an article on Oracle Availability Options and explains when to implement Oracle Parallel Server or replication or a standby database.
• There is a new release of Oracle Discover 3i and Oracle Reports 6i that support XML and are part of the Oracle Intelligent WebHouse initiative.
• Oracle licenced the mobile moddleware developed by Nettech System, to support Oracle’s steps into this field.
• There is an overview of the IOUG-A Live! 2000 conference which is being held between 7-11 May in the Anaheim Convention Centre. Over 4,000 attendees are expected.
• Kelli Wiseth gives and overview of Java 2, explaining the differences between J2SE and J2EE. The article also discusses how Java is part of the Oracle Internet Platform.
• Steven Feuerstein gives the second part of his article on using Java Classes and Objects in the Oracle 8i database.
• Richard Niemiec has an articles on Fundamental Tuning Goals and details the followings:
• Allocate the right amount of memory for the Oracle instance.
• Keep the right data in memory.
• Find problem queries.
• Kevin Loney had an article on how to protect your database from security threats. These included:
• Guard your backups and development environments
• Know your default user and applications accounts
• Control the distribution of database names and locations
• Use auditing effectively
• Make password changes mandatory yet simple
• Isolate your production database
• Venkat Devraj talks discuss six storage tips for 24x7 availability
• Know and understand RAID options
• Choose your disk-array size with caution
• Do not use read ahead caches for online transaction processing applications
• Do not reply on write caches to eliminate I/O hot spots
• Consider using multilevel RAIDS
• Ensure that your stripe sizes are consistent with your OS and database block sizes

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.

Oracle Magazine-March/April 2000

The headline articles of Oracle Magazine for March/April 2000 were focused on e-business. There was articles covering the typical issues in setting up an e-business, the technical environment and some reports from organisation who have used the Oracle tools.

Other articles included:

• Oracle releases their Oracle XML Developer’s Kit (Oracle XDK), with support for a variety of programming languages. It included XML Parsers for Java, C, C++ and PL/SQL. XSL Processor, XML Class Generator, and XML Transviewer Java Beans.
• Oracle 8i Lite for the Palm Computing and Psion EPOC operating systems is available.
• Oracle acquires Carleton, who were innovators of data quality and mainframe data extraction software for customer focused data warehousing applications.
• Oracle releases Oracle Fail Safe 3.0 which was used to protect Microsoft Windows NT applications and databases, and supported Oracle 7, 8 and 8i, Oracle Developer Server 6.0 Forms and Reports Servers, Oracle Application Server 4.0 and Microsoft Internet Information Server 4.0.
• Steven Feuerstein has an article about getting started with Calling Java from PL/SQL and gives a simple example to illustrate how to do this. The necessary system privileges included JAVASYSPRIV for the DBA and JAVAUSERPRIV for those schemas who want to call the Java code
• Graham Wood and Connie Dialeris give an overview of Statspack that was was released with Oracle 8.1.6. The article covered the various features, how to install it and how to configure the Snapshot Level & SQL Thresholds. The article also gave an example of how to use DBMS_JOB to automate the collecion of the statistics.
• A Step-by-Step guide on how to use RMAN (that most of use know and love!), including the RMAN architecture, how to setup a backup, starting a backup and the all important step of recovering a backup.
• With Oracle 7 came the ability to Clone a database. In this article it goes through the steps required to setup and clone a production database.

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.

Review of Oracle Magazine-July/August 1999

The headline articles for the July/August 1999 edition of Oracle Magazine were focused on Business Intelligence and included topics on architectures, business plans, data integration, portals, dashboards, Oracle Express, data marts and data warehouses.

