"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] .

> "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

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

One of the most interesting presentations being given at next weeks' UKOUG Reporting Tools & BIW Special Event [http://www.oracleuser.co.uk/reportingtools/Agenda.htm] is a preview of the next generation of Oracle Discoverer [http://www.oracleuser.co.uk/reportingtools/abstracts.htm#andy], known by the codename

It's only now available (so I believe) through a Google cached copy, but William G. Brown's "Undocumented Express" [http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=cache:x2mpl5yDNvoJ:www.symcorp.com/download/0002%2520Undocumented%2520Express-Oracle%2520Internals.htm+%22undocumented+express%22&hl=en&ie=

One of the new features in Oracle 9i was a Oracle Data Mining [http://otn.oracle.com/products/bi/odm/index.html], 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

There's a useful new paper [http://otn.oracle.com/products/oem/pdf/db_patching.pdf] on OTN (via ITToolbox.com [http://oracle.ittoolbox.com/documents/document.asp?i=2913&r=default.asp]) about the automatic patch notification feature in Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g. OEM 10g [http://otn.

There's an interesting interview over at CertCities.com [http://certcities.com/editorial/features/story.asp?EditorialsID=72], where Jim Dilanni, Oracle's Director Of Certification, gives some background on the program's changes over the past year, and discusses some of the changes we're

"Contrary to the pontifications of theoreticians and ivory-tower academics, there are many silver bullets for Oracle performance tuning. By silver bullet, I mean a small set of commands that quickly relieves an acute performance bottleneck. Some of these techniques of just-in-time tuning have been codified in Oracle10g with the

"Using a firewall to protect a server, and not just a database server, is not a new concept and has been around for a while. However, a firewall may be overkill in some cases. Even if a firewall is desirable, it may still have to be configured and deployed

Don Burleson offers some useful guidelines [http://builder.com.com/5100-6388_14-5142601.html] on what to ask of third-party application vendors whose applications run on the Oracle platform. Don's advice? > "If you are the victim of a shoddy Oracle vendor implementation, insist on your right to

"Hi Mark, I am a technology reporter with washingtonpost.com. I noticed your blog on Oracle. I will be hosting an online interview tomorrow with Matthew Symonds, author of the recently released book "SOFTWAR: An Intimate Portrait of Larry Ellison and Oracle." Symonds will field questions about