At my (current) workplace we have a webfiltering mechanism powered by WebSense. I’ve ranted enough number of times on twitter about websense’s stupid filtering mechanisms & the bizarre classification that it uses to classify websites.

The day finally came to launch the product but there was no fanfare. No big payoff. No feeling of fulfillment. It was merely a quiet launch with one beta customer. You didn’t know what to do with yourself so you sat there all day refreshing a view on the database to spy on what they were doing. Answer: not much. The things they did do, they did wrong. They found bugs. They found ways to circumvent all of your carefully constructed system rules and validations. Not because they were master…

Background: For the past few days weeks, I have been working on a way to export selective data from one schema to import into another. Now the problem is that “selective” data refers to the data as stored across various tables in the custom application that I’ve been working on, with elaborate relational links between the tables ( if you’re curious, the table count on the related data was about 65) – so it was not just couple of tables that I had to export.

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 🙂

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.

If you’re looking to brush up on your PL/SQL knowledge, PL/SQL challenge{#aptureLink_bTi5ZytYmL} 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{#aptureLink_WlOD3WAo4T} .

I wanted a simple tool to upload to Imageshack with minimum fuss and absolutely no config settings, couldn’t find any such so I built one myself.  Just extract all the files to a folder, run the executable, and if you want to upload something to  Imageshack, hit PrintScreen and double click the icon on the system tray, it’ll automatically upload to ImageShack imgur, and once upload is done, will give you a notification and copy the ImageShack imgur URL to the clipboard.

I’ve been facing this really annoying problem for quite some time now. My job revolves around developing apps using Oracle Forms Builder{#aptureLink_dzpThUVtnA}. 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{#aptureLink_5VcUe7aCHj} jInitiator{#aptureLink_uyXnIMpqB7} which is a JVM made by Oracle and allows a web enabled Oracle Forms client application to be…

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…

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.