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 2006 Embarcadero Technologies, Inc. All rights reserved.

'
Number of ngernails you will bite down
to nothingness today because you cant
manage your companys multiple database
platforms with a single, standardized solution.

answer
Embarcadero Technologies makes Enterprise Data
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Our expertise in optimizing Oracle, SQL Server,
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break; discover how the most sophisticated solution
is also the simplest. See how one gets it done.

Call 415.834.3131 or visit www.embarcadero.com

Oracle OpenWorld San Francisco

October 23-26, 2006
Booth #2210
 CONTENTS VOLU M E XX, I SSUE 5

F EATUR ES
CONTENT
AT YOUR FINGERTIPS

Most business data is unstructured

content, and handling it
SECURITY INSIDE effectively is a big concern
for firms that need to
Companies face severe database
manage millions of
security issues. They need to allow
documents, images,
a broader range of access, but
spreadsheets, and e-mails.
still protect vital information from
See how Oracle content
external and, increasingly, internal
management solutions
threats. Find out how Oracle can
Cover: Getty Images/Design Staff improve productivity and compliance.
help your organization protect its
David Baum
mission-critical data and improve /58
accountability and efficiency.
David A. Kelly
/40
REFINING
THE WHEEL
Inaccurate records and data ORACLE MAGAZINE
discrepancies do more than AT TWENTY
As Oracle Magazine
create organizational and ORACLES
celebrates its 20th
customer frustration. They BIGGEST
anniversary, Publisher CUSTOMER
can hurt productivity and ultimately the
Jeff Spicer looks back at EVENT YET
bottom line. Now data hubs are giving
the technologies
companies a single point of truth when
and people that
/21
they need critical information.
shaped the
Alan Joch
/48 magazine.

DE PAR T M E NTS
/15
From Our Readers / 11
Readers tell us what they think.
From the Editor / 13
22 AT OR AC LE
Events / 22 OTN Community Bulletin / 28
Secure on the inside Learn whats happening with Oracles most
Find out about upcoming
Tom Haunert dynamic online community.
conferences and training.
Oracle Resources / 27 Oracle News Briefs / 31
Heres your guide to Oracles Oracle News / 33
broadband, education, and Oracle Berkeley DB Java Edition 3.0 brings
online offerings, plus whats speed and ease-of-use enhancements to the
new at Oracle. embeddable, open source database line.

ORACLE MAGAZINE SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 20 06 3

 83 TEC HNOLOGY
PAR TITIONING
Partition Decisions / 83
Understand your partition choices, and choose the best
partition and key for your data. Arup Nanda

34 CH A NNEL S
Partner News / 34
S EAR C H
Secure Search Returns Best Results / 87
Oracle Secure Enterprise Search provides the right
SYSTIME, AppWorx, Perceptive Software, intranet search. Ron Hardman
BIAS, CISCO, Innowave Technology, Sierra
Atlantic, SkillNet, Ikan, Wipro Infotech AS K TOM
Book Beat / 34 On ROWNUM and Limiting Results / 93
Peer-to-Peer / 37 Our technologist explains how ROWNUM works and how to
Jaromir Nemec, Bruno Vroman, make it work for you. Tom Kyte
Jeffrey Hunter
Cutting Edge / 39 INS IDE OC P
Wireless Skype, cooler servers, and more- Become a Master / 97
effective advertisements Step up from Oracle Certified Professional to Oracle
Certified Master. Aradhana Puri

65
98
D EVEL O PER

R ES OUR C ES
I ND U STRY STA ND A RD
Oracle Certified Partner Index / 98
Getting Rich with Ajax / 65
Build rich internet applications with Asynchronous Advertisers Index / 100
JavaScript and XML. Rich Schwerin

F RA MEWO RKS
Harnessing the Active Data Model / 69
Going beyond basic data access with custom service
103 C OMMENT

IN THE FIELD
methods Steve Muench
Storage Made Simpler / 103
Storage virtualization can simplify
O D P.NET
database applications. Ari Kaplan
Debugging PL/SQL from .NET / 71
Debug PL/SQL in Microsoft Visual Studio with Oracle
ANALY S T S C OR NER
Developer Tools.
Mark A. Williams Managing Information Overload / 104
Enterprise content management improves
compliance efforts and the bottom line.
B RO WSER-B A SED
David Baum
Express Lockdown / 75
Lock down your Oracle Application Express applications.
Raj Mattamal

PL / SQ L PRA CTI CES

On Generics and Traces / 79
Best practices for string procedures and tracing
Steven Feuerstein

4 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 20 06 ORACLE.COM/ORACLEMAGAZINE
 When information
comes together,
everybody feels
much better.

Information lives at El Camino Hospital. A leading California medical facility, El Camino Hospital received the highest ranking
in a recent patient survey. But they never rest in their mission to use information technology to help them improve patient
care. So they turned to EMC to build a flexible information infrastructure that reduces costs and provides fast, reliable
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Read the El Camino Hospital profile at www.EMC.com/ElCamino or call 866-796-6369 to learn more.

EMC 2, EMC, and where information lives are registered trademarks of EMC Corporation. Copyright 2005, 2006 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved.
 ED ITORIA L

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6 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 20 06 ORACLE.COM/ORACLEMAGAZINE
 SPECIAL ADVERTISING SECTION

The Data Center

Opens Up
A growing number of organizations are using
the Fujitsu Groups innovative PRIMEQUEST serverswith their
open, mainframe-class performance and reliabilityto transform
enterprise computing operations

