OTN has links to two of my blog posts

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve noticed that I had a bit of a spike in my blog stats (I don’t check them often). In particular there was 2 groups of blog posts that were getting a lot of the hit.

After a bit of investigation I found out that it was do to referrals from one particular website. It was OTN or Oracle Technology Network, and more specifically it was from their webpage dedicated for Database Admins and Developer.

Yes OTN had links to my blog posts on Clustering in Oracle Data Miner and to my blog post on Are you a Type I and Type II Data Scientists.

What a surprise this was to discover!!!  and what a honour

I don’t know how long they will be on the OTN webpage, but hopefully lots of people in the Oracle community will find them useful.

I’m working on my next set of Oracle Data Miner blog posts, so watch this space. Plus I’ve started work on two technical articles that I’ll be submitting to OTN over the next few weeks. So hopefully you will see these up on OTN soon.

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.

New features for Developers in Oracle 12c & Tools

Continuing on from my previous posts on new features in the Advanced Analytics Option and the 12c Databases, this post will focus on the proposed new features for Developers in 12c and in the new releases of the development tools.

Health Warning: As with all the presentations at OOW that talked about what may be in or may be in the next release, there is no guarantee that these features will actually be in the released version of the database. Here is the slide that gives the Safe Harbor statement.

• APEX 4.2 is out now and has lots of new features in particular features for creating mobile applications including transitions, gestures, changes in orientation and HTML 5 support. Coming in 12c APEX will be able to support the pluggable database environment. You will have the option to install APEX in the Contain database or in the pluggable databases. It will also support the extended VARCHAR2 size
• SQL Developer will have Data Pump to allow for fast movement of data and for scheduling of the movements. The Database Difference tool has been redesigned to give more options and gives a more reliable comparison. A redesigned Database Copy (more options), improved Migrations and PDF report generation. SQL Developer is not the admin tool to manage the APEX Listener. UI improvements include more/better drag and drop, GRANT statement support in SQL editor and database Doc reporting. A new release of SQL Developer will be made available with the release of 12c that includes all the 12c new features
• Better Data Compression of data being sent to/from the client/server. So how you use the ORDER BY clause will become more important
• We will now have BOOLEAN in 12c but only in PL/SQL
• 12c will allow you to grant ROLES to PL/SQL program units. Or we could specify a White List that lists what other code units can call your code. This is a great security enhancement, although it involves more admin work, but it is worth it.
• 12c will allow you to include PL/SQL in WITH
• 12c will allow you to create duplicate indexes on the same set of columns. Sometimes you might want two different types of index on the same data, for example a bit map index and a b-tree index.
• Cursor results sets can now be returned implicitly instead of the existing explicit method
• The Warning messages when compiling our PL/SQL code can be filtered based on if they are Severe, Performance related or just Informational. This can be set at a System or Session level.

alter session set plsql_warnings='enable:severe';

alter session set plsql_warnings='enable:performance';

alter session set plsql_warnings='enable:informational';

There was a large number of exhibits at OOW. All of them were giving things away. For some of these you had to endure a sales pitch. One of the popular type of give away was a t-shirt. If you really wanted to, you could get enough t-shirts to keep you going for a few years. I popped into the exhibits for JavaOne and the pictures below is my faviourate t-shirt from OOW, by CloudBees.

Some of the exhibits were also giving away money. If you would sit through a 10 minute presentation you were given a ticket and if your number was picked your would could win anything from $20 up to $100. Many thanks to Intel

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.

OTN Developer Days–Dublin 12th to 14 June

The OTN Developer Days events return to the Oracle Dublin office in East Point this month from the 12th to the 14th.

These are free events, but places are limited, and allow you to get some hands-on training with these tools. Depending on the day and the topic there is a mixture of lecture and workshop, to just being a hands-on workshop.

12th June – Golden Gate 11g, Oracle Data Integrator 11g and Enterprise Data Quality (full day : 9:45-17:00)

13th June – Partitioning and Advanced Compression (9:45-13:00)

14th June – Unlocking the value of Oracle Database 11g Core Features (9:45-15:00)

These are free events and you will even get a free lunch from Oracle.

VM for Oracle Data Miner

Recently the OTN team have updated the ‘Database App Development’  Developer Day virtual machine to include Oracle 11.2.0.2 DB and SQL Developer 3.1.  This is all you need to try out Oracle Data Miner.

So how do you get started with using Oracle Data Miner on your PC. The first step is to download and install the latest version of Oracle VirtualBox.

