Review Oracle Magazine–Sept/Oct 2006- 20th Anniversary

The Sept/Oct Oracle Magazine from 2006 was the 20th Anniversary edition.

The main articles were focused on Security, Unstructured Data, Using Ajax, Partitioning (this is a regular topic), Application Express and there was the regular articles from Tom Kyte and Steven Feuerstein

 

There was only one article focusing o the 20th Anniversary of Oracle Magazine, written by Jeff Spicer and gave a brief overview of how the magazine has progress and the main technologies. The highlights included

• Oracle Magazine emerged in 1987 from the original newsletter that was issued every quarter
• In the 1990's the magazine grew in size and was primarily focus on how Oracle customer were using the products
• By the late 1990 the magazine evolved into have a number of distinct sections focusing on the wide range of products that Oracle now owned
• Then into the 2000 Oracle magazine stated to introduce more user focused features. With this we get more user group news and features on community members.
• Tom Kyte joins with a regular column in 2000
• Back in 2006 Oracle magazine has a readership of nearly 1 million.

In the November/December 2011 Oracle Magazine, Tom Haunert give an brief history of Oracle Magazine, over its 25 year history

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 1997

The January/February 1997 edition of Oracle Magazine was the “10th Anniversary Special Edition”. They were celebrating a little bit early as it should be the June/July edition, as the first Oracle Magazine was published in June 1987.  This edition says that Oracle Magazine started in 1986. So there is a little bit of confusion on when Oracle Magazine started. Some people say Oracle Magazine started before the first edition, as there was a regular-ish newsletter for a couple of years before the June 1987 edition.

The January/February 1997 edition had its contents divided into two main sections. The first of these sections was on the typical articles you would find in Oracle Magazine and the other section was for a collection of articles for the 10th anniversary.

The articles for the main part of January/February 1997 edition of Oracle Magazine included:

• Oracle Spatial Data option was released providing a full-function geometry server.
• Developer/2000 for the Web gets released
• Discoverer 3.0 beta is released
• Objects in High Gear looks at object technology and how it is and can be used in our data and applications, with example applications for education and health.

The 10th Anniversary section articles included:

• Oracle Magazine editor, Leslie Steere, had an article called The Cure for Information Overload. In this article she listed 10 questions that can help you determine if you are from Information Overload Syndrome.
1. Has your job become unsatisfying?
2. Do you find yourself unable to make important decisions?
3. Have you lost the ability to prioritize?
4. Has your work performance been less than stellar lately?
5. Have you caught yourself snapping at coworkers?
6. Do you feel unreasonably anxious at business meetings?
7. Have your sleep patterns changed for the worse?
8. Are you drinking and eating more compulsively than usual?
9. Are you experiencing problems in your important personal relationships?
10. Are you physically ill more often than usual?
• Follow the Leaders article had short interviews with some of Oracle’s top executives on the past and future of Oracle. The executive included, Dirk Kabcenell, EVP Product Division Administration, Phil Wilson, SVP Human Resources, Ian Thacker, SVP Oracle UK, Thomas Theodores, VP Corporate Legal, randy Baker, SVP, Worldwide Customer Support and Nimish Mehta, SVP Industry Management.
• Ken Jacob, VP of Product Strategy talks about about his time at Oracle and his vision for the next 10 years. “What are we going to do over the next few years in online transaction processing? How are we going to incorporate object-based technologies, asynchronous messaging, and multitier architectures. What are we going to do to enhance the data-warehouse features? There’ll be some internal architecture restructuring of the system, but the basic foundation is strong. There is nothing that we need to catch up on, so our task is to just keep moving ahead into the future.”
• Sohaib Abbasi, SVP of Oracle Tools Division, who has been working in Oracle since 1982 and lead up the SQL*Forms development in 1984. He talks about the Oracle Development Tool.
• An early customer for Oracle was the particle research centre CERN. This article charts how CERN has used Oracle from version 2 to Oracle 8.
• Kevin Loney gives 10 scripts that every DBA needs for managing the database.

