Steve Callan

Introduction This is the second of a two-part series about how you can become an Oracle DBA in today’s almost non-existent DBA job market. This article focuses on inexpensive and effective means of learning Oracle. The bad news: short of someone else paying for your education, you can expect to spend some of your own […]

Beginning with later versions of Oracle8, Oracle has provided a means of generating random numbers. This built-in package, DBMS_RANDOM, is fairly simple to use, and can generate random numbers which are generally good enough for the needs of most users. If you need to generate a large amount of data without having to provide a […]

1521. 1810. 2481. 7778. These are just a few of the port numbers Oracle uses in networking. Everyone knows 1521 is the typical port number used by a listener, but how sacrosanct is that? In other words, do other vendors know not to use 1521 for their applications because Oracle “owns” that port number? We […]

This is the first of a two-part series about how you can become an Oracle DBA in today’s almost non-existent DBA job market. This article focuses on gateway jobs, which are easier to obtain and give you exposure to Oracle. The second article will focus on ways to learn Oracle and get the most out […]

In this second article about Oracle on Windows, we will cover several more areas of interest shared by Oracle and Windows. Using Oracle on Windows is, in many ways, much simpler than using a UNIX variant as the underlying operating system. That point alone provides enough justification to learn more about Oracle on Windows if […]

In this second article about SQL functions, we will look at 11 SQL-related functions commonly used in statistics: count, sum, average, standard deviation, variance and covariance (standard deviation and variance have three each; covariance has two). Aside from other reasons (mentioned in the last SQL function article) about why a DBA may need to be […]

In this continuing series of installation cookbooks, we will look at a new and improved version of Oracle’s Application Server. This standalone release of Application Server, identified by “10g (9.0.4),” enables you to deploy forms (and reports) over the web without the overhead of installing the complete Application Server (iAS) environment. This standalone slice of […]

Oracle provides quite an array of functions when it comes to manipulating data via SQL. The Oracle9i SQL Reference guide (for release 2) lists five categories of SQL functions, with each category containing one or more functions within a category. The major functions are single-row, aggregate, analytic, object reference and user defined. The single-row function […]

Previous articles in this series covered installing a database product (Oracle9i) and a development tool (Forms & Reports 6i). For the most part, those installations – just using what Oracle provides in its hundreds of pages long installation guide – are fairly straightforward. With a fair amount of UNIX administration skills (a proficiency roughly based […]

Microsoft takes a beating at times from frustrated users of its own products and from users of third party products hosted on Windows. When it comes to using Oracle on Windows, it seems that a frequently appearing solution to problems is to reboot the PC. In reality, rebooting is necessary at times, especially after installing […]

So far, the trigger-happy DBA series has dealt with triggers related to Data Manipulation Language (DML) operations. As mentioned in the beginning of the series, another type of useful trigger is that of the system trigger. System triggers can be delineated into two categories: those based on Data Definition Language (DDL) statements, and those based […]

The Oracle9i installation guide included in last month’s Installation Cookbook series established the concept of applying an installation methodology to Oracle products. This cookbook article on installing Forms & Reports 6i (on a Solaris system) illustrates the same methodology. “But wait, I’m a DBA, not a software installer,” so you say. True, you may be […]