There's a good article currently featured on OTN about using Extended Trace to diagnose performance problems. Written by Cary Millsap and entitled "Diagnosing Performance Problems" [http://otn.oracle.com/oramag/oracle/04-jan/o14tech_perf.html], it's worth taking a look at if you'

"Stick to Web services for now: That's the new party line for BI software buyers. Recent reviews of the Java online analytic processing (JOLAP) API and XML for Analysis (XMLA) version 1.1 left many industry analysts shepherding BI tool developers away from these two standards until

eWeek [http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,4149,1440219,00.asp] viaSlashdot [http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/01/17/1347204&mode=nested&tid=126&tid=154&tid=163&tid=95] reports that Oracle are about support Mozilla on Linux as a client for

Interesting article from Hyperion [http://dev.hyperion.com/resource_library/articles/jolap_xmla.cfm] on JOLAP and XMLA. Hyperion of course have a foot in both camps (see this article by Seth Grimes [http://www.intelligententerprise.com/cgi-bin/printable.cgi?file=../030301/604decision1_1.shtml] , and my previous summary [http:

"A pattern pops out when you examine the big news items from 2003: It's mostly about putting things together. Mergers. Application integration. Grid computing. These and other trends inherently have to do with finding affinities and creating a whole that's worth more than the sum

From the Oracle Universal Installer 2.3 and upwards, it is possible to install Oracle software using HTTP, opening up the possibility of carrying out installations over a firewall. ThisOTN technical note [http://otn.oracle.com/pub/notes/install_0104.html]explains how it's all done.

More from Tom Kyte, this time on Parallel Query [http://asktom.oracle.com/pls/ask/f?p=4950:8:::::F4950_P8_DISPLAYID:1657271217898] . Tom also quotes an interesting line from Jonathan Lewis' Practical Oracle 8i book regarding the scalability of Parallel Query: "You might want to get Jonathan

Just before Christmas, I was working on a project that required STATSPACK, and I couldn't for the life of me remember how to change the STATSPACK statistics level. Anyway, as a reminder to myself, here's how it's done. From Oracle Magazine's "

Jon Mead [http://[email protected]] just contacted me to let me know he'd successfully installed Oracle Application Server 10g (9.0.4) on United Linux [http://www.unitedlinux.com/en/developers/developersregistration.html]. Over to Jon; "I have successfully installed 10g AS on Linux (United

Someone recently asked me to recommend a good book for Oracle Reports, and I thought it worth jotting down my thoughts in this area, as it's something I've been asked about a few times in the past. Oracle Reports has traditionally 'fallen between the cracks&

"You're writing a query that returns computed column values. As input to your calculations, you need values from multiple rows. What do you do? This is actually a fairly common problem. Solutions to it often involve inscrutable combinations of self-joins and subqueries. Oracle Database 10g enables a

Jonathan Lewis [http://www.jlcomp.demon.co.uk] recently posted a guide [http://groups.google.com/groups?dq=&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&selm=bsmagt%245gh%241%248300dec7%40news.demon.co.uk&rnum=12] on comp.databases.oracle.server to the best

You've probably noticed that the site has gone through a makeover in time for the New Year. It's largely been driven by the move to Moveable Type [http://www.moveabletype.org] as the engine behind the site, but I've taken the opportunity to add

Well that's it for 2003. I'm going to spend the next week or so eating too many mince pies, helping my son open his presents, and watching too much television. Have an excellent Christmas and New Year, and see you all in January!

I've just come back from an initial couple of days at a client site, where we're looking at tuning up their data warehouse. I'd previously mentioned one of the areas we'd looked at (function-based indexes [http://www.rittman.net/2003/12/16.

One of my New Year Resolutions is to move my work laptop over to Linux, to be more in sync with Oracle's development effort and to benefit from the extra performance that you get from running Oracle on a Unix platform. One of the things that's

"It really does appear that Oracle has done enough to make the grid built out of commodity servers a practical and economic reality. As a by-product it has made the management of smaller systems easier as well." writes Peter Abrahams [http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/53/34606.

"I was wondering what Oracle 9i RAC could be installed on. I had a look around and it seams to be tested on Redhat linux enterprise. The current version is is 3 and there are WS,AS & ES version. I could download and compile & build, but it&

"When using Discoverer 9iAS (the one that comes with 9iASr2) and public connections, the row-level security i'd set up on the Oracle database doesn't work any more. How can we integrate the SSO logins and discoverer logins such that our database row-level security now works?

If you're looking to use the web-based Design Browser that comes with OWB 9.0.4 and 9.2, and want to deploy it using the new built-in OC4J instance, there's a new Metalink note No. 237367.1 [http://metalink.oracle.com/metalink/plsql/showdoc?db=

> "When using Discoverer 9iAS (the one that comes with 9iASr2) and public connections, the row-level security i'd set up on the Oracle database doesn't work any more. How can we integrate the SSO logins and discoverer logins such that our database row-level security now

Interesting bit of news on OCS: Oracle Collaboration Suite 2.0 has been certified to work against the Symantec Antivirus Engine [http://home.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20031216005352&newsLang=en] , in order to scan data in the Email module [http://otn.

"One of the most confounding problems with Oracle is the resolution of buffer busy wait events. Buffer busy waits are common in an I/O-bound Oracle system, as evidenced by any system with read (sequential/scattered) waits in the top-five waits in the Oracle STATSPACK report ... The main way

Looking to install Oracle 9i Release 2 on RedHat's new Enterprise Server 3.0 [http://www.redhat.com/software/rhel/]? Werner Puschitz has produced a comprehensive guide to getting 9i Release 2 installed and running on RHES 3.0 [http://www.puschitz.com/InstallingOracle9i.shtml#RunningOracleInstallationOnRHELAS3] , including a

Oracle security specialist Pete Finnigan [http://www.petefinnigan.com/], author of the 'Detecting SQL Injections In Oracle' article [http://www.rittman.net/2003/09/28.html], has recently published a new paper on implementing row level security on Oracle. According to Pete's website [http://www.petefinnigan.