The next step is to download and install the OTN Developer Day appliance. Click on the above link to go to the webpage and follow the instructions to download and install the appliance. Download the first appliance on this page ‘Database App Development’ VM. This is a large download and depending on your internet connection it can take anything from 30 minutes to hours. So I wouldn’t recommend doing this over a wifi.

When you start up the VM your OS username and password is oracle. Yes it is case sensitive.

When the get logged into the VM you can close or minimise the host window

There are two important icons, the SQL Developer and the ODDHandsOnLab.html icons.

The ODDHandsOnLab.html icon loads a webpage what contains a number of tutorials for you to follow.

The tutorial we are interest in is the Oracle Data Miner Tutorial. There are 4 tutorials given for ODM. The first two tutorials need to be followed in the order that they are given. The second two tutorials can be done in any order.

If you have not used SQL Developer before then you should work through this tutorial before starting the Oracle Data Miner tutorials.

The first tutorial takes you through the steps needed to create your ODM schema and to create the ODM repository within the database. This tutorial will only take you 10 to 15 minutes to complete.

In the second tutorial you get to use the ODM to build your first ODM model. This tutorial steps your through how to get started with an ODM project, workflow, the different ODM features, how to explore the data, how to create classification models, how to explore the model and then how to apply one of these models to new data. This second tutorial will take approx. 30 to 40 minutes to complete.

It is all very simple and easy to use.

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 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.

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.

OTN Workshop Days in Dublin 17-

Oracle in Ireland have arranged a number of FREE Oracle Technology Network Hands on Workshops.

17th April : Database Firewall

18th April : Oracle Real Application Testing

19th April : Database 11g R2 New Features

20th April : Business Integration using Oracle SOA Suite 11g

All the workshops are in the Oracle offices in East Point, in Dublin.

To register for these events

http://www.oracle.com/us/dm/34862-splashpage-1438215.html

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

Rewards received in the Post today

Today I arrived home from work to find that I had received 2 parcels.

In the first parcel was

Thank you Oracle ACE Programme and OTN.

In the second parcel was an IOUG Select Contributors T-shirt. I received this because I had an article in the Q1 2012 edition of IOUG Select, on Oracle Data Miner.  Thank you IOUG.

Oracle Magazine–Winter 1993

The lead articles in the first Oracle Magazine of 1993 (winter) were about how the Oracle database was being used in the Toronto Stock Exchange and in the Municipio de Panama of Panama City.

Other articles of interest included

• Cary Millsap on the Optimal Flexible Architecture. Was this Cary’s first article in Oracle Magazine ? OFA provided a set of guidelines on how to install Oracle so that performance is not affected as your database environment grows. Cary gives 3 basic rules for creating and ODA compliant Oracle database (the full set is in the article).
1. Establish and orderly operating system directory structure in which any database file can be stored on any disk resources (applicable to operating systems with hierarchical directory structures only).
2. Separate groups of segments with different behavior into different tablespaces.
3. Maximize database reliability and performance by separating database components across disk resources
• There was 2 articles that looked at OODBMS. Oracle made their first purchase of an OODBMS company in 1994 and were trying to release their first OODBMS product in 1995. This never happened and their reverted to integrating some OODBMS features into the database instead.
• Oracle Glue is released. This product has gone through a number of name changes since. What is it called now ?
• There was a couple of articles discussing using UNIX or ALPHA server machines, when VLDBs were considered extremely large at 32GB. I remember there was one Bank who had the largest database in Ireland in 1993 and it was 4GB. I wonder what it is now.
• Business Object announces the release of their DOS and Windows end user data access tool for relational database tool.
• There was a number of adverts from companies providing tools and support for converting your Oracle Forms Version 2 to Forms 3

 

Click on the image above to view the PDF of the table of contents page.

My Oracle Magazine Collection can be found here.

Oracle Magazine-Fall 1992

I’ve been collecting Oracle Magazine for almost 20 years now. I have almost the entire collection, but I’m still missing some of the editions. Some people have donated some of the editions I was missing. But I still missing some.  Can you help me ? Check out my Oracle Magazine Collection.

Every 2 to 3 weeks I intend to write a blog post on each of the Oracle Magazines that I have, starting with the earliest edition that is from Fall 1992.

The main theme of the Fall 1992 edition was about the new Oracle 7 Database. I didn’t get using an Oracle 7 Database until mid-1994.There are a few customer case studies of Oracle 7 implementations. In the article Migrating to Oracle 7, they list some of the new feature. The following is an extract from the new features section.

