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The Oracle APEX Listener 2.0 is officially out. There's a TON of changes in this release. The first how you get it up and running. For the standalone version, it's very simple to be up and running quickly. Simply type "java -jar apex.war" and follow the prompts. This will get you up and running.  The biggest changes are in the REST services and I'll blog more on that later. The command line

Gerhard a colleague is dealing with postgres databases and was very suprised how many features are very oracle like. For example the same concept of Sequences as in Oracle. But then he detected the postgres enum native type support in postgres and asked me if the same feature would exist in Oracle.

After a successful migration from Oracle 10gR2 to Oracle 11gR2, I observed a very odd behavior executing a query; On first execution the query run fast - means 0.3 s; On second not faster but with tremendous reduced speed - approximate 20 s; Now this behavior is the opposite I experienced with complex queries (lot of joins, lot of predicates) , the first time of execution needs the extra cost of hard parsing and disk reads if the data is not in cache. the second time even the query run initial several seconds it run in a fraction of a second.

Oracle Application Express 4.2.1.00.08 has just been released and is available for download. The patch set can be downloaded from My Oracle Support (search for patch# 14732511) and the full distribution is available on Oracle Technology Network. In the APEX … Continue reading →

In an earlier post I noted that Berkeley DB Java Edition cleaner performance had improved significantly in release 5.x. From an Oracle NoSQL Database point of view, this is important because Berkeley DB Java Edition is the core storage engine for Oracle NoSQL Database.

Many contemporary NoSQL Databases utilize log based (i.e. append-only) storage systems and it is well-understood that these architectures also require a "cleaning" or "compaction" mechanism (effectively a garbage collector) to free up unused space. 10 years ago when we set out to write a new Berkeley DB storage architecture for the BDB Java Edition ("JE") we knew that the corresponding compaction mechanism would take years to perfect. "Cleaning", or GC, is a hard problem to solve and it has taken all of those years of experience, bug fixes, tuning exercises, user deployment, and user feedback to bring it to the mature point it is at today. Reports like Vinoth Chandar's where he observes a 20x improvement validate the maturity of JE's cleaner.

Cleaner performance has a direct impact on predictability and throughput in Oracle NoSQL Database. A cleaner that is too aggressive will consume too many resources and negatively affect system throughput. A cleaner that is not aggressive enough will allow the disk storage to become inefficient over time. It has to

1. Work well out of the box, and
2. Needs to be configurable so that customers can tune it for their specific workloads and requirements.

The JE Cleaner has been field tested in production for many years managing instances with hundreds of GBs to TBs of data. The maturity of the cleaner and the entire underlying JE storage system is one of the key advantages that Oracle NoSQL Database brings to the table -- we haven't had to reinvent the wheel.

Hi Oracle Security Folks, UKOUG 2012 in a nutshell: OAK Table day highlight was Julian’s analysis of RAT capture formats, which made reverse engineering proprietory formats look a lot easier than it should do. Christian’s super secret talk was so secret that it was not given, but managed to catch up on that later. Monday [...]

This is just a small bug fix release of the plugin. It was actually quietly released for a while now of if you have downloaded the plugin recently, you have the latest version. To be sure — check the version in the Console or you will see it in the file name. There are two [...]

It does not work :(
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Read my book review of Oracle APEX Best practices.

Berkeley DB Java Edition 5.x has significant performance improvements. One user noted that they are seeing a 20x improvement in cleaner performance.

Hello Folks, A few people have told me that they thought only SYS could select db link passwords. Truth is any user with SELECT_CATALOG_ROLE can select the passwords from ku$_dblink_view as well. SQL> select name, userid, utl_raw.cast_to_varchar2(dbms_crypto.decrypt((substr(passwordx,19)), 4353, (substr(passwordx,3,16)))) password from ku$_dblink_view; NAME -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- USERID ------------------------------ PASSWORD -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- TEST_LINK.ENTERPRISE.INTERNAL.UK DBLINK_ACCOUNT mongo If missing execute on [...]

Snip from a very Nice Slide Deck from a Presentation by the E-Business Suite Team.

See the entire presentation here

Oracle-Apex-Best Practices has been released by Pact-Pub recently. First impression on me was that it’s not a beginner guide to APEX. It’s an enterprise level Apex development features book. When developers begin to learn APEX, they think “we can do simple web projects with APEX but not more”. But this book shows that everything can be [...]

Hello Oracle Security folks, Good news and bad news – which would you like first? Ok.. so the bad news is that these user/role/privileges can select and decrypt DBLink passwords on 11.2, as the key to decrypt the ciphertext is included in the password itself. •SYS •SYSDBA •DBA •SYS WITHOUT SYSDBA •SYSASM •EXP_FULL_DATABASE •DATAPUMP_EXP_FULL_DATABASE •DATAPUMP_IMP_FULL_DATABASE [...]

Yesterday I gave a presentation ”Best of Oracle Security 2012” at the DOAG 2012 conference in Nürnberg.

Oracle platform products and architecture have progressed at a rapid pace to meet the demanding needs of SaaS application deployment. We recently (Nov 2012) recorded a webcast on latest capabilites in Oracle Cloud Application Foundation and how we using it as a platform under our own SaaS applications while also offering it as PaaS.

http://www.oracle.com/partners/campaign/eblasts/fusion-middleware-webinar-1842957.html

Are you hitting the now enforced length restriction of Textareas in your existing applications after upgrading to APEX 4.2? Then you should read Joels blog posting APEX 4.2 and Textareas for additional information and a fix. If you want to … Continue reading →

I just uploaded my talk Hashdays 2012 ”Self-Defending Databases” to the Red-Database-Security website.  The talk explains how to detect SQL Injection attacks in databases (Oracle/MSSQL/MySQL) and how to react in case of a SQL Injection (e.g. done with Pangolin, Havij or Netsparker).

Initially the idea covered only Oracle and MSSQL but Xavier Mertens extend the concept to MySQL (MySQL Attacks Self-Detection) after he saw my presentation at the Hashdays Management Session.

In 2011, I joined many others in the Movember event for the first time. This is a fund-raising effort where participants grow a mustache for the month of November and collect donations to support men’s health, specifically prostate and testicular cancers. Individuals can participate on their own or as a team, but no matter what you donate, it all goes to the same place. In my first year, I managed to collect $754 from 15 donors! Hopefully, I’ll exceed my previous year’s fundraising this year…just not sure what mustache style will bring in the most money yet?!

To see photo updates of how my ‘stache is coming along and to make donations, go to my page on Movember. Thanks for any donation you can make!