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Thanks,
LewisC
 

EnterpriseDB News at Blogspot

Chris Keene, the CEO for Wavemaker just blogged that combining Wavemaker and EnterpriseDB just got easier. Wavemaker has a new version that has out of the box support for both Postgres and EnterpriseDB.

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about my first day of Wavemaker training. I still haven’t found time to start day two but now that Wavemaker supports EnterpriseDB, I’ll probably redo day 1 using Advanced Server instead of MySQL. I could have done it before since it already supported Postgres and EnterpriseDB via a manual configuration.

LewisC’s An Expert’s Guide To Oracle Technology

Q&A about RAC and Grid with the RAC Experts

I recently got the opportunity to sit down and talk to two RAC gurus and learn what RAC is and how it relates to Oracle’s Grid technology. Listen to the discussion with Philip Newland and Scott Jesse, both from Oracle Corp. Philip is a technical manager with Oracle’s RAC Pack team and Scott is an Oracle Support Services Manager for the RAC Assurance Team.

LewisC’s An Expert’s Guide To Oracle Technology

According to an article at Computerworld, Yahoo is running a 2 PB (not GB, not TB, PB – Petabyte) database that processes 24 billion events a day. Let’s put that in perspective. 24 billion events is 24,000 million events; 24,000,000,000 events. 1 petabyte is 1,000,000,000,000 bytes. Yahoo has two of those. Actually, I should be basing this on 1k which is 1024 but when you’re dealing with petabytes, I don’t think we need to be picky. We’re talking really, really big.

Yahoo uses this database to analyze the browsing habits of it half a billion monthly visitors.

LewisC’s An Expert’s Guide To Oracle Technology

An ITToolbox user recently asked a question on the EnterpriseDB discussion group, Oracle equilant UTL_I18N.STRING_TO_RAW IN ENTERPRISEDB.

Basically, Sreenivas asked which functions in EnterpriseDB could be used to implement dbms_crypto, hex_to_raw, string_to_raw, etc. I believe he is using EnterpriseDB Postgres Plus Advanced Server which is the product that gives Oracle Compatibility. The short answer to his question is that right now, there are no compatibility functions for those. The long answer is that you can re-implement that functionality using native PG functionality.

If you look at Sreenivas’s message you can see how his existing code works.

LewisC’s An Expert’s Guide To Oracle Technology

By request, this entry will discuss some issues surrounding DML triggers. Triggers are a nifty feature. When you need them, they are very useful. They can also make maintenance and debugging an absolute nightmare.

API vs Trigger Approaches

I am an API style programmer. I do not mean that I put all of my logic in INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE procedures for each table, although that is not a bad idea. What I mean is that I tend to write functional packages and those packages deal with DML.

As an example, let’s say I have an HR system.

LewisC’s An Expert’s Guide To Oracle Technology

Do you know which open source feature is the most important? Do you know which open source database rocks and which one sucks? Is MySQL better than Postgres? Is Ingres worth considering? How does Firebird compare? Have you used, or have you considered using, an open source database?

Take a survey. It’s only 15 questions so it takes just a few minutes.

I’ll post a link where you can get the results once they have been compiled and prepared.

BTW, this isn’t my survey. I’m just passing on the link.

LewisC

LewisC’s An Expert’s Guide To Oracle Technology

I mentioned the other day that I was playing with a new GUI builder from an EnterpriseDB partner, Wavemaker. Wavemaker, in addition to providing the software, provides some training that is downloadable from the web site.

This training is a two day basics course in powerpoint format. I would guess that this is what they use for instructor led training and they just made this available to the public. Anyway, I decided to see how good the training was which in turn kind of tells me how easy wavemaker is to learn.

Day 1 includes 8 powerpoint presentations:

• Introduction
• Wavemaker Architecture
• Wavemaker Installation
• Wavemaker Studio Overview
• Page Designer Basics
• Wavemaker Data Model
• Service Components
• Data Widgets

Seeing as how I was already making some simple pages with the tool, I blew through the intro, the architecture and installation.

LewisC’s An Expert’s Guide To Oracle Technology

Today I will be writing about triggers. One of the questions I get fairly often is “what is the difference between a function, a procedure and a trigger?” I already wrote about functions and procedures in Learn Oracle: Procedures and Functions. You should probably read that one before you read this post.

What is a trigger?

A trigger is a special case of stored procedure that is fired during an event rather than being explicitly executed. A function or a procedure can be called from a command line or from within a different calling program.

Bind variables are used to ease code maintenance and to save memory and processing on the server. When you save memory and processing power, you improve the overall performance of the server. The inner details of how this saves memory has been enumerated in other places on the web. This article is designed to help developers users bind variables when running queries against Postgres Plus Advanced Server.

What are bind variables?

The easiest way to think of a bind variable is to consider it just another variable. Instead of it being a variable to be used by your application (and whatever language you happen to be using), think of it as a variable to be used by SQL.

LewisC’s An Expert’s Guide To Oracle Technology

The latest release of the EnterpriseDB database, Postgres Plus Advanced Server (AS) 8.3, includes additional Oracle compatibility features. Two of those new features are DBMS_PIPE and DBMS_ALERT. Old Oracle hands will recognize those two packages that are used for interprocess communication. This post is a quick tutorial on using these two features. If you’ve used them in Oracle, you would have no problem using them in AS.

DBMS_ALERT

DBMS_ALERT allows you to send an alert to any processes that are registered to hear (listen) that alert. The listening process can register to hear multiple alerts.