S1
 SPECIAL ADVERTISING SECTION

B
usinesses today operate in a changing pilots for some very large applications, the achieving high performance, says Judson
and unpredictable landscapeand IT performance exceeds expectations and Althoff, vice president of Platform Alliances
departments have had to scramble delivers the performance results EDS and at Oracle, which uses PRIMEQUEST servers
to keep up. In response, they often add more our clients expect. for quality assurance testing and support
and more servers that must be managed and purposes. For example, customers can build
coordinated. They also rely on expensive and Cost-effective, mission-critical enterprise grids on Oracle 10g using PRIME-
complex mainframes to ensure high avail- The PRIMEQUEST family of servers is QUEST servers running Windows or Linux,
ability and keep vital data flowing to the opening a new era in the effort to align which gives them high quality of service,
business. And they frequently have to modify enterprise computing and the needs of the fast performance, high reliability, scalability
systems to support new business initiatives business, says Richard McCormack, senior on demand, and easier management.
or fluctuations in workloadsno easy task vice president of Marketing at Fujitsu The open, industry-standard approach
when dealing with a varied array of systems. Computer Systems Corporation. In fact, he also brings agility to IT. Toyota Motor Corpo-
The result, overall, has been growing com- explains, the PRIMEQUEST family is part of a ration believes that it is important not to be
plexity, costs, and difficulty in delivering the larger vision: TRIOLEthe Fujitsu Groups locked into proprietary systems. Increased
agility needed by the business. process for creating industrialized IT infra- flexibility of a system and choice of open
To help IT departments meet those structures and services. Servers, storage, and products are key factors because Toyota is
challenges, the Fujitsu Group launched a all other hardware components are inte- continuously expanding its global business.
groundbreaking new line of servers in 2005. grated with automation and virtualization Under this strategy, Toyota selected the
Based on Intel Itanium 2 processors, the
PRIMEQUEST family of servers brings The combination of Oracle and Fujitsu Group PRIMEQUEST servers
industry-standard computing to high-end
data center operations. That represents lets companies operate cost-effectively by taking advantage
a big change, because with PRIMEQUEST
servers, companies have new options for of industry-standard solutions while achieving high performance.
addressing todays pressing enterprise com-
puting challenges, says Akira Kabemoto, Judson Althoff, vice president, Platform Alliances, Oracle
senior vice president of the Server System
Unit at Fujitsu Limited. They can bring the software in the process. Virtualization sepa- Fujitsu Groups open, industry-standard sys-
benefits of open computing to the data rates business applications and data from tem with Linux for development purposes.
center, and at the same time streamline dedicated IT resources, and pools resources PRIMEQUEST servers couple openness
systems management and maintain the for flexible and efficient usage. Automation and flexibility with power, making them
reliability and scalability needed for enter- provides infrastructures that adjust auto- suitable for some of the most demanding
prise computing. matically to changes in operations and the mission-critical applications traditionally
Since the initial release of PRIMEQUEST environment through self-monitoring and self- handled by mainframes. In terms of per-
servers, dozens of organizations have been rectifying technologies. These core technol- formance, for example, PRIMEQUEST
putting them to work and exploring ways ogies bring enhanced agility, efficiency, and servers and Oracle were used to set a
to move beyond the traditional mainframe- continuity to the business, McCormack says. world record in the two-tier SAP Sales
based approach to the data center. For PRIMEQUEST servers, with their use of and Distribution (SD) Standard Application
example, EDS, the Plano, Texas-based global Intel processors and the Linux and Microsoft Benchmark for the fastest performance on
technology services company, is incorporat- Windows Server 2003 operating systems, Linux. PRIMEQUEST servers also achieved
ing Fujitsu Group computing platforms allow companies to enjoy the cost advan- a world record for servers up to 32 cores
including PRIMEQUESTinto its solutions tages of industry-standard technology, take in the Standard Performance Evaluation
for enterprise customers. As we continue advantage of the Intel ecosystem of tech- Corporation (SPEC) Java Business Bench-
to deploy our modernization strategy, we nology and application vendors, and leverage mark 2005 (SPECjbb2005), with perfor-
are using the Fujitsu Groups PRIMEQUEST Windows and Linux skills in the data center. mance of 322,719 business operations per
Intel Itanium-based servers as our certified The combination of Oracle and Fujitsu second*indicating that PRIMEQUEST can
platform for re-hosting applications, says Group PRIMEQUEST servers lets companies provide a high-performance platform for
Ray Cline, vice president of Infrastructure operate cost-effectively by taking advantage implementing service-oriented software
Portfolio Development at EDS. Based on of industry-standard solutions while architectures for business applications.

*Certification Number 2006023 The two-tier SAP SD Standard Application Benchmark performed on April 18, 2006, by Fujitsu Siemens Computers, was certified on May 11, 2006, with the following data: Number of benchmark users & comp.: 5,000 SAP SD Benchmark users.
Average dialog response time: 1.97 seconds. Throughput: Fully processed order line items/hour: 501,000. Dialog steps/hour: 1,503,000. SAPS: 25,050. Average DB request time (dia/upd): 0.014 sec / 0.036 sec. CPU utilization of central server: 99%. Operating system central server:
Novell SuSE Linux. Enterprise Server 9 RDBMS: Oracle9i Database. SAP ECC Release 5.0. Configuration: Central server: Fujitsu PRIMEQUEST 480, 32 processors / 32 cores / 32 threads, Intel Itanium 2, 1.6 GHz, 32 KB L1 cache, 256 KB L2 cache, 9 MB L3 cache, 256 GB main memory.

S2

Continuity, efficiency,
and agility for the business
The PRIMEQUEST family incorporates a
number of technologies designed to ensure
the reliability needed for mission-critical
systems. For example, PRIMEQUEST servers
use System Mirror technology that allows
memory modules and crossbar interconnects
to operate in duplex mode and isolates
faulty components without stopping the
system. This System Mirrora first for
servers based on the Intel Itanium archi-
tectureduplicates all CPU instructions and
handles both sets of instructions in a fully
synchronized mode, detecting faults in
peripherals by identifying inconsistencies
across both sets. Because this fault proof-
ing is performed at the hardware level,
the operating system and applications are
not affected and can operate continuously.
In addition, there is no delay needed to
isolate a fault or to allow for system fail-
over. The result is fewer faults and a level
of downtime that is half that of conven-
tional server systems.
PRIMEQUEST servers also have a Flexible
I/O (FIO) feature that allows on-demand
redirection of I/O resources to specific
processing resources. In traditional servers,
I/O units and system boards are bundled,
which means that when application or load
requirements fluctuate, the system boards
cannot always use the full potential of
the available I/O units, leading to wasted
resources. With PRIMEQUEST, the Fujitsu
Group has enabled flexible combinations
of system and I/O units that can constantly
match changing system loads and partition
SB SB SB SB Spare SB
#0 #1 #2 #3
SB
#4
Reboot
Flexible I/O switch
IOU IOU IOU IOU
#0 #1 #2 #3
Partition A Partition B
SPECIAL ADVERTISING SECTION
PRIMEQUESTs System
System board #1 #2 #3 #4
Mirror function allows
memory modules and
Memory crossbar interconnects to
redundancy
CPU operate in duplex mode.
Synchronous The system duplicates all
operation
CPU instructions and
Internal chipset processes both sets of
circuit redundancy
instructions in a fully
synchronized mode,
Synchronous enabling it to detect
operation
faults in peripherals by
Crossbar redundancy
comparing tasks across
both mirrors.
configurations, making it easier to optimize problems develop into a fatal fault.
the use of system resources. This flexibility Overall, the standard features of
also improves system availability, reduces PRIMEQUEST servers provide a 99.99 per-
maintenance downtime, and shortens the cent system availability rateand that can
time it takes to recover from a failed sys- be increased to five nines when they are
tem board by 90 percent compared with run in clusters of two or more servers.
conventional servers.
Finally, PRIMEQUEST delivers reliability Tailored for consolidation
and streamlines administration with built-in Drawing on that power and flexibility,
management boards that support autono- the Fujitsu Group has optimized the
mous operation and the consolidated man- PRIMEQUEST family to support server
agement of the entire PRIMEQUEST system, consolidationan increasingly important
including hardware, software, and partitions. trend in the data center as companies
With a PC and Web browser, administrators work to streamline and rationalize frag-
can use the management boards to perform mented IT landscapes.
a wide range of activities, including server A growing number of organizations have
configuration, usage monitoring, fault mon- been using PRIMEQUEST for such efforts.
itoring, partitioning, server management, For example, the Shibaura Institute of Tech-
power control and scheduling, and con- nology in Japan is using PRIMEQUEST to
figuration monitoring. The management enable consolidation and meet its need to
boards also give users a predictive moni- support mission-critical systems. The insti-
toring function that constantly tracks tutewhich is known for advanced robotics
the status of the system to automatically studiesserves some 8,000 students and
identify and isolate any components that staff with its systems, and it has been
show signs of problemsbefore those expanding the computer-based services it
provides to them. The institutes systems
not only support the library and adminis-
Change to spare SB
With Flexible I/O, trative education-management processes,
PRIMEQUEST enables
SB SB SB SB SB
but also provide everything from automatic
#0 #1 #2 #3 #4
flexible combinations
of system boards attendance-tracking using IC cards to class
and I/O units. This information, which students can see on
lets I/O units match monitors around the institute, via a portal,
system loads and
or by using their mobile phones.
changing partition
Flexible I/O switch configurations to Such services increased the amount
fully optimize of data that must be managed, and the
resource use. institute increased its number of servers
IOU IOU IOU IOU
#0 #1 #2 #3 to handle the workload. As a result, it
Partition A Partition B was concerned about systems going
S3
 SPECIAL ADVERTISING SECTION

