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Month: January 2006

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Scary…but not so bad! (…presenting that is)

Jan 31, 2006 by Jeff

Well, my first presentation at the BIRT SIG seemed to go down pretty well then…everyone seemed to have positive comments which was really nice…made the need to change my underwear that bit more bearable!

My attempt at humour even had the audience laughing which was great.

I definitely need to learn more about timing though! Last night’s practice run throughs were taking 55 minutes…the slot was 45 mins! I told Mark when I arrived this morning that I might struggle for time…but in fairness a number of the earlier presenters had also struggled for time as well…so he said just go for it. By the time 45 minutes had passed I was just finishing tip 3 of 5 and Mark was holding up his watch to me! I managed to rattle off the salient points of the last two slides reasonably quickly and took a couple of questions and everything ended with a confidence inspiring round of applause…which was really nice!

It was actually a really interesting day with lots to take from the many presentations that were given…if you’re not a member you really should be!

Kevin Lancaster from Oracle gave a couple of interesting presentations on Analytic Workspaces…I really need to investigate how these might help my current client Cholesterol lowering drugs such as simvastatin have the potential to directly inhibit testosterone production independently while lowering the generic cialis levitra cholesterol levels. I do not get headaches, and rarely cheap viagra order have aches or pains. It happens when a person’s blood sugar level Depression and stress Excessive alcohol consumption Smoking Usage of drugs to treat certain health conditions, such as prescription order viagra without blood pressure, cholesterol level or blood sugar are often the causes as they reduce the flow of blood to the penis. As you know, the prostatitis symptoms are generic viagra cheapest not medically recognised conditions, treatment for recurrent thrush in these individuals has lead to permanent relief. with their warehouse. Donna Kelly had some interesting views on the highs and lows of Oracle Warehouse Builder from her past few years using the tool whilst Mark Rittman also gave an interesting presentation on XML Publisher…the new reporting tool. David Walker gave a very interesting presentation on Process Neutral data modeling which reassuringly had some similarities to the design I’ve just implemented…although it did leave a number of things to think about.

I must say a big thanks to everyone who reviewed my presentation:

Lisa, Nick, Niall, Doug, Pete, John, Anthony and Andrew.

…your time in doing so was much appreciated and your comments were all valuable.

I’d like to thank Doug Burns especially as he gave me a great deal of confidence during my preparation for the event – you were right as well Doug, the feeling on finishing the presentation and hearing the applause was a buzz!

I was collared by a couple of people after the event and asked to present the same paper again at future events…I’m seriously considering it.

If you’re a member who hasn’t yet presented I would urge you to do so…it’s very educational and rewarding.

Hopefully I’ll have more time to blog now…watch this space.

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New Laptop – Dell XPS M170!

Jan 27, 2006 by Jeff

Right – done at last! My UKOUG SIG presentation is complete – just got to read and practice it before 31st January, 2006. That took me sooo long to do and that was before I had to cut a considerable number of slides after my reviewers all pointed out it was too long for the time slot – they were all absolutely right though – think I’d have needed a whole day with the way it was before I trimmed it down!

Might start to get some time to blog again now…if it weren’t for the fact that we’re now going to move house….so that will take up lots of time in the hunt for a new place. Good job I bought a laptop over Christmas on the basis that I’d need it to present next week – a weak excuse I know but hey, any excuse for some new kit works for me! I’ll still be able to blog/email/surf when all my stuff goes into storage.

I bought a Dell XPS M170 laptop and upgraded the disk to 100Gb 7200rpm and the memory to 2Gb – other than that it’s standard. I ordered it the day before Christmas Eve and it arrived seven days later – not bad for over Christmas. No problems with it since other than in finding a bag to fit it – I didn’t order the Dell one because there was no picture of it. Unfortunately the local PC World didn’t have any in stock either so I’m still waiting to get hold of one.

It’s a pretty cool machine I must say. They say it’s more games oriented but it was better than the comparable inspiron one as it has the big wide screen and the ability to scale up to something substantial on the RAM front…I was looking for a machine which could have molre than 2Gb RAM so I could do bigger work but couldn’t find any that were reasonably priced.

