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And you thought your patched Oracle database was secure

The latest quarterly Critical Patch Update for Oracle 10gR2 does not plug a hole that allows published attack code to run.

The recent Oracle exploit posted to Bugtraq (http://www.securityfocus.com/archive/1/431353) is actually an 0day and has no patch. The patch for 10g Release 2 for April 2006 Critical Patch Update does _not_ contain a fix for the specific flaw that the exploit takes advantage of. As it happens – this specific flaw was reported to Oracle on the 19th of February 2006.

This is according to David Litchfield.

Ok! Now what?

(via digg)

Filed in Oracle with Comments Off | Tags: ,


Is it true that anyone can contribute to Wikipedia?

Absolutely, in fact:

Wikipedia is absolutely open to absolutely anyone contributing to absolutely anything! As long as you haven’t been banned, or the article you’re contributing to hasn’t been locked, or there isn’t a group of people waiting to delete anything you write, or you don’t make the same change more than three times in one day, or the subject of the article hasn’t decided to send scary lawyer letters to Wikipedia, or you haven’t pissed Jimbo Wales off real bad. It’s all about freedom.

Moreover:

The Wikipedia philosophy can be summed up thusly: “Experts are scum.”

I just thought to share with you the above quotes from The Wikipedia FAQK by Lore Sjöberg.

Filed in Interesting Stuff, Technology with 2 Comments | Tags:


Back to basics: Equi and non-equijoins

The join condition determines whether a join is an equijoin or a non-equijoin. An equijoin is a join with a join condition containing an equality operator. An equijoin combines rows that have equivalent values for the specified columns. When a join condition relates two tables by an operator other than equality, it is a non-equijoin. A query may contain equijoins as well as non-equijoins.

Equijoins are the most commonly used. An example of an equijoin: (more…)

Filed in Joins, Oracle with 7 Comments | Tags: ,


Oracle Bloggers Frappr Group

Spam is a disease. It spreads like a disease. There is email spam, blog comments spam, and now Frappr spam. The Oracle Bloggers Frappr Group, and for the first time since its creation, has been hit with spam. Luckily I caught it early and deleted the spammers and their messages. So, to protect the group against spammers, I have turned on membership moderation. I have done the same for the Adobe MX bloggers group.

Filed in ColdFusion, Oracle with Comments Off | Tags: , ,


How do you use tkprof to solve a performance problem?

In his latest article, Jonathan Lewis uses tkprof to analyse the performance of a query. He concluded that “When you examine the output from tkprof, it often takes a simultaneous cross-check of the block level statistics, the Row Source Operation counts, and some sensible guesswork about the purpose of the query, to be able to understand where the problem is, and how it may be addressed.” Read Jonathan’s interesting article: An example of making sensible guesses from a tkprof output.

Filed in Oracle with 2 Comments | Tags: , ,


Search your Oracle E-Business Suite data using Google

Google recently announced the addition of OneBox functionality to their search appliance, which means that you can find just about anything through the familiar Google search box, including information stored in your corporate ERP system.

Google launched an initial set of OneBox modules with Oracle, Cognos, SAS and Salesforce.com.

According to Oracle, If you are an Oracle E-Business Suite customer, with Google OneBox for Enterprise, you are able to access key information from human resource (HR), enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), and supply chain management (SCM) applications.

Before being able to search Oracle E-Business Suite, there is a sign-on process that guarantees user authorization and authentication prior to accessing secure enterprise data.

The search simultaneously spans multiple public, private, and enterprise information sources. For example, using the keyword ‘requisition’ provides multiple results from secure sources, including:

  • Access to personal desktop documents
  • Viewing personal E-Business Suite requisitions
  • Focused navigation into enterprise applications
  • Access to all corporate intranet site for policies

This looks really powerful.

Steven Chan, Director of Applications Technology Integration at Oracle reports that E-Business Suite search results are returned in XML format and merged into whatever other data Google finds from other sources.

It’ll be interesting to see if companies implement Google’s OneBox to search Oracle E-Business Suite, instead of, for example, using Oracle Portal, Collaboration Suite search functionality or even Oracle’s latest Secure Enterprise Search 10g product.

Updated May-01-2006:

Peter Heller, Senior Director, Oracle Applications Product Marketing, discusses with Cliff the new relationship between Oracle and Google, why companies want search in their enterprise applications and why this is so exciting for Oracle application customers. Listen.