down during admissions periods, final onto one PRIMEQUEST system, helping
tests, and other busy times of the year. In to cut system-management costs while
addition, the institute has several depart- increasing capacity and reliability.
Resources ments, which meant having to maintain Individual PRIMEQUEST servers can be
PRIMEQUEST servers multiple systems. expanded to include up to 64 processor
www.fujitsu.com/primequest The Shibaura Institute addressed these cores in a single cabinet. New resources can
www.fujitsu-siemens.com/primequest issues by consolidating several databases be brought online without disrupting previ-
www.computers.us.fujitsu.com/primequest onto Oracle 10g running on PRIMEQUEST ously configured resources. PRIMEQUEST
servers, and moving applications to blade servers can also be run in clusters using the
TRIOLE servers. As a result, maintenance is stream- Fujitsu Groups PRIMECLUSTER technology,
www.fujitsu.com/triole lined, and system engineers can focus on a high-availability environment that sup-
www.fujitsu-siemens.com/triole new projects rather than routine tasks. The ports Oracle Database 10g including Oracle
www.computers.us.fujitsu.com/triole institute plans to expand the services it pro- Real Application Clusters.
vides to students, and PRIMEQUEST offers The servers also bring ease of manage-
Oracle and Fujitsu the scalability the institute needs for such ment and flexibility to consolidation efforts,
uc.fujitsu.com/oracle effortsas well as the reliability required with robust partitioning capabilities that let
www.fujitsu-siemens.com/oracle for its consolidated, mission-critical systems. companies configure a large number of iso-
us.fujitsu.com/computers/oracle We know the Fujitsu Groups reliability lated partitions, with each partition running
solutions.oracle.com Enter Fujitsu because we had used a Fujitsu Group main- its own operating system and applications. In
frame, says Tatsuro Yamazaki, director effect, each partition is a fully independent
of the Center for Science Information at server within the system, which means
Shibaura Institute of Technology. We chose companies can run Linux and Windows
PRIMEQUEST because it is as robust as simultaneously on the same machine. Whats
mainframe-class computers, and we can more, with PRIMEQUESTs separation of I/O
expect it to provide stable operations. resources and system boards, additional I/O
PRIMEQUEST supports consolidation with resources can be added without affecting
the ability to easily scale up and scale out processor and memory configurations. That
cost-effectively. Sungae Hospital in Korea, flexibility lets companies scale up and scale
for example, is consolidating 14 servers out applications within the server, and easily
rearrange disks and peripherals connected to
each partition.
Overall, PRIMEQUEST servers are designed
to provide power and cost-effectiveness
both today and tomorrow. To that end, the
Fujitsu Group works with key partners
including Intel and Oracleto ensure that
PRIMEQUEST development continues to
meet the needs of enterprise computing.
PRIMEQUEST and the TRIOLE process
are designed to help companies transform
and streamline their data centers, says
Dr. Bernd Kosch, vice president of Alliances
at Fujitsu Siemens Computers. We will
continue to explore new ways to reduce IT
operating costs while enhancing the data
centers ability to support business-critical
Japans Shibaura Institute of Technology has used PRIMEQUEST servers to consolidate computing and adapt to the ever-changing
mission-critical applications and provide reliable service to some 8,000 students and staff. needs of the business.

2006 Fujitsu Limited. Fujitsu, PRIMECLUSTER, PRIMEQUEST, and TRIOLE are either trademarks or registered trademarks of Fujitsu Limited in Japan and/or other countries. Intel and Itanium are registered trademarks of Intel Corporation or its
subsidiaries in the United States and other countries. Oracle is a registered trademark of Oracle Corporation and/or its affiliates. All other trademarks and product names are the property of their respective owners.

S4

Your corrections, your opinions, and your requests:
Heres your forum for telling us whats right and
wrong in each issue of Oracle Magazine, and for
letting us know what you want to read.
NEW PRODUCT NEWS?
Im a regular reader of Oracle Magazine,
and Id like to recommend that you
include a section that provides infor-
mation on new Oracle products like
Oracle TimesTen.
Alberto Rico
albrico@colomsat.net.co
BEGIN AT THE BEGINNING
As a regular reader of Oracle Magazine,
I request that you include introductory
articles for Oracle beginners on topics
such as installation, programming, and
creating a database.
Mohammad Jaffer
mohammad_jaffer2004@yahoo.com
UP THE FREQUENCY
I read Oracle Magazine regularly and
enjoy it very much. In fact, I would
prefer if it were published monthly.
Two months seems too long to wait for
the next issue.
Abdurrahman Sahin
abdurrahman.sahin@argela.com.tr
ABOUT ADVERTISING
It was a pleasant experience for me to
read a recent issue of Oracle Magazine.
However, you published too many
advertisements. In the future, please
keep the ads to a minimum and
emphasize more good articles and
newbie information.
Rahul Baharwal
rbaharwal@yahoo.com
f r o m o u r READERS
UTL_RECOMP IN ORACLE9i
Steven Feuerstein says in his On
Confusion and Recompilation column
(oracle.com/technology/oramag/
oracle/06-may/o36plsql.html) that the
UTL_RECOMP package does not exist
in Oracle9i Database. Maybe it is not
documented, but it exists. It has saved
me a lot of time recompiling objects
without worrying about dependencies.
Carlos Mainez Martinez
c.mainez@hotelbeds.com
INTERVIEWS, PLEASE
Im currently working as an Oracle
application software engineer and am
a regular reader of Oracle Magazine. I
would like to see an interview section
where readers can get to know more
about senior Oracle developers, includ-
ing how they got started working on
Oracle, their biggest hassles while
working on different projects, how they
overcame those problems, their sug-
gestions for best practices, and tips for
junior developers to move up.
Imran Javeed
imj31@yahoo.co.in
ASKING ABOUT ASK TOM
On Transaction Isolation Levels
by Tom Kyte was a really good
column (Oracle Magazine, November/
December 2005).
Is an index of Oracle Magazine Ask
Tom columns available?
Mette Stephansen
mst@pfa.dk
ORACLE MAGAZINE
Visit oracle.com/technology/oramag/
oracle/asktom for a list of Toms Oracle
Magazine columns dating back to
January/February 2001. For even more
Tom, visit asktom.oracle.com to view his
question-and-answer archive and to learn
more about the books he has written.
GETTING OLDER
Is there a way to peruse older issues of
Oracle Magazine online?
Hamid Sunny
hamid_l_k@hotmail.com
Issues of Oracle Magazine dating back
to July/August 2003 are available online.
Please visit oracle.com/oramag and click
the Read past issues link.
CORRECTION
Raj Mattamals Browser-Based column,
Single-Step Deployment, in the July/
August 2006 issue of Oracle Magazine
contains steps that are not appli-
cable in the production release of Oracle
Application Express 2.2. Please see the
online version of the column at oracle
.com/technology/oramag/oracle/06-jul/
o46browser.html for the current steps.
The Editors
send mail to the EDITOR
Send your opinions about what you read in Oracle
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SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 20 06 11
 Something BIG is Coming for Toad Users
2006 Quest Software, Inc. All rights reserved. Quest and Quest Software are trademarks or registered trademarks of Quest Software.
All other brand or product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders. 07/2006/TOAD-teaser-OOW_Q32006
It's almost here...

www.quest.com/bignews, or stop by Booth #1214 in

Moscone South at Oracle OpenWorld, San Francisco.
Be the first to hear the news sign up at
What in the world could it be?
 f r o m t h e EDITOR
Secure on the Inside
Identify and protect against the security threat inside the enterprise.
hen I was a student I worked for several different
retail stores. While security was important at each
of these stores, one particular store initially surprised
me with its security focus, until I realized it had cor-
rectly identified the most serious security threat.
This store was part of a large national discount chain, and
what first struck me about the stores security was that it didnt
seem to have any. There was no merchandize or inventory
control technology, and shoplifters couldtoo easily in my
opinionwalk items out the unprotected front door.
After working there for just a few weeks, I discovered that
the company was actually very committed to security, just
not to security focused on the outside theft of shoplifters. The
company focused its security efforts on the inside threat.
This retail company used professional auditors posing as
shoppers to determine whether employees were properly fol-
lowing a very simple process for accurately ringing up merchan-
dize, creating and providing receipts, properly handling money,
and correctly handling inventory.
As a result of these audits, several employees that I had
worked with were caught stealing and charged with theft. The
first prosecution that I witnessed was followed by another a few
weeks later, and another a few weeks after that. All employees
knew that the company did these audits, and all employees
knew about a prosecution as soon as it happened. The fact that
there were multiple prosecutions over an extended period sur-
prised meperhaps the audits and prosecutions were prevent-
ing some theft, but they were most definitely not stopping it.
ORACLE DATABASE VAULT
Concern about corporate compliance audits is a driving force in
information technology. In the Security Inside article on page
40, David A. Kelly talks with Trent Henry, senior analyst, Burton
Group, about compliance. What weve seen at a lot of compa-
nies is that when auditors come in, they find that privilege isnt
separated among multiple users or that there are separation-
READ more about
Oracle Security
oracle.com/security
OTN Database Vault
oracle.com/database/database-vault.html
Oracle OpenWorld 2006
oracle.com/openworld
of-duties problems, such as DBAs being able to do much more
with a repository than they should be able to. One of the key
concerns is integrity of the information and making sure that it
cant get changed in an unauthorized way, says Henry.
A new Oracle security productOracle Database Vault
addresses these types of internal security concerns by providing
control over who can access data, when, and where, protecting
the data from malicious actions and simple mistakes. Oracle
Database Vault also reports who is accessing what and when,
and controls data access by highly privileged database users.
SCRUTINY BRINGS SECURITY
Compliance audit concern has driven initiatives to create com-
pliant processes and access controls. But the possibility of an
audit and the audit itself do not prevent malicious activity or
even simple mistakes. Some audits, of retail stores, income
tax returns, and corporate compliance, will uncover problems
because mistakesintentional and accidentalhappen (unless
they are prevented by a product like Oracle Database Vault).
When a compliance audit turns up a significant problem,
unlike a simple retail store audit scenario looking at whether a
cashier properly handles receipts and money, the compliance
audit may be only the beginning of an investigation into both
company compliance and the peopleincluding more highly
privileged usersinvolved.
An audit that uncovers significant problems will certainly
have repercussions, perhaps even including job terminations
and legal prosecutions, but it will also identify the internal
security weakness. And unlike the retail store that canor
mustsimply continue to audit the same cashier process, com-
panies will need to respond to and resolve the security issue,
and that solution will immediately improve the internal secu-
rity of the enterprise.
Whether an audit finds or does not find problems, however,
it draws attention to internal security and the threat within the
enterprise, and that can only make the enterprise more secure.
ITS HERE
Oracle OpenWorld is here. Ill be at the show October 2226,
meeting with authors, editorial board members, and partners;
recording podcasts; talking to customers; getting ideas for future
articles; and more. If you see me there, please say hello, and tell
me what youd like to read in Oracle Magazine.
Tom Haunert, Editor in Chief
tom.haunert@oracle.com
ORACLE MAGAZINE SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 20 06 13
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ORACLE MAGAZINE
AT TWENTY
Observant readersor more accurately, those readers who focus on details in Oracle
Magazine that have nothing to do with the magazines technical content and everything to
do with the magazine itselfhave no doubt noticed that the spine of Oracle Magazine this
year carries the volume number XX. That does, in fact, mean that Oracle Magazine is now 20
years old, an event that carries some significance in the magazine world when one considers
that nearly 60 percent of all magazines fail before reaching their first anniversary.* So happy
anniversary, Oracle Magazine! And heres to 20 more information-filled years.

BY JEFF S PIC ER

From Newsletter to Magazine
Oracle Magazine didnt emerge from a
smoke-filled marketing meeting, fully
formed and ready to serve readers, but
rather evolved in 1987 from a quarterly
company newsletter to a brief, 12-page
printed magazine that contained Oracle
product and company news. Those first
magazines, published twice yearly, con-
tained short customer profiles, Oracle company news, infor-
mation about Oracle partners, and product updates.
The magazine evolved quickly in those early yearsmuch
as Oracle Corporation itself. In the late 1980s and early 1990s,
Oracle had become well known as an enterprise database and
tools company; the magazine noted this reputation by dubbing
itself as the SQL Database Journal for several years. However,
as the companys products and services rapidly expanded
moving beyond databases and development tools to include
enterprise applications and industry-specific toolsthe maga-
zine dropped the tagline and called itself
simply Oracle Magazine.
Focus on Customers
Oracle Magazine continued to change
alongside Oracle itself, and by the early
1990s the magazine bore little resemblance
to issues just a few years prior. The maga-
zine grew in size, readership, and sophisti-
* A Bumper Crop, Samir Husni, April 1, 2004, Folio:
cation, focusing much of its content on how Oracle customers
used Oracle technology in their own businesses. Much of
that content was industry focused, demonstrating Oracle
Corporations knowledge in a variety of verticals. In addition,
the magazine added new departments and cat-
egories for DBAs and developers.
Oracle Magazine also began to carry pro-
files of industry executives, such as HPs John
Young, Sun Microsystems Scott McNealy, and
Amdahls Jack Lewis, giving these leaders a
Tom Hogan, chance to share their thoughts about tech-
Oracle Magazines
first editor nology and its impact on business with the
growing audience of Oracle Magazine.
During this period, as the magazine began publishing quar-
terly, the staff changed and grew, with the first editor, Tom
Hogan, passing the baton to editors Jon Bell and Julie Gibbs.
Other editors included Leslie Steere and managing editor Kim
Austin, as well as editor/writer Don Tyler, who had been with
the magazine since its inception. Julia McVeigh also joined the
staff. The magazine added profession-
als to handle design, production, and
circulation, and for the first time ever, it
was audited by a professional circulation
management firm.
The Impact of the Internet
Although it had been in existence for
nearly 30 years, the internet was finally

ORACLE MAGAZINE SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 20 06 15

 poised in the mid
1990s to have enormous
impact on business, commerce,
and communication.
Technology companies, such as
Oracle, were rapidly developing technologies
and products that would take advantage of
the unique reach and opportunities offered
by the internet. Oracle Corporation blazed
trails with Web development products,
a Web server, and the first database with
built-in internet functionality.
The internet and Web made their mark Julie Gibbs,
former editor
on Oracle Magazine as well. The magazine and publisher
responded to the internet craze with thought-
ful articles and guides to the new technologies. In addition to
stories devoted to the rise and impact of the internet, Oracle
Magazine created a mascot of sorts named the Web Master,
whose mission was to patrol cyberspace, making it a safer place
for companies to do business.
By 1996, Oracle Magazine was going electronic, with the first
electronic version produced as a CD-ROM with a clever library
interface. Subsequent versions appeared online and the maga-
zines online presence was dubbed Oracle Magazine Interactive,
or OMI. OMI was an elementary predecessor
of sorts to todays Oracle Technology Network
(OTN), with additional technical content
beyond what appeared in the print publica-
tion, online forums for readers to share and
exchange information, and code tips from
Leslie Steere, Oracle professionals. Editors Marsha Bazley and
former editorial
director and editor Margaret Lindquist joined the Oracle Magazine
staff to manage the additional content and Web
ORACLE MAGAZINE
TODAY
Jeff Spicer, Publisher
Caroline Kvitka,
Senior Managing Editor
Blair Campbell,
Contributing Editor
16 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 20 06 ORACLE.COM/ORACLEMAGAZINE
presence. Eventually, OMI would merge
with OTN, a union that remains today.
Audience Segmentation
By the late 1990s, Oracle Corporations
products and services had become
wide-ranging and diverse. Although still
widely known for its flagship database,
the company was no longer known as
just a database company. Oracle Magazine
evolved alongside the company once again, introducing new
magazine sections for developers, system administrators, and
business professionals. Eventually, Oracle Magazine would spin
off much of the business and application content into a sepa-
rate sister publication, Profit: The Business of Technology.
Oracle Magazine had almost reached its current form with a
collection of columnists, technical articles, customer profiles,
event information, and partner guides. During this period, the
staff evolved as Kelli Wiseth, Patty Waddington, Blair Campbell,
Claire Breen, Carol Tady, and I joined the editorial team.
Putting Forth Personalities
From book authors to user group leaders
and third-party consultants, Oracle has
never lacked its share of gurus and per-
sonalities, and over the years, Oracle
Magazine provided many of those vision-
aries and technologists with a platform
for communicating to the broader Oracle
community. As the millennium came to
a close, Oracle Magazine began featuring
even more Oracle community members, and in some cases
embarked on projects to help these specialists to expand their
Jennifer Hamilton,
Sales and
Production Director
Tom Haunert,
Editor in Chief
Richard Merchan,
Design Director
Susan Olsen,
Senior Creative Director
 reach beyond the magazine itself.
First and foremost was columnist Tom Kyte, who began
working with the magazine in 2000. Kyte, with Oracles public
sector organization, started consulting with the magazine to
evaluate weekly code tip submissions for the magazines Web
site. An online Q&A forum soon followed and Ask Tom
was born. The popularity of Ask Tom was instantaneous,
and Kyte began receiving hundreds of questions each week. A
more usable online interface was required,
so Kyte quickly rebuilt the Ask Tom Web site
using Oracle Application Express. Other col-
umnists, including Cameron ORourke and
Steven Feuerstein, soon followed with online
community sites of their own, promoting
information exchange between users and Margaret Lindquist,
former online editor
offering expert advice and commentary.
In addition, Oracle Magazine began its tradi-
tion of inviting Independent Oracle Users Group presidents
to use the magazine as a forum: presidents Rich Niemiec,
Kimberly Floss, and Ari Kaplan authored regular columns
about database management, tuning, wireless, and other tech-
nical topics. Oracle Magazine also began the annual practice of
honoring visionaries in the Oracle community with the Oracle
Magazine Editors Choice Awards.
With its increased focus on solid tech-
nical how-tos, Oracle Magazine required
an increasingly tech-savvy staff, and
during this period Tom Haunert, Justin
Kestelyn, Kay Keppler, and Caroline
Kvitka joined the editorial team.
Portal to the World of Oracle
As Oracle Corporation has continued to
Jennifer Armstrong,
Circulation Director
Lia Guimaraes,
Department Coordinator
ALLISON LEVENSON
Kyle Walkenhorst,
Associate Publisher
grow and evolve, so has Oracle Magazine. The
magazine continues to hold a unique position
in the world of magazines, reflecting both the
interests and needs of its readers and the pri-
orities of Oracle Corporation.
Today, each issue of Oracle Magazine Julia McVeigh,
reaches nearly 1 million readers* with a broad former publisher
mix of technical content for developers, admin- and production
istrators, and DBAs; customer profiles; partner manager
and vendor news; Oracle company news; event information;
and opinion columns. The magazine is truly a portal to the
world of Oracle.
As with all worthwhile endeavors of Oracle Magazines
scope, there are many thoughtful, dedicated people behind
the scenes, planning, editing, and producing each issue of the
magazine. You can learn more about these people, as well as
past staff members, on our Web site.
And finally, thank you to the readers of Oracle Magazine, par-
ticularly those who provide feedback about the content of the
magazine. The magazine is only worthwhile if it serves the needs
of our readers, so please let us know what those needs are. O
Jeff Spicer (jeff.spicer@oracle.com) is the publisher of Oracle Magazine. He was
editor in chief from July 2000 to January 2006.
* Erdos & Morgan readership survey, September 2005
LEARN more about
Oracle Magazines past and present staff
oracle.com/oraclemagazine/20/people.html
The history of Oracle Corporation
oracle.com/oraclemagazine/20/history.html
Kay Keppler,
Features Editor
Justin Kestelyn, Editor in Chief,
Oracle Technology Network
Ron Sellers, Senior Graphic Designer
Allison Levenson, Graphic Designer
ORACLE MAGAZINE SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 20 06 17
DOCUMENT
FAX EMAIL PRINT
STR SOFTWARE, celebrating their 20th anniversary, follows the
commitment of product excellence and customer focus required
to reach this longevity, particularly in the software industry.

STR SOFTWARE also congratulates Oracle Magazine, one of

the worlds most read magazines, for 20 years of timely industry
news, supportive resources and valuable articles.

Gold standard document delivery with over 1000 sold

 DELIVERY
FAX EMAIL PRINT
Looking For...
Batch Delivery?
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Any Document, Format, or Volume?

YES, WE CAN.

800.897.7097

Hear Us Speak At
Oracle OpenWorld
www.strsoftware.com
 NFORM
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ATIONB ETTERRE

Scheduled Keynote Presenters

Monday, October 23
Charles Phillips
MORE INFORMATION. MORE INSPIRATION. MORE RESULTS.
President
Oracle October 2226, 2006 | Moscone Center | San Francisco
Oracle OpenWorld 2006 promises to be the biggest Oracle event everwith
Hector de J. Ruiz
Chairman of the Board more than 40,000 attendees, 1,400 sessions, and nearly 500 exhibitors.
and CEO Featuring informative workshops, keynote presentations, and practical training
AMD
for all solutions in the Oracle portfolio, Oracle OpenWorld is the premier event for
Michael Dell
Chairman of the Board the Oracle community. Get hands-on instruction from Oracle experts. Get access
Dell Inc. to hundreds of Oracle partners. Get connected to your peers and build your
business network. Get better results from your enterprise technology.
Tuesday, October 24 Oracle OpenWorld 2006 Highlights
John Wookey Technology-specific presentations: Whether you run Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracles
Senior Vice President
Applications Siebel CRM, Oracles PeopleSoft HRMS, or Oracle Retail applications, Oracle OpenWorld has
Oracle sessions, training, demos, and presentations for all your Oracle solutions.
Oracle OpenWorld X-Treme: Join us for an intense program designed for database
Mark Hurd
CEO and President administrators and implementers. Attend X-Treme hands-on labs designed by Oracles
HP development team to gain in-depth technical insight into Oracle products.
Develop: Get the latest information on Oracles use of leading development technologies
John Chambers Java, .NET, XML, service-oriented architecture, scripting, and moreat this three-day
President and CEO program for developers.
Cisco Systems Special JD Edwards Program: Attend conference sessions designed specifically for JD
Edwards World and JD Edwards EnterpriseOne customers.
Appreciation Event: The legendary Sir Elton John will entertain attendees at the biggest party in
Wednesday, October 25 Oracle OpenWorld history.
Chuck Rozwat Exhibition Halls: Visit two exhibition halls, featuring 450 of Oracles leading partners, more than
Senior Vice President 400 Oracle demos, and the Secured Enterprise Pavilion.
Oracle
MARQUEE DIAMOND

Jonathan Schwartz
President and CEO
Sun Microsystems, Inc.
PREMIER ELITE GRANDE

Larry Ellison
CEO
Oracle PLATINUM INNOVATION

To learn more and to register go to oracle.com/openworld

Preregister for the Full Conference: US$2,050 (August 19 through October 20) | Onsite registration: $2,250
Register by August 18 and save an additional US$200.

ORACLE MAGAZINE SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 20 06 21

 a t O r a c l e EVENTS
Technology Events
Conferences and training to help you stay on the cutting edge
Quest Webinars
Online, September and October
Quest International Users Group is partnering
with several vendorsincluding Bottomline
Technologies, SYSTIME, Quadrant Software,
Cetova, RapidDecision, and Cforiaon a free
Webinar series to help customers learn how to
maximize software value. Get details at
www.questdirect.org/questdirect/events.
Digital ID World 2006
September 1113, Santa Clara, California
Themed Managing the Decentralization
of Identity, this user-centric conference
showcases the industrys best practices and
provides networking opportunities. Register at
conference.digitalidworld.com/2006.
SAP TechEd U.S.
September 1215, Las Vegas, Nevada
SAP TechEd offers hands-on workshops and
in-depth lectures on SAPs latest development
and modeling tools and more than 800 hours
of technical and business process training.
Learn more at www.sapteched.com/usa.
Society for Information
Management SIMposium 2006
ELIJAH MERCHN
September 1720, Dallas, Texas
Designed for and by CIOs to encourage peer-
to-peer exchange on technology and business
22 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 20 06 ORACLE.COM/ORACLEMAGAZINE
Oracle OpenWorld
October 2226
San Francisco, California
Connect with the people, products,
and trends at the forefront of business
and information technology at more
than 1,400 sessions covering all Oracle
applications, technology, industries, and
solution areas. Visit two exhibition halls
hosting more than 450 Oracle partners,
and take in more than 400 live demos at
the Oracle DEMOgrounds. And dont miss
Sir Elton John at this years appreciation
event. Visit oracle.com/openworld.
integration practices, the SIMposium gives
CIOs, CTOs, and other senior IT executives
access to leading companies and innovations.
Learn more at simposium2006.simnet.org.
South African Oracle User Group
2006 Conference
September 2527, Sun City, South Africa
This eighth annual conference and product
showcase incorporates PeopleSoft, JD
Edwards, Siebel, and Retek. Get details at
www.saoug.co.za/conference/2006.
Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2006
October 813, Orlando, Florida
Join more than 2,000 other attendees for
speakers, programs, networking opportunities,
analyst roundtables, and tutorials on major
issues and trends. Sign up at www.gartner
.com/it/sym/2006_/sym16/sym16_home.jsp.
World of Health IT Conference
& Exhibition
October 1013, Geneva, Switzerland
Designed by and for the healthcare IT commu-
nity in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa
buyers, vendors, technology users, providers,
and healthcare regulatorsthis conference
bridges the gap between public policy and the
realities of day-to-day implementation. Get
information at www.worldofhealthit.org.
ORACLE USERS
GROUPS
Deutsche ORACLE-Anwendergruppe
Regionaltreffen (regional meetings)
September 12, Hamburg, Jena, and
Munich, Germany
www.doag.org
Oracle Clinical User Group 11th
Annual Conference
September 1720, Vancouver, British
Columbia, Canada
www.ocug.webexone.com
East Tennessee Oracle Users
Group Meeting
September 18, Oak Ridge, Tennessee
easttennessee.oracle.ioug.org
Utah Oracle Users Group
Fall Conference
September 19, Salt Lake City, Utah
www.utoug.org
Ottawa Oracle User Group DBA/
Developer Day
September 22, Ottawa, Canada
www.oug-ottawa.org
Ohio Oracle Users Group
Quarterly Meeting
October 10, Columbus, Ohio
www.ooug.org
Rio Grande Do Sul Oracle Users
Group Meeting
October 10, Porto Alegre, Brazil
www.guors.com.br
Kansas City Oracle Users Group
Training Day, Featuring Tom Kyte
October 11, Overland Park, Kansas
www.kcoug.org
AADOUG Southeastern Michigan Oracle
Professionals Technology Conference
October 17, Ann Arbor, Michigan
www.doug-mi.org
Dallas Oracle Users Group Meeting
October 19, Las Colinas, Texas
www.doug.org
Greater Cincinnati Oracle User Group
Quarterly Meeting
October 25, Cincinnati, Ohio
www.gcoug.org
Indiana Oracle Users Group Meeting
October 26, Indianapolis, Indiana
www.inoug.org
eventsLOCATOR
Oracle Events
oracle.com/events
Locate user groups by using OTN
oracle.com/technology/collaboration/
user_group
 Special Advertising Section
True Gridhow fearless
innovation forges the way
in new computing frontiers
HP and AMD deliver superior
industry-leading performance,
reliability, and affordability
to support evolving Oracle grid
computing environments.
You know the old saying: you can get it fast, good, and
cheappick one. In todays demanding business world,
however, IT professionals dont have that choice.
Management expects everything yesterday, at lower cost
than the day before that, and with higher quality than
ever. So what can you do? Its as though you need some
magical system that provides mainframe performance
and reliability at the price of a commodity PC.
Well, there is no magical system. But there is grid computing.
Grid computing pools IT resources into a virtualized
environment that can be carved up and served on-the-fly
to support rapidly changing business demands. Heres
Marquee Sponsor of this years Oracle OpenWorld.
the clincher: True grid computing can deliver performance
that rivals the fastest mainframes, with resilience no
mainframe can matchall using affordable, standards-
based servers and storage.
HP and Oracle are collaborating to provide true grid
computing solutions to businesses around the world.
Together, we are leveraging the world-renowned
performance and reliability of HP ProLiant servers
incorporating innovative AMD Opteron processors, in
conjunction with Oracle Grid technologies, including
Oracle Database 10g and Oracle Real Application
Clusters (Oracle RAC). As a result, companies can use
grid computing to achieve minimal business disruption,
and rapid return on investment. Whats more, when the
grid is built with AMD Opteron processor-based
HP ProLiant servers, enterprises can maximize the
performance, quality, and economy of their grid
environmentstoday and as they evolve for the future.
 Special Advertising Section

AMD Opteron processor-based The HP BladeSystem is particularly well suited to grid

HP ProLiant serversthe ideal
foundation for grid computing
The ideal server platform for grid computing is one that
offers high performance, extensive scalability, and
affordability. On all counts, its hard to beat HP ProLiant
servers with AMD Opteron processors.
environments, delivering a range of performance and
form factors, including higher processing density, with
scalability up to 192 processors in a 42U rack. Combined,
the HP BladeSystem and HP ProLiant server blades are
part of a wired-once, consolidated infrastructure comprised
of servers, storage, power, and network resources. These
modular resources can be easily provisioned or re-purposed