Standard Oracle 7 provides the functionality and performance to tackle most mission critical applications:

- Multithreaded server
- Shared SQL
- Cost Based optimiser
- Row level locking
- Declarative integrity
- Role based security
- 100% ANSI/ISO standard SQL
- Enhanced national language support

The procedural option for Oracle 7 provides additional capabilities that enhance the database server in the application environment:

- Stored Procedures and Functions
- Procedure packages
- Database Triggers
- Lock manager package
- Database alerts

The distributed option for Oracle 7 makes a physically distributed database appear as a single, logical database. Features of this option include:

- Distributed updates
- TP monitor (XA) interface
- Transparent two-phase commit
- Remote procedure calls
- Table replication (snapshots)
- Oracle Mail Interface

Another article that stands out is by Richard Barker (do you remember his?) who was responsible for the CASE*Method and Oracle’s CASE Tools.

There was several articles on the new Oracle Forms 3 and Oracle Menu 5. Talking about some of the new features like List of Values (LOVs), pop-up Field editor and Pop-up Pages.

There also also the first articles on using Oracle a Microsoft Windows environment. Oh how I remember the frequent blue screens when developing and compiling my forms and in particular my report, with does early releases on Windows.

 

The editorial staff of Oracle Magazine have kindly given me permission to make a PDF of the front cover and the table of contents available for each edition. To get this PDF click on the above image or follow this link to see what Oracle Magazine used to look like 20 years ago.

My next blog post on Oracle Magazine, will look at the Winter 1993 edition.

If you have any of the editions that I’m missing from my collection and you would like to donate then, then drop me an email and we can arrange delivery.  You wont see any of them on eBay, I promise.

New additions to my Oracle Magazine Collection

I put out a call a few months ago looking for help in completing my Oracle Magazine collection. I also had a letter in the Nov/Dec 2011 edition of Oracle Magazine looking for help.

The following people contacted me in December offering to send me some of my missing editions.

Lisa Dobson - Oracle DBA at Durham University and Vice President of UKOUG
Debra Lilley - President of UKOUG
Christian Antognini - Trivadis AG, Switzerland
Dan Vlamis - Vlamis Software Solutions, MO, USA

Many thanks for your donations.

It seems that people don’t keep their Oracle Magazines!

I’m now just missing a very small number of editions since 1992.  Can anyone else help ?

Does anyone have any Oracle Magazines from before 1992 ?

The following table gives the current collection (printed editions). The grey boxes are the editions that I’m still missing, and keep an eye on my Oracle Magazine page for updates.

ODM 11gR2–Real-time scoring of data

In my previous posts I gave sample code of how you can use your ODM model to score new data.

Applying an ODM Model to new data in Oracle – Part 2

Applying an ODM Model to new data in Oracle – Part 1

The examples given in this previous post were based on the new data being in a table.

In some scenarios you may not have the data you want to score in table. For example you want to score data as it is being recorded and before it gets committed to the database.

The format of the command to use is

prediction(ODM_MODEL_NAME USING <list of values to be used and what the mode attribute they map to>)

prediction_probability(ODM_Model_Name, Target Value, USING <list of values to be used and what model attribute they map to>)

So we can list the model attributes we want to use instead of using the USING *  as we did in the previous blog posts

Using the same sample data that I used in my previous posts the command would be:

Select prediction(clas_decision_tree
USING
20 as age,
'NeverM' as cust_marital_status,
'HS-grad' as education,
1 as household_size,
2 as yrs_residence,
1 as y_box_games) as scored_value
from dual;

SCORED_VALUE
------------
           0

Select prediction_probability(clas_decision_tree, 0
USING
20 as age,
'NeverM' as cust_marital_status,
'HS-grad' as education,
1 as household_size,
2 as yrs_residence,
1 as y_box_games) as probability_value
from dual;

PROBABILITY_VALUE
-----------------
                1

So we get the same result as we got in our previous examples.

Depending of what data we have gathered we may or may not have all the values for each of the attributes used in the model. In this case we can submit a subset of the values to the function and still get a result.

Select prediction(clas_decision_tree
USING
20 as age,
'NeverM' as cust_marital_status,
'HS-grad' as education) as scored_value2
from dual;

SCORED_VALUE2
-------------
            0

Select prediction_probability(clas_decision_tree, 0
USING
20 as age,
'NeverM' as cust_marital_status,
'HS-grad' as education) as probability_value2
from dual;

PROBABILITY_VALUE2
------------------
                 1

Again we get the same results.