Steve Callan

When people talk about installing Oracle, more times than not they are referring to installing the program files for the relational database management system (RDBMS) application. Other people use the word Oracle somewhat loosely when referring to any Oracle product (e.g., Forms & Reports, Developer Suite, Application Server, etc.) to be installed. Whichever it is […]

Here is a problem many developers run into: ORA-04091 table owner.table_name is mutating, trigger/function may not see it. In many cases, the cause of this error is due to code within a trigger that looks at or touches the data within the table the trigger is being called or invoked from. The "look and touch" […]

Who is the trigger-happy DBA? No, I do not mean the DBA who is pulling his hair out over a developer’s mistake ("I truncated all my tables. Why can’t you simply do a rollback for me?"), or the DBA fighting management’s insistence on using export as the primary backup and recovery strategy ("Just do one […]

Last month’s "Connecting with Oracle" article dealt with properly configuring the tnsnames.ora file. Using a statistics-related analogy for a minute, you can have Type I and Type II errors with respect to your tnsnames.ora file. You can have a "good" tnsnames.ora file, but "reject" its use due to not knowing where it is. You can […]

Avoiding the "ORA-12154: TNS: could not resolve service name" error Where were you when Oracle9i was released? Okay, so it wasn’t that memorable of an event for most users, DBA’s, and the rest of the world. However, given that Oracle9i was released over two years ago, it is interesting to note that its new features […]