It is my turn now
I’m heading to China tomorrow for a two week vacation. I’ll be visiting my parents in law in Shanghai. It’ll be my second visit to China. My first visit was in 2000. I went to Hong Kong and Beijing. I hated Beijing. It is the most polluted city in the world, at least that’s how it was in 2000.
Most probably I will have Internet access while I’m on vacation. Humm! That sounds like an oxymoron: Internet, vacation. But hey, what will I be doing when everybody starts talking Chinese? Either I sit like an idiot, smiling and nodding my head, or fire up my laptop and start surfing. The choice is clear. Of course, I’ll be visiting lots of exciting places and eating lots of weird food (no dogs, I promise), and of course, taking lots of pictures.
Filed in Personal with 7 Comments | Tags: china, vacationYou may be sued
If you maintain a blog and allow readers to post comments, you better be careful because you may face a lawsuit over these comments.
One example of such a lawsuit, which I picked up from WSJ, is the one filed by Traffic-Power.com against Aaron Wall, who maintains a blog on search engine optimization SEOBook.com. At issue are statements posted in the comments section of Mr. Wall’s blog that blasted tools sold by Traffic-Power.com.
Legal analysts said that courts generally have held that the operators of computer message boards and mailing lists cannot be held liable for statements posted by other people, and blogs might be viewed in a similar light.
I am not familiar with the details of this lawsuit but my personal belief is that this and similar lawsuits are baseless and should not have been filed in the first place. If you (the entity filing the lawsuit) disagree with statements posted on a website, you either prove that those statements are wrong, or, please, don’t try to sue the website just because they, or someone who left a comment there, disagree with you or claims something against you. Prove their claims are wrong, publicly. if you can’t, then their claims are most probably right.
Comments anyone?
Related links:
The Wall Street Journal article
Pre DBMS_RANDOM
Back in the old days when DBMS_RANDOM did not exist ( pre Oracle 8 ), How did Oracle developers generate random numbers? Now I know. (more…)
User Defined Operators
Going through Oracle documentation (yes, I do that sometimes), I found the CREATE OPERATOR command. This command allows you to create user-defined operators. To quote psoug reference:
Oracle allows developers of object-oriented applications to extend the list of built-in relational operators (for example, +, -, /, *, LIKE, AND, OR) with domain specific operators (for example, Contains, Within_Distance, Similar) called user-defined operators. A user-defined operator can be used anywhere built-in operators can be used, for example, in the select list or the where clause. Similar to built-in operators, a user-defined operator may support arguments of different types, and that it may be evaluated using an index. Similar to built-in operators, user-defined operators allow efficient content-based querying and sorting on object data.
I have never created a user-defined operator before, so being the “always-trying-something-new” type of guy, I quickly put together a simple test. Here it is: (more…)
Filed in Oracle with Comments Off | Tags: operator, user-definedTom Kyte’s Newest Book and SQLPlus Prompt
I downloaded part of Tom Kyte’s newest book “Expert Oracle Database Architecture – 9i and 10g Programming Techniques and Solutions” from Tom’s blog and started reading with interest (Can’t wait until the book is available at Amazon). I got to page 25, “Setting Up Your Environment” and read through page 28 when I noticed the following: (more…)
Filed in Books, Oracle with 3 Comments | Tags: book, sqlplusColdFusion to Oracle via a Boolean
On the cf-talk mailing list there was a thread about ColdFusion calling an Oracle stored procedure that has a BOOLEAN as the data type of one of its input arguments. Looks like ColdFusion does not have a CF_SQL_BOOLEAN as a valid value for the cfsqltype argument in the cfprocparam. So, what to do? (more…)
Different ways to count
In Oracle, there are at least three different ways to count the number of records a SQL query returns: (more…)
Filed in Oracle with 4 Comments | Tags: count, sqlMailing Lists
I like mailing lists and I think they are better than online forums. First, almost everyone has access to e-mail and can read it online as well as offline; unlike web forums, where you have to be connected to the internet all the time. Second, e-mail is almost immediate, when someone sends out an e-mail to a list you’re subscribed to, the e-mail shows up almost instantly in your inbox, compare that to constant manual refreshes to a forum web page. Last but not least, if you want to post to a web forum, you normally have to get a username and a password (as if you need more of those), remember your username and password and then login every time you want to post. Compare that to the ease of writing an e-mail and publishing to the list (once you subscribe).
Having said that, are there any good, high quality Oracle and ColdFusion e-mail lists out there? Absolutely. In fact, I am subscribed to the following: cf-talk and oracle-l. I find them both to be excellent mailing lists. However, oracle-l is basically an Oracle DBA list. Most of the questions and answers there relate to database administration. Since I am an applications developer and not a DBA, I have looked for a mailing list that deals with Oracle database development, especially SQL, PL/SQL, coding techniques, and related Oracle technologies that have little to do with database administration. I could not find one. So I created one, the “oradev” mailing list.
Oradev is hosted on freelists.org (same place where oracle-l is). I find freelists.org as the best free mailing list service on the net. It’s reliable, has a clean web interface and the mailing lists’ archives are fully and easily searchable.
So, if you are an application developer dealing with Oracle databases or a newbie Oracle developer looking for advice and direction or a seasoned Oracle professional eager to help and add to your knowledge (DBA’s welcome too), go ahead and join oradev.
To join oradev visit http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oradev. See you there.
Related links: oradev, oracle-l , cf-talk
Filed in ColdFusion, Oracle with 5 Comments | Tags: mailing-listYour SQL tool
Some Oracle professionals swear by SQL Plus, others just don’t even use it. There are a lot of tools out there for interacting with the Oracle database (and other databases as well) that serve as an alternative for SQL Plus; to name a few: (more…)
Filed in Oracle, Technology with 13 Comments | Tags: sql-developer, sql-navigator, sqlplus, toad, toolFirefox tips
I have a couple of Firefox tips I would like to share with you. First, to block sending referrer information, i.e. to stop sites you visit from seeing where you come from, follow these steps: (more…)
Filed in Firefox, Tips with 5 Comments | Tags: Firefox