Other articles included:

• 15 Rules for Enterprise Portals
• Gear it to casual users
• Use intuitive classifications and searching
• Allow access to a publish/subscribe engine
• Enable universal connectivity to information resources
• Provide dynamic access to information resources
• Set up intelligent routing
• Integrate a business intelligence toolset
• Use a server based architecture
• Build in distributed, multithreaded services
• Enable flexible permission granting
• Append external interfaces
• Provide programmatic interfaces
• Establish internet security
• Make it cost effective to deploy
• Ensure that it can be customized and personalized
• Oracle Application Server release 4.0.8 was available for beta testing and includes support for Enterprise JavaBeans. Java Servlets, Java Server Pages and allows developers to build robust self service applications quickly
• Oracle and MapInfo joined forces to release an internet-based spatial-data analysis solution to help organizations to understand and visualize data and to identify patterns and customer trends
• Oracle makes available Oracle iTV platform, that is a solution that makes it possible for broadcast, cable and telecommunications providers to deliver interactive services .
• Nine tips for using Oracle Discover included:
• Us the decode statement
• Implement summary redirection
• create optional conditions (filters)
• use query statistics
• perform regular maintenance on the query statistics tables
• familiarize yourself with the EUL tables
• make regular backups
• modify registry settings
• delete objects with care
• Standardizing your interfaces. The first of a three part article on creating interfaces to the database. This article focused on showing how to setup and use UTL_FILE for loading data into and getting data out of the database.
• Creating a Virtual Private Database in Oracle 8i describes how to approach such a project to implement fine grained access control and gives the following steps for setting up a VPD
• create the application context
• create a package that sets the context
• create the policy function
• associate the policy function with a table or view

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.

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

Review of Oracle Magazine–May/June 1999

The headline articles for the May/June 1999 edition of Oracle Magazine were focused on using internet technologies to allow businesses to work together more efficiently.

Other articles included:

• Oracle and Hewlett-Packard announce the a prebuild Oralce 8i appliance. This had a code-name of Raw Iron.
• Oracle announce a $100million venture fund to promote innovation by companies developing products and services based on Oracle 8i
• Oracle 8i comes with the an enhanced feature that automatically keeps a standby database synchronized with the production database. This is called the Automated Standby Databases (ASD) and hopes to reduce the amount of manual work DBAs need to perform.
• Some helpful suggestions on how to go about implementing parallel DML in Oracle 8.
• Rules for Parallel Insert
• The insert statement must be of the form ‘insert into table_name select …’
• The table being modified must have a specified parallel declaration or you must specify a parallel hint directive in the insert statement
• You can perform parallel insert on non-partitioned as well as partitioned tables
• After the parallel DML is complete no other SQL statements can access the same table until a Commit is issued.
• Rules for Parallel Update and Delete
• Table table must have a parallel declaration specified or you must specify a parallel hint directive in the update/delete statement
• You can perform parallel update or delete on partitioned tables only
• You cannot see the result of the parallel update or delete during the transaction
• By using the parallel options, data intensive SQL statements, database recovery, and data loads can be executed by multiple processes simultaneously. All the following operations can be executed in parallel
• table scan
• sort merge join
• Not In
• select distinct
• aggregation
• cube
• create table as select
• rebuild index partition
• move partition
• update
• Insert ….. select
• Enable constraint
• PL/SQL functions called from SQL
• Nested loop join
• Hash join
• Group by
• Union and union all
• Order by
• Rollup
• Create index
• Rebuild index
• Split partition
• Delete
• Star transformation

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.

Oracle Magazine–March/April 1999

The headline articles for the March/April 1999 edition of Oracle Magazine were on the evolving world of the DBA. With some much new technology available in the database the role of the DBA is moving from a back office type role to one having a significant strategic influence in the organisation.

Other articles included:

• Oracle releases a web based version of their Oracle Strategic Procurement application that includes three key parts: Strategic Sourcing, Internet Procurement and Process Automation.
• Sun and Oracle announce a strategic agreement that allows both companies to enhance their product offerings by exchanging key technologies. Oracle will use the core of the Sun Solaris operating environment to deliver the industry’s first database server appliances.
• Oracle Data Mart Suite releases version 2.5. It includes, Oracle Data Mart Builder, Oracle Data Mart Designer, Oracle 8 Enterprise Edition, Oracle Discoverer, Oracle Application Server and Oracle Reports and Reports Server.
• New integration between Oracle Reports release 6.0 and Oracle Express Server release 6.2 to give users the ability to distribute high quality reports of information held in a multi-dimensional database across the enterprise.
• The need for the DBA to know and understand the V$ views has been increasing during the later releases of 7.3 and 8i. The can be used for a variety of purposes, including understanding locked users, system resources, licencing and parameter settings.
• One thing that all DBAs need to plan for is a database recovery. Planning it is one thing, but practicing it is another thing. A typical recovery plan will include, choosing a data file, create a backup, take the damaged tablespace offline, restore the damaged data file, bring the tablespace back online, recover the tablespace, bring the tablespace back online and test it.
• Avoiding trigger errors, including Mutating and constraining table errors.
• There is an article by Bryan Laplante on using Historgrams to Optimize Data Mart Performance.

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.

Oracle Magazine-Nov/Dec. 1998

The headline articles for the Nov/Dec 1998 edition of Oracle Magazine were on building web based applications and thin client computing. A large part of the magazine was dedicated to these topics.  This was a bumper edition with a total of 152 pages of content.

Other articles included:

• There was a few articles on using Oracle 8i, including how to use Java in the Database, the Internet File System, Intermedia and Data Warehousing.  Oracle 8i comes with over 150 new features
• There was a couple of articles on the Millennium Bug and how to approach such projects. There was also some advice for organisations who would have to look at how to deal with the introduction of the Euro currency in Europe.
• There was a section for articles on new product announcements from Oracle partners, including Quest, Nextek, Maxager, ObjectShare, Constellar (Warehouse Builder), Prism, DataMetrics, IQ Software, Eventus, DataMirror, Precise, Saville, DataShark, J-Database Exchange, Andataco, GeoMedia
• Oracle makes available Oracle 8i and the Application Server on a Linux platform for the first time.
• With Oracle 8i we have a number of ways of managing our constraints, including:
• Deferrable integrity constraints
• Non unique indexes for primary key and unique constraints
• Immediate constraint enabling
• Detecting lock and waiting transactions was always a task that consumed a lot of time for a DBA. A number of scripts was given to help you identify these and to resolve these problems.
• For allow of Oracle Certified DBAs out there. There was an article promoting the OCP DBA program and Exam. Some hints and tips about the exam were given, along with some practice questions.
• Plus there was 12 pages on adverts at the back of the magazine.

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.

Review Oracle Magazine- July/August 1998

The headline articles for the July/August1998 edition of Oracle Magazine were on designing, developing and delivering Data Marts using the Oracle Database and related tools. The main article looks at the different phases of developing a data mart in 90 days.

One of the key messages in these articles is to keep focused on the business problem and that the technology part is very minor in this. This message is still vey key to the analytics and big data world, keep focused on the business problem.

Other articles included:

• Oracle ships JDeveloper Suite. It included App Builder for Java, Oracle Application Server 4.0, Oracle 8 Database Server, Symantec’s Visual Page HTML editor, and a one year developer’s membership in the Oracle Technology Network. Yes there used to be a cost to be a member of OTN!!!.
• Oracle We Developer Suite wins the PC Magazine Editor Choice award. The suite comes with full development licences for Designer/2000 Release 2.1, including object extensions, Developer/2000 Release 2.1, Oracle App Builder for Java, Oracle Application Server 3.0, Oracle Database Server (releases 7 and 8) and the Oracle Web Development Kit
• Oracle Support announce plans to give read only access, via the web, to its Bug database.
• There was an advert for TOAD when it was still freeware and provided by ToadSoft.
• Security management for Oracle 8, has been increasing in importance over the past few years. For all those people who have some security responsibilities, here are some key elements for database security: System security, Data security, User security, Password management and System auditing. Security is more than just providing a Firewall.
• Building Message-based apps with Oracle 8’s Advanced Queuing, involves 5 main steps, including:
• Start the server’s AQ background process
• Create a database user account to manage queues
• Create a user-defined type for application messages
• Create a queue table and a corresponding queue of the user defined message type
• Build the application to enqueue and dequeue messages of the user defined message type
• For the DBAs there was an article on Fast Full Index Scan, how to enable it and gives a number of examples of the hints including the index_fss.

