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 […]

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 […]

Back in the old days when DBMS_RANDOM did not exist ( pre Oracle 8 ), How did Oracle developers generate random numbers? Now I know.

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, […]

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 […]

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?

In Oracle, there are at least three different ways to count the number of records a SQL query returns:

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 […]

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:

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: