Regular expressions can save you hours or even days of work in some cases. For anyone not yet familiar with regular expressions, I definitely recommend to get to know at least the basics. That’s what Tanel Poder advised his readers and I agree with him. To that end, here is a list of resources (in […]

I have stumbled upon the following presentation by Mark Townsend, the vice president of database product management, titled The Future of Database Technology. Towards the middle of the presentation, there is a high level overview of many Oracle database 11g features like SQL replay, online table and index redefinition, automatic diagnostic workflow, support for online […]

Reading through other programmers’ code I often discover interesting things that sometimes I find hard to explain. For example, consider the following simple PL/SQL block:

DECLARE CURSOR emp_cur IS SELECT first_name FROM employees WHERE […]

As you may already know, Google recently released Google Gears, an open source browser extension that lets developers create web applications that can run offline using JavaScript APIs.

Google Gears provides three key features:

A local server, to cache and serve application resources (HTML, JavaScript, images, etc.) without needing to contact a server. […]

I have lost confidence in Oracle’s ANSI style SQL. Eric, in his comment to the post Back to basics: anti-joins and semi-joins, warned me of the following gotcha:

If you are writing queries that select from many tables, like denormalizing data for warehousing, and the sum of the columns in those tables exceeds 1,050, […]

Oracle SQL Developer, the free graphical tool for database development, has just been upgraded from 1.1 to 1.2. Here is the list of bug fixes and here is the release notes document including new features and known issues.

If you are already running production release 1.1 (v 1.1.0.23.64) or above, you can use Help > Check […]

Here is the email I received from Oracle:

Dear Edward Awad, The history of information technology is a journey, defined by innovations such as the internet and grid computing. Oracle would like to personally welcome you to see the next generation of innovation by inviting you to the launch of Oracle […]

Resumes seem to be mostly useless, this is what Andrew Wulf thinks, and I can’t agree more. I have been conducting a few interviews lately to fill a PL/SQL contract position, and in almost all cases the resume was so overcharged with buzzwords and all kinds of technologies created in the past 10 years. However, when the moment of […]

I’m not a big fan of blogrolls. A blogroll is a collection of links to other blogs. I believe what’s more interesting and useful is to have a a collection of links to other blog posts and web pages, or a linkblog. Some bloggers use the shared items in Google Reader as their linkblog. Robert Scoble uses this […]