The HP ProLiant BL25p
server blade
The HP ProLiant BL25p
two-processor server blade,
engineered for enterprise
performance and scalability,
now features single-core and
dual-core AMD Opteron 200
series processors, SAN storage
capability, and 4GB NICs
standard. The BL25p server
blade also shares the same
infrastructure components as all
other p-Class server blades.
For one thing, HP ProLiant servers are proven. Over
HP ProLiant servers
10 million units have shipped to dateover 3.3 million
built on AMD Opteron
more than the nearest competitor.3 In fact, HP ProLiant
processors
held the top market share position in the x86 server
HP ProLiant DL585 server
market for nearly nine years.4 Clearly, customers
recognize quality and value when they see it. ProLiant CPU Form Max.
model Capacity Factor Memory
From ultra-dense server blades to a complete line of
affordable rack and tower servers, the HP ProLiant DL145 2 1U 16GB
platform continues to set the standard for reliability and DL385 2 2U 32GB
value. And HP continues to work closely with AMD to
DL585 4 4U 128GB
handle greater workloads with increased value and
flexibility for scale-out database applications. In addition, BL25p 2 96* 32GB
HP systems management software works seamlessly with BL35p 2 196* 16GB
Oracle software to simplify grid administration and optimize
BL45p 4 96* 64GB
performance. For example, HP OpenView Operations is
*indicates number of processors in a 42U rack
integrated with Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Grid
Control, providing a broad range of management
capabilities all based on a common view of management
to support changing business requirements. And with
data. Its no wonder that Technology Business Report (TBR)
management built in to every component, server blades can
found HP customers to consistently rate manageability as
identify the location of all resources connected to the
a strength of HP ProLiant servers.5
intelligent infrastructure and facilitate advanced monitoring,
HP offers a full line of AMD Opteron processor-based control, and change.
HP ProLiant DL servers that are flexible and easy to
With their outstanding scalability and extensive memory
manage, making them ideal for multi-server deployments
capacity, AMD Opteron processor-based HP ProLiant
in rack and cluster configurations. In addition, the
servers and server blades offer ideal flexibility, performance,
modular HP BladeSystem with HP ProLiant BL server
and economy for a wide range of Oracle environments.
blades provides the ultimate in integrated, high-performance
capabilities for grid environments, with the AMD Opteron
processor providing power management capabilities to 3
Source: HP internal shipment reporting and IDCs. Worldwide Quarterly
keep infrastructure costs under control. As shown in the Server Tracker, May 2005.

TPC-H benchmark cited above, HP ProLiant server blades

4
IDC Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker, May 2005, combining
historical HP and Compaq results before the merger.
built on AMD Opteron processors and running Linux
can achieve record-setting performance results.
5
TBR Corporate IT Buying Behavior & Customer Satisfaction Study:
Intel-Based Servers; First Quarter 2005, May 3, 2005.
 Special Advertising Section

The choice of platform for this environment is critical.

Servers must scale with virtually no limit and be able
to support large database implementations. They must
deliver the performance to meet enterprise-wide
business demands. They must fit into the data center
environment in terms of power usage and cooling
requirements. And they must be affordable as well as
easy to manage.

HP and AMD set

Oracle 10g with HP ProLiant servers built on AMD Opteron
processors not only meets these requirements, but exceeds
them. In fact, two recent TPC-H benchmarks placed HP
the standard for ProLiant at the top of the 300GB clustered performance
category. These benchmarks were performed using a cluster
grid performance of eight HP ProLiant BL25p server blades, each configured
with AMD Opteron processors and running Red Hat
Getting the most from a grid computing environment
Enterprise Linux ES 4 with Oracle Database 10g Real
depends largely on infrastructure components. One of
Application Clusters.
the fundamental design concepts of commercial grid
computing is using large numbers of industry-standard The first benchmark, conducted using the Single-Core
servers. This allows consolidation of multi-tier applications AMD Opteron processor Model 252 (2.6GHz),
onto a centrally managed environment employing performed at 13,284.2 QphH and $34.20/QphH in the
resource sharing, and deploying a highly available 300GB clustered category. A second benchmark, conducted
scale-out database. using the Dual-Core AMD Opteron processor Model
252 (2.4GHz), performed at 18,725.92 QphH and
$27.97/QphHdemonstrating the scalability of this
Table 1 unique processor with a 41% performance gain and
TPC-H 300GB benchmark results with 18% cost saving from single-core to dual-core.1
HP ProLiant BL25p 8p Cluster with (See Table 1.)
Oracle 10g Real Application Clusters
This watershed benchmark establishes the following:
The HP ProLiant BL25p server blade is number one in
performance in the clustered 300GB category, beating
IBM eServer 325 with a configuration that is 48% less
HP ProLiant BL25p server blade expensive. (IBM eServer 325 @ 13194QphH and
$65.44/QppH @ 300GB).2
TPC-H 1 Single-Core AMD Opteron 1Dual-Core AMD Opteron Delta First use of server blades in an Oracle database
Metrics processor Model 252 processor Model 280 cluster benchmark.
(2.6GHz/1MB) per (2.4GHz/1MB) per
BL25p (8 total) BL25p (8 total)

