I recently stumbled across a sample chapter of Expert Oracle PL/SQL where the authors (Ron Hardman and Michael McLaughlin) mentioned that OraFAQ.com is a good place to post Oracle questions.

This article shows how Oracle's Heterogeneous Services can be configured to allow a database to connect to a Microsoft Access database using standard databases links. The method described can be used to connect to MS-Access from about any platform - Unix/ Linux or Windows.

With Oracle Database 10g, there are some new arguments available for the dbms_stats package subprograms. Those parameters are as follows:

• granularity
• degree

Advisors are the server components that provide you with useful feedback about resource utilization and performance. The most important of all advisors is the Automatic Database Diagnostic Monitor (ADDM). ADDM does analysis of the system, identifies problems and their potential causes, and comes up with recommendations for fixing the problems. It can call all other advisors also.

In this article (chapter) we will look at new features surrounding the DML commands INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE.

Two improvements have been made in the backup and recovery areas in Oracle 10g. When user errors and logical corruptions occur in the database, flashback functionalities provide fast and flexible data recovery. When physical or media corruption occurs in the database, RMAN delivers an improved and simplified recovery method.

It is the business that has the knowledge about their entities (things of importance) and what kind of unique information that separate them (invoice numbers, customer IDs, and so on).

Your role as an analyst/designer is to validate such properties, and to fit them into a normalized database model that reflects the needs of the business.

Oracle Database 10g has expanded the ability to globalize Oracle databases dramatically. As you can see by looking over the following list of globalization improvements, Oracle has attempted to make Database 10g the database of choice for all globally supported and utilized databases.

Oracle databases have many types of auditing features. In mandatory auditing, certain actions are always audited, regardless of the other audit options or parameters. Database activities, such as system startup and shutdown, are always recorded.

SQL tuning is one of the challenging tasks faced by DBAs and developers. It is an interesting and creative, but at the same time, daunting task. Manual tuning of SQL statements requires a high level of expertise and experience to understand and design suitable access paths to yield better response times. It is also a time consuming process. Other challenges include periodic collection of statistics and an ever-changing workload. And in a typical application, there are just too many SQL statements to tune.