To view the cover page and the table of contents click on the image at the top of this post or click here.

In my next blog post I will look at the 20th and 25th Anniversary editions of Oracle Magazine.

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.

Peer-to-Peer in Oracle Magazine–September/October 2013

The latest edition of Oracle Magazine is now available online and can be viewed at http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/oramag/magazine/current-issue/index.html

I’ve been included in the Peer-to-Peer feature, along with two other Oracle ACEs. The Peer-to-Peer feature is a regular part in Oracle Magazine and typically gives a short profile of 3 Oracle ACEs or ACE Directors.

If you have subscribed to get a printed copy, we should be getting a copy of it in the post over the next couple of weeks.

Review of Oracle Magazine–November/December 1996

The headline articles for the November/December 1996 edition of Oracle Magazine were focused on VLDB with articles on scaling to petabyte sized databases, the latest and best hardware to use, what new exist features in 7.3 and 8 for VLDBS, what new tools exists to assist administrators with the scale of the database.

Other articles included:

• There was an article on what is a Operational Data Store (ODS) and it also highlights how and ODS is different to a Data Warehouse. Despite this article and many, many more like it in the wider press since 1996 there is still lots of confusion out in the IT world on what whey are and how they are different.
• A new Database Design tool has been added to the Oracle Designer/2000 suit. This new tool was supposed to be lightweight, etc.  Oracle Data Modeler is a much better tool.
• Oracle outlines their roadmap for making their database and certain tools available on Windows NT.
• IKEA has implemented and Oracle 7 DB on multiple platforms, including IBM MVS, Digital VMS, IBM AIX and other UNIX variants. Other tools used by IKEA included Developer/2000 and Designer/2000.
• How to manage multi-table joins to reduce the amount of processing. The article looked at how to use Nested Loops, Merger Joins and Hash Joins. The article also suggests that in some cases maybe you need to consider redesigning your tables/data model.
• Motorola implements multi-lingual Oracle Human Resources 10SC in 14 offices in 8 countries. There was a lot of use of NLS functionality in the database including NLS_LANG, NLS_NUMERIC_CHARACTERS, NLS_SORT and the translated _TL tables in Oracle Applications.
• We have the first Y2K related article, an much of the discussion focused on how Oracle Stores Dates in the database. Most of the fuss focused on if you captured and stored a two digit year or a four digit year. Oracle provided the RR format mask to minimise the amount of recoding that needed to be done to Many applications around the world.
• There was 6 pages of job adverts from Oracle Australia, Database Consultants Inc, ACT1, BPA, Profound Consulting, RHI Consulting, Ernst & Young, TransTech, Wilco, Information Alliance, Exor Technologies, The Consulting Team, InTimeSystems, May&Speh, Price Waterhouse. I wonder where some of those companies are now.

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 1996

The headline articles for the September/October 1996 edition of Oracle Magazine was on Putting the Web to Work and focused how to build web based applications. Topics covered included the Web Server, Intranet vs Client/Server applications, what (Oracle) tools to use.

Oracle articles included:

• There was an interesting advertisement from Sun. It consisted on one page that contained the following text, “when your intranet is protected with Solstice by Sun, unauthorized users see your information quite differently,. For a free demonstration, turn the page” The next two pages are blank!
• Oracle publishing will be launching Oracle Applications Magazine in November 1996. The new magazine will be targeted at top line-of-business managers and will offer executives and other qualified Oracle Applications users in-depth industry analysis and technology and business overviews of topics critical to managers looking for technology solutions to business problems.
• Euro Star train service that covers UK and France, and has trains running under the the English Chanel, has implemented the Oracle Financials Application suite. One of the main features is its ability to handle multiple currencies and companies and the flexibility of running processes and period-end routines.
• Oracle announces that Wells Fargo has negotiated that the largest enterprise database licence agreement in the financial industry and will be implementing Oracle Universal Server, Oracle DB 7.3 as well as DB options such as data warehousing and electronic commerce. This new environment will need to support 25,00 users and the gathering of 80 gigabytes of data each month.
• Oracle has released a number of its applications for the web.
• Using partitioning for a Data Warehouse and how it compares to using Clustering.
• How to build business rules using triggers in Oracle 7 and how to ensure consistency in the data.
• A summary of a number of SQL Functions were given with examples. These included Numeric, Character, Data, Conversion and Group By functions.
• A listing of a procedure and some other scripts was given for sizing tables and indexes in Oracle 7.

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 1996

The headline articles for the July/August1996 edition of Oracle Magazine was on how to balance security and communication in a distributed world, extending Oracle power objects applications and automating Oracle tuning

Oracle articles included:

• Oracle released three of its products on the web. These included Oracle Web Customers, Oracle Web Suppliers and Oracle Web Employees. They aimed to help make it possible for companies to conduct secure business transactions over the internet and corporate intranets. They also shipped Oracle Workflow to help support the implementation of these new products
• Oracle Express Analyzer, an object-oriented reporting and analysis tool had its second release
• UBS Bank implements the Oracle based operational accounting system, with over 800,000 input records daily and over 3,000 cost centre reports that needed different levels of summarisation. The new application allows the executives to view information in virtually any format choosing from 120,000 multi-level, multi-view reports.
• The Egyptian Stock Exchange and Capital Market Authority implements a new trading system build on Oracle
• Don Burleson in his article on Automating Oracle Tuning gives a number of scripts that would assist the DBA in finding out what is going on in the database. So instead of purchasing some expensive tools, all you needs was these scripts UTKBSTAT/UTLESTAT.

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–Volume 1 Number 1

A few weeks ago I sent a few emails to some well know names in the Oracle World looking to see if they have a copy of the very first Oracle Magazine (Volume 1 Number 1).

Many thanks to Oracle ACE Director Cary Millsap of Method R, who responded to say that he had the very first Oracle Magazine. He kindly arranged to have it scanned into PDF. 

To view the 12 page Oracle Magazine (Volume 1 Number 1) click on the following image.  Read and Enjoy!

Some people have said that his is not the first Oracle Magazine, published in June 1987. Although this edition is labelled as Volume 1 Number 1, an Oracle Newsletter existed for a few years prior to this edition.

Do you know of anyone who has these newsletters ?

My Oracle Magazine Collection can be found here. You will find links to my blog posts on previous editions.

Review of Oracle Magazine–May/June 1996

The headline articles for the May/June 1996 edition of Oracle Magazine was an introduction to the Oracle Universal Server and how it can be used to give a flexible architecture for your growing organisation

Other articles included:

• Oracle Magazine goes interactive with the launch of the www.oramag.com. The initial site had Oracle Magazines from 1994 and 1995, along with subscription information, a Q&A area and a WebMaster comic strip
• There was a preview of Larry’s Network Computer (NC). It was supposed to be a low cost computing appliance optimised to operate on the internet and other highly distributed networks such as corporate LANs, is designed to provide users with simple, economical and robust communications and access to information. The NC will include a Web Terminal, ISDN Video Phone, Set-top Box, Two-way Pager and a Personal Digital Assistant.
• Oracle Developer/2000 and Designer/2000 Release 1.3 is announced
• There is a review of how Cisco standardised on using Oracle 7 and how they went about the selection and implementation of Oracle Applications including financial, manufacturing and human resources applications.
• Integrating the WWW and Oracle Order Entry. Companies can now have an instant presence to the world but also, by examining the web-server activity logs, they gain the ability to see who the buyers are and who just browses

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.

The First Oracle Magazine–Volume1 Issue 1

In my last blog post I reviewed the contents of the March/April 1996 edition of Oracle Magazine. While doing this I noticed on the Editors Pages, Julie Gibbs gave a review of the very first Oracle Magazine from 1987.

Here is the front cover of the first Oracle Magazine. I’ve scanned the editors page, containing the review. Just click on the image below.

The first edition had just 12 pages of content.

Here is the extract from the editors page March/April 1996:

“The picture you see on this page is of the first cover of Oracle Magazine-Yolume I, Number I, June 7987. Yes, we are celebrating our tenth anniversary this year. Ten years may not seem like much in other industries, but in high tech, it's a veritable lifetime. Companies and products have come and gone-where ate you now, VisiCalc? How about the PC jr? And who knew in 1987 that the Internet would be the dominant topic of the high-tech press in 1996?

What was in the first issue of Oracle Magazine? Here's a sampling of articles in that 12-page fledgling publication: New Network Expands Customer Support (24-hour online support was introduced June I, 1987);
Oracle Version 5 .1 Released; Oracle RDBMS Now Available on Wang VS; Oracle Exceeds First HaIf Forecast (revenues for the first half totalled almost $46million); UniForum: Site of Oracle UNIX Announcements (at the time, Oracle ran on more than 20 platforms, including new
UNIX ports to NCR, Sun, DEC Ultrix,Sequent, Altos, and Plexus); SQL Declared Standard Language by ANSI; Double DEC Awards for Oracle (Digital Review's Target Awards gave Oracle first place for "Best Database Management Product" and the No. I rating in the "Digital News 50").”

Some people say that Oracle Magazine existed before 1987. Oracle did have a newsletter type publication.

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.

Review of Oracle Magazine–March/April 1996

The headline articles for the March/April 1996 edition of Oracle Magazine was Oracle’s first or early articles on Data Warhousing, including DW Architectures, what Oracle tools you can use, multi-dimensional analysis, Oracle Express and future directions of data warehouses.

Julie Gibbs, the editor of Oracle Magazine, wondered ‘What will be hot in 2005?’. Some of her predictions/suggestions were:

• Will Larry Ellison’s NC provide every home with a $500 internet box
• What will be the 3 biggest software companies and were any of them around in 1995
• How many people will use the internet everyday
• Will the internet be censored ? How and by whom ?
• Or will the internet be passe and will virtual reality be a reality
• What will be the size of the largest data warehouse
• Will Apple still exist
• Will you be reading your magazines in print or online
• Will your company have a woman CEO
• How many people will be telecommuting
• Will every desktop have built in video conferencing so that you can talk to your coworkers

Other articles included:

• Oracle Interoffice Suite was released and comprised Messaging, Document and Workflow servers based on Oracle 7.3. The product provided groupware functions, such as electronic mail, messaging, scheduling, directory services, document management, workflow and conferencing.
• Oracle 7.3 new features included Oracle Enterprise Manager, Oracle Software Manager, SQL*Net 2.3, advanced replication and Oracle ConText.
• How to rename your database. It is not always optimal for a database to keep the name it was born with. A step by step guide is given on how to do this without loosing any data!
• A case study is presented from NeXT Computer on how to audit and clean up your Oracle Applications data as you prepare to upgrade to Release 10. These included:
• Review Usernames and unused responsibilities
• Unused menus and menu options
• Are outdate concurrent requests being purged
• Unused printers
• Identify cluttered production libraries
• Unused custom concurrent processes
• Unused database objects
• Inactive vendors and invalid distribution sets
• Unused payment terms
• Closed bank accounts
• Protecting your budgets
• Obsolete journal sources
• Invalid price lists
• Unbooked orders and unclosed orders
• Unused payment terms, transaction types, units of measure and inactive sales people
• How to design a database for OLAP. Most of the following steps still stand today for designing your star-schemas
• Define the question (business function/area)
• Use Normalized logic
• Identify Dimensions
• Create Hierarchies
• Identify Attributes
• Identify Measures
• Add Calculations
• There was a review of the very first Oracle Magazine that was published in June 1987.  Watch this space, as I will be posting the details soon.

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.

Oracle Magazine Collection–New addition May/June 2005

I received in the post today a copy of an Oracle Magazine that I’m missing from my collection.

It was sent to me by Kim Berg Hansen from Denmark. Check out his blog.

I owe him a beer at the UKOUG conference in Birmingham later this year in December.

This now means that I have a copy of every Oracle Magazine from July 1998 right up to the current Avengers special editions. Plus other editions with a few gaps going back to 1992.