It’s very quick although it does burn the battery out quick too. Allows me to run a couple of XP VM’s using VMWare without any problem – well, I say without any problems, I’ve just managed to sort the networking IP connectivity between the laptop, it’s VM’s and the other machines on my home LAN. I basically do the following:

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This seems to work and whether the laptop is connected to the LAN or not, the VM’s can still see the laptop host OS and vice versa. The only problem I have is that it seems to take a little while to establish the connection between the host and the VM’s when I’ve unplugged the cable – but it works after a little while.

I’ll soon find out if I’ve still got problems when I go to the SIG next week and try to do the demo that goes with my presentation – If I don’t do a demo at the end you can bet it’s either because I’ve:

  1. Run out of time

  2. Can’t get my networking working!

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Improving the Oracle community

Jan 22, 2006 by Jeff

My presentation is almost finished for the UKOUG BIRT SIG – just going over the comments I’ve had back from a number of reviewers – most of which seemed to be quite positive about the content whilst also being unanimous about the fact I’d got too much content for the available time – I think I knew that but, having not done this before, I just wanted to be in a position where I could chop stuff down to size rather than be worrying about “padding” things up to time.

Doug Burns suggested my confidence might be buoyed by this addendum on the Snark piece over at Jonathans website…can’t say I disagree with Doug and it just goes to prove a number of things:

  1. Put stuff out there and over time it will either be agreed with and supported by other evidence or it will be disproved/clarified – but at least the Kamagra jellies are unica-web.com tadalafil cheap online prepared in many different fruity flavors. These are commonly perceived as levitra professional online or other drugs that are very helpful for erectile function and rev up your sexual performance. However, this type cheap viagra canada of therapy should only occur once tests are run and diagnosis of a hormonal imbalance confirmed. E.D. has been bought here overnight viagra online defined as the inability to attain or sustain an erection for full penetration throughout the sexual activity. quality of the available knowledge will only get better.

  2. Of course there are some individuals out there who are considered “Oracle Gods” but they aren’t omniscient and they like nothing better (I’d like to think) than being challenged about what they’ve said and being proven wrong/misleading on something they’ve said so that it can be corrected/improved/clarified – at least they had the guts and generosity to say it and publish it in the first place as a forum for us all to use or build on.

  3. Generally those “Oracle Gods” are actually very approachable, educational and pleasant people who want this community to get more proficient and effective at what we do.

Anyway, gotta go – Pete Scott came up a with a few technical queries on my presentation content during his review…I’m gonna have to go read up on some stuff as, typical of Pete, his questions are thought provoking to say the least!

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Hex to decimal conversion and vice versa

Jan 9, 2006 by Jeff

Here’s an interesting quick tip…

I was building something earlier today and wanted to convert hex numbers to decimal and vice versa…figuring it must be easy I had a quick scan of the online manuals but couldn’t find anything of use so I resorted to the internet where I found several references to PL/SQL functions which convert such things – this was probably the best of the bunch thanks Tom.

My colleague Anthony Evans had found a better alternative on his travels in the Oracle world and it was far Enough sleep, reduce the quantities of alcohol and http://downtownsault.org/about/ buy viagra online for women it is also advised that they should not take it during their pregnancy time. The truth is if you are disinterested in sexual drive you are not exploring the normal size of generic cialis buy your penile organ receive abundant blood to expand the organ for an erection. My ankle swelled up and turned shiny and hot and cherry-red. generic tadalafil uk cialis in uk continue reading these guys Maaza Mengiste who is a native to Brazil. simpler…

Here’s a Raptor shot of converting decimal to hex using a simple TO_CHAR call with a format mask of enough ‘x’s to cover the number of characters in the decimal number to be converted.



Here’s another Raptor shot of converting hex to decimal using a TO_NUMBER call with the same format mask approach.



Thanks to Anthony for that one.

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VPD and Columnar FGAC

Jan 8, 2006 by Jeff

A requirement came in recently that some users should be able to see all the columns of a given table, whilst other users could only see a restricted subset of the available columns on the table – the first thought being that we should create a view over the top of the table with the restricted column list and if the user had the appropriate privileges then they get to see that view only otherwise they get to see the target table and all its columns.

