Andrei DANEASA

I’ve been asked by Packt to review one of their last books on Oracle, “Oracle Advanced PL/SQL Developer Professional Guide“.
Like many of the Packt books, it’s highly recommended to read the subtitle as well, in this case “Master advanced PL/SQL concepts along with plenty of example questions for 1Z0-146 examination”.
So in case you’re preparing for this Oracle University exam and ready to become “Oracle Advanced PL/SQL Developer Certified Professional“, this book is a good start.

The structure of the book if following in detail the 1Z0-146 exam topics and the user will find a separated chapter for each topic, exactly in the same order, which makes the book a very good companion when preparing for exam. The examples used trough the book are clear and easy to understand. Starting chapter 7 onwards there are topics with high applicability like SecureFiles, tuning, caching, profiling and tracing and SQL Injection prevention techniques that should be read by every Oracle PL/SQL developer but are not very well understood and unfortuntely underused by the community.

If the reader is not necessarily keen to take the exam, he can then switch to Oracle documentation available on tahiti.oracle.com, where he can read more about each of the topics in the book and many other advanced PL/SQL topics that Oracle University didn’t include in the exam curriculum.

The main effect Facebook and LinkedIn had on my online behavior is that I’m not posting on my blog anymore. It’s also true that I don’t have the time anymore for long articles, but I am really loving my blog (now 6 years old… school boy) and will continue to publish here things that are too technical for Facebook and not business enough for LinkedIn.

Meanwhile, since the last post, I studied a lot on Oracle Data Integrator (ran 5+ workshops across EMEA), Oracle GoldenGate (very hot on my plate, built a machine we’re using for exercises and the corresponding lab book very appreciated on our workshops), Oracle Database Firewall, got GoldenGate Certified Implementation Specialist certification, was traveling a lot to various places in Europe, including a series of 7 weeks in a row, now chilling out a bit and making time for CISSP certification.

Certification status as of May 2011

What’s common to the 3 technologies above? Anybody? Yes, I’m trying to get heterogeneous, they are all dealing with other database systems as well.

Keep in touch.

P.S. Yes, I do hate as well Ubuntu 11.04, can’t wait for 11.10

Apex is a great tool for rapid web applications based on Oracle Database. It’s free, and if you’re happy with Oracle XE’s limitations, then it’s perfect, you have the database free as well. I’ve been following APEX for long time ago, since it was called HTML DB, and wrote 2+ years ago a guide how to install APEX on XE.

Now APEX 4.0.1 is GA and most of the people would like to upgrade. It’s very simple.

1. Download APEX from OTN
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Approx. 4 months after the Linux release, the Windows version of 11gR2 arrived on OTN silently.

Just 64bit version for the moment, but I’m sure the 32bit version will follow soon. Considering the fact there is nothing on corporate blogs or on eDelivery, I’m sure they will make it public after both version will be available, most probably after Easter.

Regarding the version itself, I used the beta versions and will definitely recommend it.

LATER UPDATE (6th of April): 32bit version has just arrived on OTN here.

Enjoy!

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I recently read SQL Developer 2.1 book by Sue Harper, published by Packt Publishing (thanks Veena).

In a few words: I’m impressed. It’s a must read for everybody who’s working with Oracle.

For those of you who never used SQL Developer, Read the rest of this entry »

I’m a constant user of Google Analytics. It’s a great piece of software with lots of useful reports, easy to read and to understand. However, I was never curious how far I can go with it.

Last week I had a discussion with someone in Oracle about Real-Time Decision (RTD) Server and Real User Experience Insight (RUEI), so I decided to find out first all the capabilities of Google Analytics.
After half of day of reading the course materials on Google Conversion University, I decided that a challenge might worth 50$, so I took the exam.

More than an hour later I passed the 70 questions exam, much difficult than I expected, with a score of 87%:

Now having the proof I understood correctly what’s happening with Google Analytics, I can jump into conclusions: Read the rest of this entry »

I used both services to take tests in the past as the following: Microsoft – Pearson VUE and Oracle – Prometric.

It seems that driven by the cut-costs strategy they started to steal each other’s clients. Oracle just moved to Pearson VUE. The result for me as a customer, not as an Oracle employee, is that I cannot access my history. You have to believe me or to wait until Oracle will provide online transcripts when I will tell you what I own. There’s no history on their side, they claim the history will be kept on Oracle’s side at Certview, but I was unable to check my history.

I remembered I used Pearson VUE to take my Microsoft MCSD exams, so I tried to log in with my old credentials. Surprise…. Microsoft is no longer with Pearson, but they moved to Prometric. It’s totally confusing and you don’t want to take an exam these days 🙂

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well… my colleagues from SQL Dev team will probably take out from the marketplace our competition. Having so many features for free is something that me and all the users are highly appreciating.

SQL Developer 2.1 EA1

Some facts of SQL Developer 2.1 Early Adopter 1: Read the rest of this entry »

Yes, it finally arrived! Check this out!

Related posts:
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On SQL Server 2005 Express Edition (I don’t know how’s on full version, never had a license for it) the default connection model is through named pipes and TCP/IP is disabled.

If you want to connect to it from Oracle SQL Developer using jTDS driver it will throw a generic connection failure, as he is trying just TCP/IP. The error looks like this:

In ordrer to enable TCP/IP you have to do a few steps:
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