To view the entire collection – click here.

Oracle Magazine–The Avengers Collection

I had a nice surprise when I arrived home from work last night. There was a parcel delivered during the day. When I opened it, I found 6 Oracle Magazines for the May/June 2012 edition. 

There was one magazine for each Avengers character. So I have the entire collection.

A big thank you to the person so sent them to me. You know who you are.

These magazines will be joining my collection of Oracle Magazine that spans 20+years. Check out the collection.

Oracle Magazine May/June 2012 Collector Editions

The good people at Oracle Magazine have produced a number of collectors editions (six) of the current edition (May/June 2012) .

I received my copy of the magazine in the post yesterday and the one that I received is the following

I’ve been collecting Oracle Magazine for over 20 year and I have almost the entire collection.

I would like to add all 6 special editions to my collection.

If you would like to donate your Oracle Magazine and help me complete the collection, add a comment to the blog or email me directly. I will be able to let you know what special editions I’m still missing

Oracle Magazine-May/June 1995

The headline articles for the May/June edition of Oracle Magazine included one of the first articles on Data Centers,using the prebuilt packages in PL/SQL and how to use object-oriented programming techniques in Oracle Forms 4.5

Other articles included:

Oracle 7 Internet Access Kit also called the Oracle World Wide Web Interface Kit. Developers could use this kit developers can create links between web servers and Oracle 7 databases. The Oracle WWW Interface Kit included:

• Oracle’s Web-Oracle-Web (WOW) PL/SQL gateway to web servers
• Oracle’s PL/SQL editor and development tool for creating dynamic PL/SQL
• PERL, a freeware interpreting programming language
• ORAPERL, an extension to PERL for use with Oracle 7 databases
• ORAYWWW, a PERL gateway
• WORA, a user-friendly database browser written in Pro*C
• DECOUX, a post-processing gateway that inserts query results from a Oracle 7 database into HyperText Markup Language (HTML) documents
• Navigator, a collection of PERL scripts and one Pro*C module that enables administrators to quickly configure HTML forms for end user queries
• Text Search System (TSS), an indexing and free text search system
• MORE, a collection of Pro*C gateways for maintaining an information repository
• HotMetal, a HTML editor

Fee access to Oracle ConText. Oracle customers were offered an opportunity to try ConText before you buy. According the the article Oracle ConText is a revolutionary linguistic analysis program that automatically generates back-of-book indexes and reduces the volume of text to a summary.

Ken Jacobs gives the second part of his in-depth article on the latest release of Oracle 7.1 and Oracle 7.2 databases. Ken was vice president of Product Planning and has been working with Oracle since version 2 of the database.

Mike Ault has an article on using DBMS_PIPES PL/SQL package, how to access the shared pool using the DBMS_SHARED_POOL PL/SQL package and how to use the DBMS_OUTPUT procedure.

How big is your database ?  Oracle conducted a survey of all its customers to see what was the typical size of their databases and how many users each database would have. The following diagrams gives the results of this survey and compares the 1994 results with the results from 1993. We can see that there was a bit of a jump on the size of the databases but the number of users increased significantly

So must customers had databases in the 2GB to 10GB. How things have changed. If the survey was conduced for 2012 what results would be get ?

In 1995, Oracle Open World took place in Yokohama, Japan between 18th and 19th January. It had 130 seminars and sessions.  In 2012 OOW will have over 500 sessions and will run over 5 days!

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.

How big was your Oracle Database in 1993 & 1994

I’m in the middle of writing my summary of the May/June 1995 edition of Oracle Magazine (that blog post is coming soon). There was a one article about a survey that Oracle conducted of its customer on how big their databases were and the number of users for their databases.

The follow diagrams gives the summary results of these surveys.

We can see that there was a bit of a jump on the size of the databases but the number of users increased significantly

So must customers had databases in the 2GB to 10GB. How things have changed. If the survey was conduced for 2012 what results would be get ?

Does anyone know if Oracle has published similar survey results in the last few years ?