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.

Review of Oracle Magazine-March/April 1998

The headline articles for the March/April 1998 edition of Oracle Magazine were on how the role of the DBA is increasing in importance, managing databases globally, how the DBA is an important strategic partner in an organisation. Oracle is being used by a number of health organisations including Norway’s national hospital system, Regence BlueCross BlueShield of Utah and Neuroclinical Trials Center.

Other articles included:

• Oracle Applications 11was due for release during the first half of 1998 and has a number of key features including, Universal Access, Globalized Finance, Project Manufacturing and Flow Manufacturing.
• Oracle’s Industry Applications division recently introduced new products including Oracle Public Budgeting, Oracle Sector Grants Management and the Oracle Energy Upstream solution .
• 5 ways DBA’s can be strategic partners: Proactive systems management, systems design, change management, performance tuning and security.
• Steve Lemme, DBA/systems manager for Motorola lists the following tasks for DBAs to keep them busy
• Daily Duties : At a minimum monitor
• Oracle ALERT file logs
• Systems resources
• Backups
• Archive logs
• Error logs
• Weekly Watch : Check free space including:
• Tablespaces
• Tables
• Indexes
• Clusters
• Monthly Monitoring : Do audits for fragmentation of :
• Indexes
• Clusters
• Tables
• Oracle Enterprise Toolkit comprises, Enterprise Manager, Diagnostics Pack, Tuning Pack and Management Pack.
• Kenny Smith looks at a day in the life of a DBA working from home using Oracle Enterprise Manager that included a Data Load, Change View, Create stored function, Add a new user, Fix a database link, Send a size report to director, Fix a production slowdown, Helped an application developer and Averted a production crisis.
• Migrating to Oracle 8: Quick Start on New Features:
• Knowledge Collection and Consolidation
• Learn about Oracle 8’s new features
• Get help from someone who has implemented Oracle 8
• Review the new features with your team
• Application Analysis for New Features
• Implement minor changes first
• Define the table partitioning strategy
• Define and indexing strategy
• Identify the tables you can index organise
• Database Design Analysis for New Features
• Define the new physical layout
• Define a partition maintenance strategy
• Migrate to partitions
• Backup and Recovery Strategy
• Review your current backup and recovery strategy
• Make as many tablespaces as possible read-only
• Define a multitiered backup strategy using SMR
• Make sure at least two independent restoration options exist
• Ensure that you can do the restoration in an adequate time period
• Define a plan for testing backup and recovery
• Kevin Loney has an article on the new format for ROWID in Oracle 8, what it is and how to use it

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.

Review of Oracle Magazine–January/February 1998

The headline articles for the January/February 1998 edition of Oracle Magazine were on Electronic Commerce and include justification for building EC applications, creating online shops and what products Oracle has to support as aspects of an EC applications.

Other articles included:

• Oracle Product announcements included:
• Oracle InterOffice 4.1
• Oracle Lite 3.0 gets a Java facelift
• Oracle Gateways for MS SQL Server 8 and Sybase 8
• Oracle Applications Release 11 is coming soon
• Applications Desktop Integrator
• Application Server 3.1
• Oracle 8 on Sun Sets new World Record. TCP-C Benchmark with 51,871.62 tpmC at $134.36 per tpmC runing Oracle 8 on Sun Solaris 2.6 on a two node Sun Microsystems Ultra Enterprise 6000 cluster
• Marking the Mart Decision, looked at how using a Data Mart approach you can have a project delivered quicker (3 to 6 months) and a cost of $100,000. All this using the Oracle Data Mart Suite for Windows NT
• Securing transactions in Network Applications using Oracle’s Web Application Server to control security
• Digital Certificate Authentication
• Application Authorization
• Encryption
• Managing Unstructured data in Oracle 8. There ware some new data types including LOB, CLOB, BLOB  and BFILE
• Making the most of Java looks at how you can use applets with Designer/2000 WebServer Generator
• A quick start guide on how to migrate to Oracle 8, included:
• Determining the Migration Strategy
• Ensure compatibility
• Identify invalid objects and lost statistics
• Eliminate language problems
• Take care of read-only tablespaces
• Know the point of no return
• Avoid large restores
• Defining Resource Requirements
• Define Personnel requirements
• Set the timing of the migration
• Determine space requirements
• Create an appropriate testing environment
• Determining Potential Problem Areas
• Review ROWIDs
• Avoid reserved words
• Eliminate obsolete init.ora parameters
• Identifying Verification Tests
• Develop the test strategy
• Do migration testing
• Perform minimal testing
• Do functional testing
• Do integration testing
• Do performance testing
• Do load-stress testing

