Rittman Mead - Delivered Intelligence

If you’ve been developing applications on Oracle for a while, you’ve no doubt come across the concept of ‘Bind Variables’. Bind variables are one of those Oracle concepts that experts such as Tom Kyte and Jonathan Lewis frequently cite as being key to application performance, but it’s often not all that easy to pin down […]

"Oracle Corp. plans to deliver a major update
to its Collaboration Suite before the end of this year, adding instant messaging
capabilities, improving integration with enterprise applications and enhancing
other features, company executives said Tuesday." reports Joris Evers in
an
Infoworld.com article.
And this looks interesting: "Aside from instant
messaging, Oracle will deliver enhanced features to rival Microsoft’s Windows
SharePoint Services group […]

"I’m an Oracle developer who wants to get into some of the "newer"
technologies that Oracle offers. I want to get Oracle 9iAS, Portal, Forms
services etc up and running on my PC. I’m going to get a PC that can handle
this. Do you have any articles on how to install […]

Will SQL replace proprietary tool languages as the ETL language of choice? Yves de Montcheuil asks this question over at DMReview.com.

Oracle Discoverer is an ad-hoc query tool used for reporting and analyzing
data held in Oracle and other third-party databases. It presents data using
‘business terms’, allowing users to build reports by choosing data items from a
business repository (known as the ‘End User Layer), then dragging and dropping them
onto a report using a ‘point and click’ interface. […]

One of the new features in Oracle 9i was a Oracle
Data Mining, a data mining engine which allowed data analysts and
application developers perform a range of data mining algorithms on data held in
the Oracle database. Oracle 9i came with a number
of mining algorithms, such as Adaptive Bayes Networks, Clustering and
Association Rules, together with a Java […]

It’s only now available (so I believe) through a Google cached copy, but William G. Brown’s “Undocumented Express”
paper contains a number of good Oracle Express tips in nine categories:

MCALC
Worksheets
Time dimensions
TCONVERT
Capstones
XCA
Faster SQL-based loaders
Custom functions
Conjoints

 Check it out whilst it’s still available…

One of the most interesting presentations being given at next weeks’ UKOUG
Reporting Tools & BIW Special Event is a preview
of the next generation of Oracle Discoverer, known by the codename ‘Drake’.
Oracle haven’t officially released details of Discoverer Drake yet, but it’s
possible now to pull together a picture of what the product is likely to look
like, […]

There’s a useful new paper on OTN (via ITToolbox.com) about the automatic patch notification feature in Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g. OEM 10g supports a live connection to Metalink and notifies the DBA about any critical patches that need to be applied to the database, and records and tracks those patches that have been applied.