Oracle Magazine–March 1995

In 1995 we have a change to the frequency of publication of Oracle Magazine. It is not published every 2 two months with 6 editions each year, as it is still the case.

The headline articles in the March/April 1994 edition of Oracle Magazine included Integrating Unstructured Information, Minimizing Client/Server Network Traffic with Oracle Forms 4.0, Relational Objects and how the Canadian Postal Service was using Oracle Technology to deliver mail on time.

Other articles include:

Dynamic SQL Comes to PL/SQL: Introduces us to the DBMS_SQL package. A useful quick reference one pager is given giving the details of each of the 15 procedures and functions, including, BIND_VARIABLE, CLOSE_CURSOR, COLUMN_VALUE, DEFINE_COLUMN, EXECUTE, EXECUTE_AND_FETCH, FETCH_ROWS, IS_OPEN, LAST_ERROR_POSITION, LAST_ROW_COUNT, LAST_ROW_ID, LAST_SQL_FUNCTION_CODE, OPEN_CURSOR, PARSE, VARIABLE_VALUE.

Personal Oracle 7 for Windows gets released and it now has a graphical administration tool to allow us to manage the database, including users, backup and recovery managers along with export/import and SQL*Loader and Oracle Objects for OLE. The hardware requirements included 8Mb of RAM and less than 30Mb of hard-disk space. How things have changed!!!. It was capable of running on Window 3.1 and was Windows 95 ready.

Rollback segments in in Oracle 7 allows use to now effectively manage our transactions. It gave the following recommendations:

• Create a separate tablespace for rollback segments for administrative and monitoring purposes
• Se the size of the tablespace according to the number and storage parameters of the rollback segments
• Place your rollback segment tablespace on a separate disk device, if possible. Consider total I/O activities and spread I/O over available disk devices
• Create one rollback segment for every four concurrent transactions
• Don’t create more than 50 rollback segments
• Create smaller rollback segments for OLTP applications. This increases the likelihood that rollback segments will be cached in SGA according to the least recently used algorithm, resulting in performance gain
• Create larger rollback segments for decision support or back processing applications
• Set initial to you average transaction size, set OPTIMAL to four to eight times larger than INITIAL

Oracle Magazine goes digital and interactive with a CD-ROM containing every issue of published in the previous two years and also contained a map of Oracle offices worldwide.

To view the cover page and the table of contents click on the above image or click here.

My Oracle Magazine Collection can be found here. You will find links to my blog posts on previous editions.

Tom Kyte is in Belfast 16th April

The Oracle User Group has organised for Tom Kyte the famous Oracle evangelist to come Belfast to give a one day seminar.

The seminar will be in the Hilton in Belfast.

Some of the topics to be covered on the day include:

• 5 things you probably didn’t know about SQL
• 5 thing you probably didn’t know about PL/SQL
• All about metadata: why telling the database about your schema matters
• What is New and Improved and Coming in Oracle Application Development
• All about Oracle Database Security.

All of this will followed by a 1 hour Ask Tom session, where you will have your chance to ask the man himself anything about the Oracle database.

This is a FREE event. What more could you ask for!

Check out the OUG website for more details and how to register for this event.

http://www.ukoug.org/events/tom-kyte-seminar-and-asktom-live/

Don’t forget to use the OUG Ireland twitter tag  #oug_ire

Oracle Magazine–Summer 1994

The headline articles in the Summer 1994 edition of Oracle Magazine included Objects in Motion on how to reap the benefits of OO technology, building a business case for Objects, working with Objects and some basics of OO programming.

As part of the articles on Objects, there was an interview with Steve Jobs who was an Object Evangelist at NeXT.

Apart from the articles on Objects we also had articles on:

• System Level Roles in Oracle 7: Going beyond Connect, Resource and DBA. In Oracle 7 the DBA can not create role groups.
• Customising Oracle Reports with PL/SQL: This article explores the different triggers that now exist in Oracle Report, where we can now use PL/SQL to perform pre-processing of data before it is displayed in the report output. The triggers included Before Runtime Parameter Form, Parameter Validation, After Runtime Parameter Form, Before Report (executes), Object level triggers, Between Each Page and After Report
• How Nintendo is using Oracle 7 client/server to stay ahead with providing faster and easier access to sales and marketing information.

