Well, here we are, one day before new year’s eve, looking back to 2005 and asking ourselves: What will 2006 bring? The answer is: nobody knows. I just hope that the new year will be full of health, wealth and happiness for all of us.

On a personal note, during the first 4 days of 2006 […]

I have at least two computers I use on a daily basis, one at work and one at home. I use Firefox on both computers. I have always used the Firefox extension Bookmarks Synchronizer to synchronize my bookmarks to my personal FTP server, so that I can access them from work and home. When I […]

Oracle Project Raptor, a new and free graphical tool that simplifies database development tasks such as browsing database objects, running SQL scripts, and editing PL/SQL statements, has just been released.

I have always used the SQL function TO_CHAR to extract parts of a date, like the month or the year. But, there is another way to extract parts of a date: the function EXTRACT. Here is an example:

Yesterday, on the way back from work, I was stuck in a huge traffic jam. The jam was not because of a car accident or because of bad weather (it was just raining) but it was because everyone was heading to the shopping mall (Washington Square mall, in case you live in Portland) which […]

In addition to this list, here is another Java based open source database for you: H2. Well, it is not really open source, it is free to use and distribute, and the source code is included. But currently does not use a traditional open source (GPL) license. (via).

Here are my favorite Firefox keyboard shortcuts. I find them very useful because they make my browsing experience faster and easier. They are also handy especially when I am tired of using the mouse. In no particular order:

I stumbled upon an article about open source databases. I’ve always thought that MySQL and PostgreSQL were the only open source databases out there, but it turns out that there are quite a few more.

Here is a list of open source databases that are mentioned in the article:

In this post I will show an example of how you can transform a query result into an XML document. I will also show how you can write a query that produces nested or multi-leveled XML document using cursor expressions.

On page 353 of Expert Oracle Database Architecture, Tom Kyte writes about a really cool trick. Consider this simple create table statement: