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

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

2. Unzip it making sure you don’t change the name of the apex folder inside the zip.

3. Connect to your XE installation

4. Run the installation script

5. Wait 10-15 minutes then connect again as sysdba and import images

!do not put the “apex” folder in the path there

That’s it, no more unlock account, set password, set port, you already did this on the previous installation.

Enjoy!

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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!

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, is a GUI like Toad or PL/SQL Developer. The main difference is that it’s free and made by Oracle. As a former user of PL/SQL Developer I have to say that Oracle SQL Developer reached its maturity, Oracle is investing a lot of efforts in developing this tool and this is why now SQL Developer is the most used tool for Oracle development, which is quite impressive considering it has just 2 or 3 years since it was launched.

I was using SQL Developer since it was on beta, still called Project Raptor, and I witnessed the way it grew day by day. From a very simple GUI the development team added:

• migration capabilities, making Oracle Migration Workbench deprecated
• schema copy, schema compare
• import/export capabilities
• SVN/CVS integration
• Data modelling
• excellent reporting capabilities

Now, coming back to the book: what’s better than having a book describing all the above written by the Product Manager of the tool? Sue did a fantastic job writing the book and now everybody have a reference (with a lot of examples and screenshots) for all the capabilities of SQL Developer.

I have to recon that there were quite a few things in the book that I have no idea they exists. This is mostly due to the fact that the product is on such a heavy development and the releases are launched very frequently.

After reading the book I am seriously thinking of buying the hard-copy of the book. Again, it’s something that everybody that deals with Oracle must have.

***** (5.0/5)

The prices at www.packtpub.com are:
- 38.69 EUR for the paper book (discounted 10%)
- 28.89 EUR for the eBook (discounted 15%)
- 44.68 EUR for the paper book + eBook (10% off paper book and 85% off eBook).

LATER UPDATE: I’ve got 15% off for people reading this review, you just need to use the promo code: OSQL15r

Enjoy!

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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:

• GA it’s a great piece of software for analyzing trends, keywords and content.
• GA it’s staying on another server than your web server and the communication is uni-directional. This means GA will get information about your site, but you cannot implement real-time decisions based on GA
• GA it’s free, same Urchin, so if you own a blog or have a small budget, these will be your choices
• Both RTD Server and RUEI are licensed products with a price per processor over 80K USD, which makes them a choice just for big enterprises
• RTD Server will be able to serve real-time content based on your behavior, just like Amazon is doing
• GA is not able to track 404-pages, loading times, code execution times

To summarize: if you’re big, go with RTD and/or RUEI. If you’re not so big, stay with GA, Urchin or other free stuff like them.

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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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SQL Developer 2.1 EA1

Some facts of SQL Developer 2.1 Early Adopter 1:

• SQL Dev is the most downloaded product on OTN
• SQL Dev is now the leader in DB Dev tools
• the new version can migrate DB2 and Teradata databases, so we need just Informix to get rid of old Migration workbench
• the new version supports version control: CVS and Subversion
• the new version can do unit testing
• many many other features

Enjoy!

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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:

1. From SQL Server Configuration Manager, go and expand “Network Configuration”, choose “Protocols for SQL Server Express” and enable TCP/IP

2. Open TCP/IP properties page, go to the second tab “IP Addresses” and in the last field called “IPAll – TCP Port” enter your port number. You might want to choose 1433.

3. Restart SQL Server Express service.

4. Try again from SQL Developer. This time will work!

Good luck,
Andrei

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Installation of 10g Express Edition should not take more than 10 minutes and the steps are below:

1. Prepare the swap space
If you have less than 1GB memory run the following commands to create swap space:

2. Add new Aptitude source and get the GPG key for Oracle
2.1. First modify /etc/apt/sources.list file:

2.2. Append following line:

2.3. Save and close the file. Next import GPG key:

2.4. Update package database:

3. Install Oracle 10g XE:

4. Post-install configuration
4.1. You must configure Oracle TCP/IP port and other parameters. Simply type the following command:

4.2. Add environment variables in .profile

Add the following lines:

Good luck,
Andrei

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