To view the cover page and the table of contents click on the above image or click here.

My Oracle Magazine Collection can be found here. You will find links to my blog posts on previous editions.

Oracle Magazine–Winter 1994

The headline articles of the Winter 1994 edition of Oracle Magazine included topics on how an energy company migrated to client/server, towards the paperless office (it never really happened!!), Business Processing Reengineering and document management.

There was a noticeable number of articles and advertisements on reporting tools. The tools mentioned included Oracle Browser version 2.0, Oracle Data Query, Impromptu, Intelligent Query (IQ), Visual CyberQuery, R&R Report Writer, ReportSmith and SQL Assist

There was also an article called ‘An Elegant Approach to Report Generation’ and looked at how you could take the ASCII file produced by a SQL report and load it into a WordPerfect template.

We have the first mention of on Oracle Certification. ‘Database administrators and application developers can now become Oracle Certified to demonstrate their skill and competence in using Oracle systems. ……. Upon successfully completing the exam – which covers such areas as using SQL and Oracle Forms, tuning applications, and administrating and Oracle database – students will be awarded with the title of Oracle Certified Administrator and/or Oracle Certified Application Developer’.

Oracle announces the launch of their Real-Time Support System. Unlike My Oracle Support we have today, back in 1994 you needed a modem and remote communications package that could emulate a SQL*Forms support terminal type.

There was an article, by Kevin Loney, on how you could add Help documentation to your Oracle Forms applications using Oracle*Text Retrieval 2.0.

Finally there was an article by the IOUG about their International Oracle User Week in 1993. This event was held in the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando FL, where there was an attendance of 3,300 participants. This conference has since been expanded and is now call COLLABORATE and will be in Las Vegas in 2012 on 22-26 April (I wish I could be there).

To view the cover page and the table of contents click on the above image or click here.

My Oracle Magazine Collection can be found here. You will find links to my blog posts on previous editions.

Oracle Magazine–Fall 1993

The headline articles of the Fall 1993 edition of Oracle Magazine included topics on Multimedia Servers, Free Space Defragmentation and Geographic Information Systems.

Apart from the head line articles most of the other articles were about product announcements/updates and about how certain types of companies were using IT.

The main technical article was by Kevin Loney on freeing up free space in an Oracle 6 database using defragmentation. This was a popular topic for Oracle version 6 and 7, when disk space was expensive. It is less of an issue today.

There was an article on the Digital Highway and in Multimedia Servers. These were early indicators of Larry’s investing in the Video On-Demand servers.

The first maintenance release of Oracle 7 database was announced (Oracle 7.1), with enhancements centred around:

• Parallel Operations : performance increases, splitting of query execution, data loading and index creation tasks and execute them concurrently on multiple CPS. Permits multiple sessions running SQL*Loader using the fast bulk load i.e.direct path
• Application Development : Users can now embed PL/SQL functions in SQL statements and reference those functions in SQL expressions as if they are build-in.
• Administration : Tablespaces can be placed in read-only mode. Provides a parallel recovery mechanism.
• Standards Compliance : Oracle 7.1 is compliance with the SQL92 Entry Level standard. The ORDER BY clause can not reference SELECT list items names with a column alias.

Some of the products discussed in articles included Pro*C version 2.0, SQL*Module version 1.0, OracleWare, Oracle Graphics version 2.0, SQL*Net version 2 on MVS, SQL*Connect to SQL/400 and Oracle Card 2.0.

Apart from these product related articles, some others of interest included an advertisement for ERwin which was a product owned at that time by Logic Works.

There was a short article on the IOUG 12th Annual User Group Conference in September.

To view the cover page and the table of contents click on the above image or click here.

My Oracle Magazine Collection can be found here.

My previous posts on Oracle Magazine
  - Winter 1993
  - Fall 1992