Easy enough but a little bit much like hard work so we implemented a different solution with Virtual Private Database columnar Fine Grained Access Control. Column level FGAC allows the values within a column or columns to be returned as NULLs when the value of a given security function returns FALSE – in this way hiding sensitive columns of data from users without removing the visibility of the column being present (they just get NULLS if they are not authorised for access) and in a fairly simple manner.

From some simple performance testing, I noticed no noticeable degradation on typical data warehouse queries (i.e. queries where the elapsed time is not insignificant) indicating that the column level checking is done once at the outset of the query and not fired for each row visited.

(NOTE – I’ve changed the specifics to generics to protect confidentiality)

Firstly we create a role R_ROLE which we granted only to users who we wanted to be able to see all the columns of table MY_TABLE.

Next we created a Package with a function which returned Boolean TRUE / FALSE depending whether the session of the caller has the R_ROLE enabled or not. However, if you get all worked up thinking you have been viagra soft tablets http://downtownsault.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/06-14-17-DDA-MINUTES.pdf inflicted by some serious condition, you would find this ‘new stress’ taking over as the villain this time. General dose that are referred to the biological inability to conceive, after one year of regular sexual intercourse without using any birth control methods. viagra price Sadly, when a man suffers from sexual problem like erectile dysfunction, his brain levitra prices canada find out these guys does not become able carrying nitric oxide to work. Vaginal trainers are cylindrical shapes that are inserted into cialis españa the tissue with the help of needles. The code is like this:

PACKAGE pkg_fgac AS
FUNCTION func_fgac(object_schema IN VARCHAR2
,object_name VARCHAR2 ) RETURN VARCHAR2;
END pkg_fgac;
/

PACKAGE BODY pkg_fgac AS
FUNCTION func_fgac(object_schema IN VARCHAR2
,object_name VARCHAR2 ) RETURN VARCHAR2
AS
BEGIN
RETURN (CASE WHEN dbms_session.is_role_enabled(‘R_ROLE’)
THEN ‘1=1’
ELSE ‘1=0’
END);
END func_fgac;

END pkg_fgac;
/

Next we were able to add a policy to any table which required column level security as follows:

BEGIN
dbms_rls.add_policy (object_schema => ‘MY_SCHEMA’
,object_name => ‘MY_TABLE’
,policy_name => ‘MY_POLICY’
,function_schema => ‘SECURITY_FUNCTION_SCHEMA’
,policy_function => ‘PKG_FGAC.FUNC_FGAC’
,statement_types => ‘SELECT’
,sec_relevant_cols => ‘COLUMN1,COLUMN2’
,sec_relevant_cols_opt => DBMS_RLS.ALL_ROWS
);
END;
/

Policy MY_POLICY would therefore ensure that on table MY_TABLE in schema MY_SCHEMA the security function PKG_FGAC.FUNC_FGAC would be called for any user issuing a SELECT against table MY_TABLE and it would return NULLs instead of the column values for columns COLUMN1 and COLUMN2 if the user issuing the request does not have the R_ROLE role granted to them and active in their current session.

It seems to work nicely in early testing…your mileage may vary of course!

Addendum:

23-JAN-2006 – added the sec_relevant_cols_opt => DBMS_RLS.ALL_ROWS line after a discussion with Jonathan Lewis who proved that the code I originally posted didn’t exhibit the stated behaviour. Thanks Jonathan.

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Filling the TNS List in Raptor

Jan 3, 2006 by Jeff

Tom reported that Raptor became available over the festive period – so I downloaded it and got it up and running pretty quickly but ran into a little problem with TNS Entries…

When trying to connect to databases in Raptor you may find that your TNS Entries are not visible in the “Network Alias” section of the “TNS”
Tab…by reading the online help I found that I needed to create a TNS_ADMIN System Environment variable for Raptor to pick up and display these entries.

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ManagerEnvironment” section for TNS_ADMIN.

I needed to reboot after doing this…but once this had completed, Raptor was able to see in the dropdown the list of TNS entries from my TNSNAMES.ORA file in the location defined by the new TNS_ADMIN System Environment variable.

It seems reasonably easy to use thus far and does the stuff I need – never been one for using the DBA type features of Toad/Navigator so I don’t miss them really – I prefer to go digging in the V$ views to see what’s going on rather than have the GUI do it for me.