Filed in Google, Oracle with 1 Comment | Tags: , ,


Fan emails

A couple of people recently used the contact form on my blog and sent me the following two e-mails:

Hi,
Please help me where i can get the software for downloading oracle Software in www.Oracle.com…

Also please suggest me which software is best suited .i mean the correct URL so that i can easily Download it.I m going to pursue my Oracle Certification soon .so for practise purpose i need that software..please help me in this regard

Please do reply

But wait, the next one is even better:

Dear Oracle,

I would like to use your products:
Oracle 10g; and Oracle JDeveloper 10; and Oracle SQL Developer

I wonder whether you could ship me CDs free of charges for learning. (I’m living in Vietnam)

I’m looking forward to your help,
Thanks in advance,

Regards,

Wow! my name is “Oracle” and I ship CDs all over the world for free. Sweet! And since I am the “Oracle”, I can correctly guess the shipping address too.

Filed in Oracle with 6 Comments | Tags: ,


OraNA powered by Google and FeedBurner

In this post I will share with you how I transformed OraNA from an aggregator powered by Wordpress to a powerful, robust and easy to manage feed aggregator powered by Google Reader and FeedBurner.

I will take you through the three easy steps that I followed to set up OraNA. You can follow the same steps to set up your own aggregator if you wish.

I will also share with you the features that make OraNA unique, like the ability for anyone to contribute feed items, the aggregation of feeds for websites that do not have feeds (like Jonathan Lewis’s web site), and the option to “plug-n-play” the aggregator on any website or blog, with just one line of code.

Here is how I (re)created OraNA:

1 – Set up the feeds in Google Reader:

Recently Google Reader introduced the ability to share labels. Using this feature, you can subscribe to many feeds, label them with a specific label, and then share that label. A shared label has one unique feed URL. subscribing to that one shared label feed is the same as subscribing to every feed with the same label.

So, I subscribed to all the feeds that I wanted to include in OraNA, labeled them “oracle” and then turned on sharing on that label.

2 – Created the OraNA feed in FeedBurner:

Next, using FeedBurner, I burned the feed produced in the first step above. The result was the final OraNA feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/orana. This feed, by itself and when viewed in a browser, looks and acts like a totally functional feed aggregator, however, I wanted to publish the feed’s content on its own customized HTML web page. No problem. FeedBurner has the “BuzzBoost” service that republishes your burned feed’s content as go-anywhere HTML. I activated BuzzBoost. The result was a snippet of JavaScript that I pasted into the OraNA web page.

3 – Added the sources to BlogRolling:

I wanted to display the feeds that OraNA aggregates. To do that, I exported the feeds in Google Reader to an OPML file, then imported the file into BlogRolling. In BlogRolling, I edited the links so that they pointed to the source website instead of the feed. Then I copied and pasted the BlogRolling JavaScript code into the OraNA web page.

That’s it.

Now, when I want to add a new feed to OraNA, all what I need to do is to subscribe to the feed I want to add in Google Reader, label it “oracle” and add it to the blogroll in BlogRolling.

OraNA features:

And to list the sources, add this code:

Happy news reading :)

Important Note: If you are already subscribed to the OraNA feed, make sure you use http://feeds.feedburner.com/orana to continue receiving updates.

Filed in Google, Oracle with 6 Comments | Tags: , , , ,


New Oracle 10g Book Center

I have just noticed that OTN has now an Oracle 10g Book Center. The page lists Oracle books from Oracle Press, Apress, Elsevier Digital Press, O’Reilly & Associates, Prentice Hall Professional Technical Reference, Rampant, TechPress and Sams Publishing.

Each book has a direct link to Amazon.com and most of them have sample chapters for you to download. There is also a single page to download all sample book chapters.

Check out the Oracle 10g Book Center on OTN.

Filed in Books, Oracle with 4 Comments | Tags:


Web 2.0, vyew, buzzshout and AJAX

I was reading Remko Mantel blog about Web 2.0 and thought about sharing with you a couple of links. The first is a very cool and useful “Web 2.0″ website that offers a free, web-based collaboration tool that provides a feature-rich meeting room with real-time, whiteboard functionality. Features include:

  • Create instant meetings – No client to download or install
  • Annotate, share, and save documents
  • Store your work (25MB free storage)
  • Capture and share screenshots with 1-click
  • Conduct a meeting with up to 20 attendees
  • Upload and share photos from your Flickr!, Yahoo! Photos, or Kodak accounts
  • Create custom photo slideshows with music

Check it out at vyew.com. I have played with it a bit and my first reaction was: Wow!

If you’re wondering what other “Web 2.0″ services are available out there on the Net, wonder no more. Just launched, a new (Web 2.0) website, Buzzshout.com, an online listing and repository of reviews of the hottest new “Web 2.0″ companies.

AJAX is a major component in all Web 2.0 website development. Oracle already has a one-stop shop for AJAX development available on OTN.

Filed in Interesting Stuff, Oracle, Technology with 1 Comment | Tags: , , ,