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.

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 🙂 Download the PDF from here, or just read it via the embedded doc

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.

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.

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.

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.

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: