Mark Rittman

"Many companies make a concerted effort in selecting their appropriate BI toolset for their organization. However, once they have selected a specific vendor tool, they spend comparatively little time determining their appropriate licensing approach. Hidden just beneath the surface of the seemingly obvious licensing alternative are some key factors

"When an Oracle database suddenly becomes unavailable, the immediate reaction is to do something -- right now! -- to solve the problem, which sometimes makes the problem worse. This article discusses some examples of when it's really best to stop and think before proceeding" writesJim Czuprynski

Quick tip from Tom Kyte on appending the date to an Export filename [http://asktom.oracle.com/pls/ask/f?p=4950:8:::::F4950_P8_DISPLAYID:612348047].

"Versions 8i and 9i of Oracle have altered the facts behind several common beliefs of DBAs. Find out why these five cherished beliefs about working with the database may no longer be true and how the changes enhance your options." writes Bob Watkins [http://techrepublic.com.com/5171-22-1031068.

"Before you can identify problem SQL in your database, you have to ask the question of what is bad SQL. What criteria do you use when you begin the hunt for problem SQL in your critical systems? Understand that even the seasoned experts disagree on what constitutes efficient and

Much of my work involves designing and reviewing dimensional data models, and an interesting issue that often comes up is how to deal with data items such as invoice number, order number and so on, that are not strictly facts - you're not going to want to add

Niall Litchfield has started a site [http://www.niall.litchfield.dial.pipex.com/] on working with the Oracle database. I met Niall at the last UKOUG conference and he seems like an all-round nice guy;check it out [http://www.niall.litchfield.dial.pipex.com/] when you get a chance.

More news on the Oracle 9i 9.2.0.5 patchset, and it's suitability for Oracle OLAP users. Anthony Waite confirms in an OTN OLAP Forum posting [http://forums.oracle.com/forums/thread.jsp?forum=16&thread=237886&tstart=0&trange=15] that the 9.

"Larry Ellison, CEO of Redwood Shores, Calif.-based Oracle, and Michael Dell, chairman and CEO of hardware giant Dell, joined forces during a conference call with journalists and analysts Tuesday to announce that Dell will offer Oracle's Standard Edition One database prepackaged on Dell PowerEdge 2600 or

Arup Nanda gives us the lowdown [http://otn.oracle.com/pub/articles/10gdba/week7_10gdba.html] on the Oracle 10g 10.1 release of SQL*Plus. And the good news? "Contrary to some widespread rumors, the COPY command is still available, although it will be obsolete in a future

Even if you have done a superb job in installing and configuring Oracle9iAS, if the system is not always available or if the performance is poor, then you need to start looking at tuning and optimising your 9iAS instance. Being complex, an Oracle9iAS environment has a huge amount of tuning

"Although Oracle has yet to officially announce its upcoming Oracle Certified Professional (OCP) 10g certification track, some details are starting to emerge" writes Becky Nagel [http://www.certcities.com/editorial/news/story.asp?EditorialsID=592] for certcities.com.

A colleague and I were working today on an HTML DB application that displayed a table of customer records. What we needed to do next was to put a checkbox beside each customer record, so that we could select one or more of them for subsequent processing. Having looked through

Back in January, I posted a link [http://www.rittman.net/archives/000708.html] to some DBA interview questions [http://www.databasejournal.com/features/oracle/article.php/3085171] put forward by James Koopman at Databasejournal.com. Well, James has now posted another article that gives answers to the questions, so

Damir Bersinic [http://certcities.com/resources/contributors/default.asp#Bersinic] shares his top five new Oracle 10g Features to Support Grid Computing inthis certcities.com article [http://www.certcities.com/editorial/columns/story.asp?EditorialsID=172].

Time to check out the competition. "The next version of Microsoft's SQL Server, code named Yukon, will include new PIVOT operators, which will make business intelligence reporting much easier. See what PIVOT operators can do for your next database project." writes Sanders Kaufman, Jr. [http://builder.

There's a useful couple of new articles on Orafaq [http://www.orafaq.com/articles/] by Saikat Goswami that are worth taking a look at if you're thinking about developing on the J2EE platform. "Introduction to Java Database Connectivity" [http://www.orafaq.com/articles/archives/

> "I am trying to link 2 databases through Business Objects to enable Bus Obs users to run their own reports (querying data from both databases 'simultaneously') and have reached a stumbling block because (as I'm sure you're aware) database links between Oracle

A problem that often seems to happen when Oracle 9iAS 9.0.2 crashes is that you can't seem to restart OID using OIDCTL. For example, a situation might arise when a server is bounced without 9iAS being shut down cleanly. When you reboot the PC, and use

DBAZine are currently running an extract [http://www.dbazine.com/shasha1.shtml] from Dennis Shasha and Philippe Bonnet's book,"Database Tuning: Principles, Experiments, and Troubleshooting Techniques" [http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1558607536/markrittmanso-20/102-8671428-4295315] on data warehouse tuning and optimisation. The extract

"Once again, marketing alchemists have cooked up a bowl of confusion with only a few simple ingredients. Everyone in the business intelligence (BI) space is wild about dashboards, but few proponents are talking about the same thing." writes Stephen Few [http://www.intelligententerprise.com/info_centers/bi/showArticle.

One question I'm often asked is "Apart from the inclusion of Oracle OLAP and Oracle Data Mining, what are the benefits of upgrading an Oracle 8i database to Oracle 9i?". Well, I recently came across an article on this subject [http://www.dba-oracle.com/art_builder_

"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 inan Infoworld.com article [http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/

Will SQL replace proprietary tool languages as the ETL language of choice? Yves de Montcheuil asks this question over at DMReview.com [http://www.dmreview.com/editorial/newsletter_article.cfm?nl=bireport&articleId=1000016&issue=031604] .