Steven Feuerstein has a nice little presentation on some golden rules for developers. They aren’t anything new, yet not many people read/follow them 
Download the PDF from here, or just read it via the embedded doc
Tags: Development, PL/SQL, Programming
Toad (acronym for Tool for Oracle Application Developers) is arguably one of the most popular and best known tools used by most people dabbling in Oracle databases ( or for that matter, most relational databases anyway). Toad’s reputation is so good, I’ve known few people swear by it and don’t even bother looking at other software, no matter how good.
Toad’s got more features than your average SQL/ PL/SQL developer would use,and hence got a bit of a steep learning curve. Not to mention an even steeper price tag ( the base edition starts at $957, and goes all the way upto $4709 if you include the Code Tester and DB Admin module). Given these prices, Toad is pretty heavily pirated.
However, most people are unaware that Toad also comes in a freeware edition, and until recently was severely crippled. Few days ago, there was an update to Toad freeware – and the updates are pretty good. The freeware edition is now based on 10.5 codebase, rather than previous 8.5 codebase. Now before you start jumping up and down, the restrictions on the freeware edition are still in place, but noticeably lesser than the previous update. Some of the restrictions include you being limited to only one concurrent database connection (which btw – would severely hamper me, I generally maintain 2-3 connections). Another major irritation is that the freeware edition will expire every 90 days, and you will need to uninstall, re-download and reinstall it. Ugh.
Here’s comparison chart between the commercial edition and freeware.
If you’re OK with the restrictions imposed by freeware edition or a Toad fan, then you can go ahead with getting it. If you ask me, Oracle’s SQL Developer is a perfectly acceptable alternative tool.
(In case you’re wondering my preferred tool, its Allround Automations’ PL/SQL Developer. Yes, yes, I know, the UI is butt ugly – I didn’t want to touch it at all just because of the UI – but believe me, once you get over the UI, you’ll love it – its fantastically fast, consumes very little memory and got boat load of features for the price its available at. I’ll probably do a review of the tool soon.)
Do let me know if you have a preferred /alternative tool that I could look at.
Download Links:
3. Allround Automations PL/SQL Developer
Tags: download, free, oracle, PL/SQL, PL/SQL Developer, SQL Developer, TOADL
If you’re looking to brush up on your PL/SQL knowledge, PL/SQL challenge is pretty nice. It’s a daily challenge quiz, where you are presented with multiple choice or true/false questions. It’s an initiative by Steven Feuerstein , who’s pretty well known. I just joined in, first few questions were not too tough Join in, there’s some great prizes to be won .
If you know of any more such websites, do drop in a comment and let me know.
(PS: If you’re wondering what’s with the weird URL structure, well its built on Oracle Apex. Long, clumsy URLs are a pain, and Apex does nothing to banish them).
Tags: Apex, oracle, PL/SQL, Programming, SQL
I’ve been facing this really annoying problem for quite some time now. My job revolves around developing apps using Oracle Forms Builder. Oracle Forms applications, uses Java applets to run inside any browser, on most platforms. Here’s the kink – Oracle Forms applications by default uses Oracle’s jInitiator which is a JVM made by Oracle and allows a web enabled Oracle Forms client application to be run inside a web browser.
As much as I hate using Internet Explorer – I have to depend on it as the my app depends on other components which are designed on run on Internet Explorer only 
Till now I’ve been using Mozilla Firefox, but now the situation demands that I needed to use Internet Explorer. And when I launched Internet Explorer – Ka boom! Internet Explorer crashes. Did few things, such as disabling all addons, getting rid of Sun’s JVM et al, but made no difference.
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Finally, I came across a solution(or rather a workaround) – replace the jvm.dll in jinitiator directory with that present in Sun’s JRE 1.6. If you don’t want to install the whole bundle – just click here(jvm.dll, 2.2 MB), I’ve uploaded just the jvm.dll file, rename the original jvm.dll (present in jinitiator/bin/hotspot directory) to, say jvm.dll.old, and replace it with the one given in the above link. Restart the browser, IE shouldn’t crash anymore.
Tags: Forms, IE, Internet Explorer, jinitiator, oracle
They say “Necessity is the Power of Invention” – a quote which I fully understood the impact today. I’ve been trying to understand Oracle’s Hierarchical Queries for a while now, but never fully understood the situation under which or when it would be used. Yesterday I got a reason to use it. Let me begin.
Tags: hierarchical queries, oracle, PL/SQL, query, SQL
Couple of days ago at work I was asked to create a new environment(schema, user) for specific application testing conditions. While that was no big deal, I was also asked to import all the data from existing production environment into a new environment – and I was in a bit of bother here – generally the whole importing/exporting is done by DBA’s not developers. While I knew the usage of exp and imp commands, creating schema would require stuff like tablespace creating, adding data files and more importantly – grants which I had NO clue on. So after a bit of experimenting and consulting with my fellow colleague Rupam, I finally managed to export and import the data. This post is on how-to go about doing it.
If you want to skip all the commands and all just get the import / export done in 1-click try Easy Dump Oracle 1.1 – a tool which I found on the database server after all the headbanging
Anyways here’s a step by step process on how you export and import the data – do note that Easy Dump Oracle can import data ONLY if required grants are given to the user and tablespace has been allocated. For that you need to follow the below mentioned steps.
Tags: data files, exp, export, imp, import, oracle, tablespace
Over the period of time that I’ve been working on PL/SQL, the one the thing that we end up doing often is reset the sequences we use for Primary keys in our tables. Why do we do that, you might wonder.
Consider this case:
Tags: oracle, PL/SQL, Primary key, reset, sequence, SQL
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