VirtualBox, Virtual PC, VMware Workstation and a few other software packages help you create and run multiple virtual machines on your desktop or laptop enabling you to run multiple operating systems simultaneously on a single computer.

My personal favorite is VirtualBox (recently acquired by Sun Microsystems), not only because it is freely available as Open Source [...]

Links to interesting, educational, informational, or just plain fun websites…

David Aldridge’s post about OVERLAPS caught my attention. I did not know that you could do something like this in Oracle:

SQL*Plus: Release 10.2.0.1.0 - Production on Thu Jun 12 22:06:24 2008

Copyright (c) 1982, 2005, Oracle. All rights reserved.

SQL> connect eddie/awad Connected. SQL> SELECT * 2 FROM dual 3 [...]

Amazing what you can do with ANYTYPE, ANYDATA, ANYDATASET, DBMS_TYPES, DBMS_SQL and pipelined table functions implemented using the interface approach. You can end up with a dynamic sql mashup like you’ve never seen before, and pivot like you’ve never pivoted before. Of course, if you’re on Oracle DB 10g or below, you can never pivot [...]