Steve Callan

What if you could directly read and manipulate data at the block level? Oracle provides such a tool to do exactly that, but you have to build it yourself. The Block Browser and Editor tool, or bbed for short, is your ticket into the contents of data blocks within an Oracle database. What can you […]

Introduced in Oracle 10g, the UTL_COMPRESS package can be used to compress and uncompress large objects (raw, blob or bfile). For all practical purposes, you can think of UTL_COMPRESS as PL/SQL’s means of compressing or zipping files. When looking at the various procedures and functions, many are prefixed with LZ. The algorithm used to perform […]

In this article, we’ll take a look at what Oracle does when you perform a tablespace point-in-time recovery (TSPITR) – and also what it doesn’t do, depending on the version being used. One of the errors can be vexing, but once you know where and how to fix it, the point-in-time recovery process works much […]

This article and the next cover a couple of RMAN exercises using an older version of Oracle. Newer versions, specifically 10g and up, take care of many issues or limitations present in 9i and 8i days, and as we all know, not everyone is using the latest and greatest version(s). The exercises or samples cover […]

In today’s economic conditions, many companies have made significant cuts in training budgets. Significant even means no budget. In some cases, if you’re willing to pay for training out of pocket, you may get to attend on paid time as opposed to taking vacation days. This is where I found myself in wanting to take […]

It seems there is no end of tools or ways to monitor a database. Monitoring tools range from the expensive, high-end see-all be-all variety to homegrown, simplistic shell scripted ones. Before pursuing one or more approaches (and before spending money), identify what it is you want to accomplish. What is it you want to monitor, […]

In the last article, covering the installation of Oracle9i on Windows 2003 Server on VMware Workstation, we saw how a virtual machine application could make creating what appears to be an odd environment fairly easy to accomplish. Why spend time building an Oracle9i environment, you may ask. The fact is that not every business using […]

Virtualizing hardware is the latest rage when it comes to cost savings and getting the most bang for your buck out of your hardware investment. You may hear someone talk about turning a p-machine into a v-machine, and that can mean a physical machine has a virtual machine software application installed on it or that […]

For those who are ultra-conscious about security within the Oracle RDBMS, particularly when the topic involves the weaknesses of Oracle’s password mechanism or algorithm, older versions of Oracle (especially 10g and below) are always going to be viewed as a hacker’s target of opportunity. Almost nothing you can do, so it seems, will ever give […]

This article revisits a series written around five years ago regarding running an Oracle database on Windows. There have been quite a few changes, which you may not see or know about unless you have actively pursued staying abreast of this technology area. One aspect that has not changed is Oracle Corporation’s commitment to making […]

One of the main features of Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher (BIP) is its ability to connect to pretty much every major RDBMS on the market. By default, the configuration for connecting to the Oracle RDBMS is present out of the box. Being a Java-based application at heart, the connection setup to Oracle uses JDBC. Let’s […]

Imagine an Oracle database facing a SQL Server database as if each were looking at a mirror and seeing their somewhat distorted reflections. The Oracle database entity lifts its right hand and expects to see four fingers and a thumb reflected back, but instead, sees five thumbs and a claw. And to be fair, when […]