I bet that you did not believe your eyes when you saw the two words “Free” and “Oracle” right next to each other, did you? Well, it happened a few hours ago. Oracle has now a “freebie” database of the 10g version, the Oracle Database 10g Express Edition. So what is Oracle Database 10g […]

According to Sandy Mamoli, “Oracle people” are a “conservative bunch” and “it is about time to admit that some input from the outside would do no harm”. She also believes that Oracle DBAs and developers come across as “grumpy old men (and women) who oppose change and who want the IT world to remain the […]

“CASE works with all modern versions…”, that’s what Doug Burns wrote in his excellent article about CASE expressions. I believe that a clarification is needed here, especially for those of you who still deal with Oracle 8i. In Oracle 8i CASE statements and expressions are supported only in SQL and not in PL/SQL. In 8i […]

I often find myself wanting to quickly and easily e-mail a few photos to my friends and colleagues. So, if the photos are small, I can easily attach them to my e-mail and click on the send button. But, most of the times my JPG files are at least 1 MB in size. In this […]

Triggered by Francois’s comment, I have created a new collaborative book on oradot: The Oracle Resources Book. This is an online book that you can contribute to and I urge you to do so. The more Oracle community members add information to this book, the more useful it becomes. There are a lot of Oracle […]

While reading this page, I stumbled upon a trick (by Tom Kyte) to generate an alphanumeric character string of any length using the Oracle SQL function RPAD. The emphasis here is on the length of the string, not its content. Let’s say you want to generate a 10 character string, you can easily do it […]

The newest site for the Oracle community is born, oradot.com:

Oradot is a site for the Oracle community and by the Oracle community. Similar to Slashdot, oradot is currently designed to allow any user to submit “stories” (or articles) which are then discussed by the community. Stories may be technical or non-technical and should be related […]

If you have a blog on Google’s blogspot, rejoice, you may now have 1,306,313,812 extra people reading your blog.

Back when I was in China a few weeks ago, blogs hosted on Google’s blogspot were not accessible as they were blocked by the Chinese government. But, based on this InfoWorld article, China has now opened up […]

In his comment, Gary alerts me of the fact that Oracle has a pre-defined collection type called dbms_debug_vc2coll. It is owned by sys and granted to public. I have also discovered that there is another pre-defined collection type called ku$_vcnt and it is also owned by sys and granted to public. However, ku$_vcnt is a […]

If you have been thinking of buying a domain name, now is the time. Yahoo is currently offering domain names for $2.99/year (up to 5 years). A good deal. Much better than my deal, when I got my awads.net domain name from Yahoo a few months ago (it was about $5/year then). (via)