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.

Review of Oracle Magazine- November/December 1997

The headline articles for the November/December 1997 edition of Oracle Magazine were focused on the Network Computing area, how it works, what framework to use, how the architecture works, how it supports the information management universe.

Other articles included:

• The new features of Designer/2000 Release 2.0 included a new Design Editor, an updated Repository to capture more details about the application structure, rules and application logic and reusable module components.
• Object Database Designer for Object-Relational Databases is beta released with a production version in a few months
• Oracle’s Very Large Memory (VLM) capability on Windows NT raises the 2GB memory constraint imposed on applications running Windows NT. With VLM, Oracle can cache almost 8GB of database information in memory.
• Extending Oracle 8 with Objects looked at how to create nested tables, and creating object tables
• How to Create a Good Test Database gives some guidance on how to extract a referentially intact subset of data for testing a data warehouse with new reports, queries and programs.
• A Management Perspective on Handling a New Millennium gives a methodology to address the complete management and control issues. The had the following phases:
• Impact assessment
• Prechange analysis
• Compliance
• Retest and Integration
• Using Parallel Query to improve Windows NT Data Mart Performance
• The last section of the magazine had 10 pages of job adverts.

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.

Review of Oracle Magazine–September/October 1997

The headline articles for the September/October 1997 edition of Oracle Magazine were how to put your data warehouse on the web, how to build it, how it works, differences between a data mart and a data warehouse, how Delicato Vineyard and the US Environmental Protection Agency web enabled their data warehouse,

This was a bumper edition of Oracle Magazine. It had just over 150 pages of content. This is compared to the previous editions that have been +/- a few pages of 100.

Other articles included:

• There was a certain amount of repetition of announcements from the previous edition (a lot). I won’t repeat them here but check out the previous edition review.
• Extending Oracle 8 with Objects covered how to create and work with Object Types.
• How to setup and configure your Oracle Database hot standby, how to monitor it and what limitations to watch out for.
• Oracle Designer/2000 Administration: Tuning Tips and Techniques.
• The tips for the Repository included:
• Bring your system up to speed
• Re-create indexes and hash tables frequently
• Size the SGA Shared_Pool_Size and the DB_Block_Buffers
• Pin procedures to the SGA
• Size the tablespaces
• Re-create the repository through import/export
• Be aware of the impact of sharing objects across multiple application systems
• Tips for Client-side tuning:
• Use suggested settings for PC clients
• Install Designer/2000 client tools on a file server
• Tips for Network Tuning
• Configure SQL*Net
• Unlocking the value of test with Oracle ConText cartridge. CareerPath.com uses ConText to enable servers to quickly and efficiently search through hundreds of thousands of job vacancies quickly and relevant for the searchers entered details.

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.

Review of Oracle Magazine–July/August 1997

The headline articles for the July/August 1997 edition of Oracle Magazine were all focused on using Java, building applications, an interview with James osling using Java and the Oracle Database together and an outline of what Oracle sees as the future for Java.

Other articles included:

• There as a lot of product announcements (similar to the previous edition). These included:
• Developer/2000 Web Cartridge
• Enterprise JavaBeans for Integrated Business Solutions
• Oracle/CNN Launch
• Personal Oracle Lite 2.4 : Mobile RDBMS
• Oracle Replication Services Release 1.3: Bidirectional replication
• Oracle Projects 10.7 Suite of Applications
• Oracle Web Application Server 3.0 on HP-UX
• Oracle Discoverer 3.0
• Oracle GEMMS 4.1
• Data Mart solution for Windows NT
• Using the Network Computing Architecture (NCA) with Developer/2000 and Designer/2000. This covered how you can create components that you can mix and match, and plug into your applications. This involved using JDeveloper and the Developer/2000 Web Forms Cartridge to Deploy in Java.
• There was an article discussing how you can implement your applications in a distributed environment, on a phased basis.
• Steven Feuerstein writes planning your PL/SQL development to maximise your PL/SQL environment. He suggests that there are two specific steps for PL/SQL: 1 Consolidate access to the underlying database, and 2 Standardize exception handling and creating general utilities that can be reused. Best practices include:
• Make packages flexible and easy to use
• Overload the package to make the package smarter
• Modularize the package so it can be maintained and enhanced.
• Hide the package data
• Build multiple packages simultaneously
• Employing top-down design in PL/SQL
• Make the most of the PL/SQL language and features

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.

Review of Oracle Magazine–May/June 1997

The headline articles for the May/June 1997 edition of Oracle Magazine were focused on the release of Oracle 8, with articles on the new features, how Boeing and Arizona Start University are using Oracle 8 to create a plane for the future, and some articles on using object technology in Oracle 8.

I remember back in 1994 Oracle bought an OODBMS company with the aim of ‘if you cannot beat them then buy them’. The Object Relation project of Sedona was born and the first of the deliverables from the project was in Oracle 8.

Other articles included:

• The key benefits of Oracle 8 Server (The Database of Network Computing) can be grouped under Scalable, Available, Object-Relational, Large Scale, Distributed, Secure and Evolutionary.
• The new features of Oracle 8 have been in new or better functionality for OLTP, Data Warehousing, Parallel Server, Object-Relational (code named Sodona), Partitioning, Backup and Recovery, Connectivity, Replication, NCA Framework and Migration.
• Oracle announces that they have licensed Borland Java tools and we now have the birth of JDeveloper and the world of ADF will come along many years later.
• The Industry Applications Division (IAD) of Oracle announce new applications and releases. These included: Oracle Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) 2.2, Oracle Government Financials, Oracle Energy 3.1, Oracle Clinical 3.1, Oracle Environmental 4.5 and Oracle Health and Safety 2.0.
• Kumaran Systems, releases a tool that will convert all your reports written in RPT (ReportWriter, which was very similar to PL/SQL) to Reports 2.5.  I really liked RPT. It was quick and you could do a lot with a few lines of code. Converting to Oracle Reports took a bit of getting used to. As a lot of the work you had to put into developing the report revolved you having to play with frames and anchoring box positions. Oh I still have the scares.
• Los Angeles County uses Oracle 7.1 to help it manage its environmental applications.
• How to defined and use Summary tables in your Oracle Data Warehouse.
• Oracle launches a new magazine for its users call Profit and is aimed at the CFO and CIO market.

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.

Oracle Magazine Collection

Are you going to Oracle Open World & have old Oracle Magazines.
I’ve been working in the Oracle World for 20 years now. During that time I’ve been collecting the print editions of Oracle Magazine since 1992.
I have all the Oracle Magazines from 1998, but I’m missing some of the editions prior to 1998.

Can you help me complete my collection ?   (I promise that you wont find them on ebay!!)

What I would really like to do is to have a print copy of every Oracle Magazine going back to the very first one in June 1987. To see the electronic version of the first edition, which was very kindly made available by Cary Milsap, click here.

So in the run up to Oracle Open World could you have a look to see if you have any of my missing editions or any of the early editions. I can collect them off you are Oracle Open World.

If you have a look through my blog you will see that I’ve been posting a review of some of the early editions of Oracle Magazine. Ideally at some time in the future I will have a review of all the Oracle Magazines available.