Steve Callan

While not that technical in nature, this one question gives you an opportunity to list reasons or possibilities of a technical nature, which in turn allow you to demonstrate your knowledge and understanding of how Oracle Database works, and perhaps in this case, how it may not be working. Oracle DBA job interviews seem to […]

Discover what happens within SQL Server during and after configuring Oracle as a data source. Quite a few objects are created, including a system-level database, numerous jobs running under the SQL Server agent, and flat files created on the file system. Read on to learn more. In this final article on using Oracle as a […]

In some prior articles on Oracle and VMware, the hardware and software components consisted of a Windows-based PC and the Oracle RDBMS. This article will expand upon the “Oracle in a virtualized environment” concept by looking at other alternatives for the hardware and software. Let’s start off with the hardware. By and large, most everyone […]

In this article, we’ll continue on with the setup of Oracle as a data source for SQL Server. As mentioned in Part 1, one of the requirements on the MSSQL side is that the version be of the Enterprise or Developer editions. One major plus of Oracle over Microsoft is that Oracle software has no […]

The Oracle RDBMS is obviously a data source for itself, and when a user wants to get data from the database, there is a litany of features and options to consider. Permissions, roles, grants, tables, views, synonyms and database links are commonly seen. Perhaps less obvious are other data sources within the database, and one […]

As a database administrator, there are two kinds of databases you are likely to own: those you design and those you inherit. In this article, we’ll look at what takes place during the design phase, and then apply the lessons there to a real world implementation, courtesy of Oracle E-Business Suite. As many database design […]

No, really, you may have to do this one day: enable the use of barcodes in Oracle Reports. Is this a database administration or administrator responsibility? Yes and no. It is obviously not related to anything having to do with data, but it can certainly falls under the “who is our Oracle and all things […]

In Part 2 of the product review for Toad for Data Analysts (TDA), we’ll look at several of the more advanced features of this application (part one is covered here). TDA offers more sophisticated users features such as data synchronization, automation, and reporting. Excel Reports As a DBA, how many times have you been asked […]

Toad for Data Analysts (TDA) is yet another product in a long line of highly useful, well-designed, productivity enhancing applications developed by Quest Software. The branding behind the purpose of this tool gets right to the heart of what TDA can help you accomplish with data: Query, Understand, and Report. If you are a database […]

What is the best way to prevent unintended updates or deletes in a table? The small changes may not be so bad or hard to recover from, but what if it was every record in the table that underwent a change? The “global change” situation can occur when a user submits an update or delete […]

In a prior article on Oracle’s Block Browser and Editor tool (BBED), the installation of the tool was covered. In this article, we’ll look at starting a session using a simple database and see how to view data. The database used in this example is minimal in terms of structure. Use dbca to create a […]

The SQL Performance Analyzer, or SPA, is another new feature introduced in release 11g. SPA, and another feature named Database Replay, fall under what is known as Real Application Testing. The distinction between the two is that Database Replay, as its name implies, enables you to replay events within a database. SPA, on the other […]