Composite 13284.20 18725.92 +41%

QphH 1
TPC: Results valid as of November 17, 2005. Complete results
can be found at www.tpc.org.
Price/QphH $34.20 $27.97 18%
2
Source: Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC), www.tpc.org
 Special Advertising Section
AMD Direct
Connect Architecture
AMD Direct Connect
Architecture provides an
innovative approach to
system design that further
adds to the capabilities
you can achieve with HP
ProLiant servers in grid
applications by reducing
bottlenecks that can
compromise performance.
With Direct Connect
Architecture, memory is
directly connected to the
CPU optimizing memory
performance, I/O is directly
connected to the CPU for
more balanced throughput
and I/O, and CPUs are
connected directly to CPUs
allowing for more linear
symmetrical multiprocessing.
Find out how HP and AMD can bring true grid computing
for Oracle to your enterprise. Visit www.hp.com/go/oracle.
AMD Opteron processors
driving increased performance
and scalability
The highly efficient design of AMD Opteron processors
is central to enabling industry-leading performance and
scalability in HP ProLiant servers. Single-core and dual-core
AMD Opteron processors with Direct Connect Architecture
integrate key system elements, including AMD64 technology,
integrated DDR DRAM memory controller, HyperTransport
technology, AMD PowerNow! technology, and more.
AMD64 is the innovative technology that allows you to run your
existing 32-bit applications and operating systems at peak
performance, while providing a migration path that is 64-bit
capable. So, you can maintain a single architecture across
32- and 64-bit environments.
The integrated DDR DRAM memory controller changes the way
the processor accesses main memory, resulting in increased
bandwidth, reduced memory latencies, and increased processor
performance. Available memory bandwidth scales with the
number of processors to ensure continued high performance as
you scale out your grid environment.
HyperTransport technology-invented at AMD with contributions
from industry partners-is a high-speed, low latency, point-to-
point link designed to increase the communication speed between
integrated circuits up to 48 times faster than some existing
technologies. HyperTransport technology helps reduce the number
of buses in a system, which can reduce system bottlenecks and
enable todays faster microprocessors to use system memory more
efficiently in high-end multiprocessor systems.
AMD PowerNow! technology with Optimized Power Management
(OPMA) provides performance-on-demand by dynamically
adjusting performance based on CPU utilizationhelping the
systems in a computer grid to run at optimum performance and
power levels, while reducing electricity costs and maximizing
IT budget dollars.
With AMD Opteron processors, you have the ideal
platform to drive high-performance, scalable compute
processing for virtually any size Oracle grid application.
Get it allspeed, quality, and price
Grid computing offers IT organizations tremendous
opportunities to manage rapidly changing and growing
business demands with speed, reliability, and economy.
Working with Oracle, HP and AMD offer the technologies
to capture these opportunities and deliver long-term
value that meets todays IT requirements.
According to Oracle, the formula for grid computing
includes standardizing on affordable, modular servers
and storage, consolidating servers and storage with
Oracle Database 10g and Real Application Clusters, and
automating day-to-day management tasks with Oracle
Enterprise Manager 10g Grid Control. With HP ProLiant
servers built on AMD Opteron processors, combined
with the HP management software that is well integrated
with Oracle software, you have the perfect ingredients for
true grid computing that delivers:
Performance and scalability needed to process
rapidly increasing quantities of data
Reliability required to run mission-critical
enterprise applications
Lower total cost of ownership to focus more dollars on
adding business value and increasing profitability
As of November 17, 2005
Source: Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC), www.tpc.org
HP Bladesystem ProLiant BL25p cluster (8 CPUs) with Oracle Database 10g Release 2
with Oracle Real Application Clusters, 13,284.2/QphH @ 300GB, $34.20/QphH
@ 300GB, available 10/31/05. HP BladeSystem ProLiant BL25p cluster (8 DC CPUs)
with Oracle Database 10g with Oracle Real Application Clusters (8 Nodes/8 CPUs/
16 Cores/16 Threads)
18,725.9 QphH @ 300GB, $27.97/QphH @ 300GB, available 11/11/05.
IBM eServer 325 cluster (16 CPUs) with IBM DB2,
13,194.9 QphH @ 300GB, $65.44/QphH @ 300GB, available 11/08/03.
2005 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. The information contained
herein is subject to change without notice. The only warranties for HP products and
services are set forth in the express warranty statements accompanying such products
and services. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional
warranty. HP shall not be liable for technical or editorial errors or omissions
contained herein.
AMD, Opteron, HyperTransport, and PowerNow! are trademarks of Advanced
Micro Devices, Inc. Oracle is a registered U.S. trademark of Oracle Corporation,
Redwood City, California. Linux is a U.S. registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.
 a t O r a c l e RESOURCES
Whats New at Oracle
The latest courses, online articles, offers, and more
ORACLE WEBCASTS
Oracle OpenWorld
oracle.com/openworld
Stay on top of the action in San Francisco
with Oracle OpenWorld online. Listen to
keynotes by Oracle executives Larry Ellison,
Charles Phillips, and many others.
Oracle Fusion for the Supply Chain
oracle.com/broadband/showiseminar
.html?4801419
Learn how Oracle Fusion supports business
processes, improves strategy, and delivers
best-in-class supply chain software.
Oracle and .NET: Integrated for Easy
Application Development
oracle.com/broadband/showiseminar
.html?3953377
Speed development and integration of
Microsoft .NET applications with Oracle.
Experience the Power of Oracle on Windows
oracle.com/broadband/showiseminar
.html?4763607
Oracle Database, Oracle Fusion
Middleware, and Oracle Applications
enable fast deployment of Oracle-based
applications on Windows and tight integra-
tion of Microsoft .NET applications and
Microsoft Office products into your broader
IT infrastructure.
Oracle Secure Backup
oracle.com/broadband/showiseminar
.html?4740074
Learn how Oracle Secure Backup provides
fast and secure tape backup for the entire
Oracle environment.
ORACLE UNIVERSITY
Oracle Database 10g Administrator
Certified Master
education.oracle.com/certification
Oracle is now offering an Oracle Database
10g Administrator Certified Master cre-
dential. The Oracle Certified Master exam
requires the ability to master and demon-
strate complex DBA tasks in a lab-testing
environment. Reported benefits of certifica-
tion include higher productivity, billing rates,
and recognition such as salary increases
and job promotions.
Satisfaction Guaranteed
education.oracle.com
Oracle University is now offering a 100%
Student Satisfaction Program, in which
students can retake a class if they are not
completely satisfied with it.
Oracle Applications Certified
Professional Program
education.oracle.com/certification
For years Oracle Database professionals
have enjoyed the prestige and benefits of
the Oracle Certified Professional program.
Now the advantages of being certified
are available to Oracle E-Business Suite
11i applications professionals. Initially,
certification is available in the areas of
financials, supply chain management, and
applications technologies.
Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Release 2
Hands-On Training
education.oracle.com
(Search keywords: Oracle Enterprise Manager)
Oracle University is offering a five-day
instructor-led training course on Oracle
Enterprise Manager 10g Grid Control
Release 2. Topics include installation and
configuration best practices, managing and
reporting against Oracle and non-Oracle
targets, and monitoring and managing
service-level performance.
ORACLE APPCASTS
Oracles Fusion User Experience Is a Key
Ingredient to Customers Success
streaming.oracle.com/ebn/podcasts/
applications/4774325.mp3
Hear how user experience and user-
centered design are key in delivering
quality experiences for Oracle customers.
Oracle Integrates E-Business Suite with Google
Search Appliance
streaming.oracle.com/ebn/podcasts/
applications/4774323.mp3
ORACLE MAGAZINE
Tune in to learn about the new relation-
ship between Oracle and Google, why
companies want search in their enterprise
applications, and the benefits for Oracle
Applications customers.
ORACLE EXECUTIVE BLOGS
oracle.com/corporate/executive/blog
Get insight on new Oracle products, ser-
vices, and strategies straight from Oracle
executives. A number of Oracle executives
have entered the blogging world, including
Jesper Andersen, senior vice president
of Application Strategy; Jacob Christfort,
vice president of Server Technologies;
Mary Ann Davidson, chief security officer;
and Christophe Job, vice president of
Application Development Tools.
For Oracle product information, call the number for
your region:
Country Phone Number
U.S. and Canada .....................................1.800.367.8674
Australia ....................................................1800.735.467
Austria.......................................................0800.29.7626
Belgium ........................................................0800.73280
Brazil .........................................................0800.901.985
China.........................................................800.810.0161
Denmark.........................................................8088.1068
Finland ......................................................0800.113.573
France .......................................................0800.905.805
Germany.................................................0800.1.810.111
Greece.................................................00800.353.12020
Hong Kong......................................................3002.1246
India ..........................................................1600.44.6725
Indonesia...........................................001.800.1.672.253
Ireland ........................................................1850.672253
Italy ..............................................................8008.74720
Japan ........................................................0120.155.096
Malaysia ....................................................1800.80.1837
Mexico...................................................01800.221.7321
The Netherlands .............................................0800.0827
New Zealand .............................................0508.555.215
Norway...........................................................800.14411
Philippines........................................................811.5831
Portugal.......................................................800.853.021
Singapore ................................................1800.6722.531
South Africa...............................................0800.994.225
South Korea...............................................080.2194.114
Spain............................................................900.952900
Sweden ........................................................020.798798
Switzerland................................................0800.55.2574
Taiwan.......................................................0800.672.253
Thailand ..............................................001800.441.0545
Turkey .................................................00800.353.90014
U.K. .........................................................0870.5.332200
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 20 06 27
 a t O r a c l e RESOURCES
OTN Community Bulletin
Upcoming audit? Get prepared via Project Lockdown.
DATABASE SECURITY BEST PRACTICES
IN A BOX
Has there ever been a better time to
educate yourself about best practices
for maintaining database security? If
the recent stories in the media about
information security breaches havent
motivated you to do so, perhaps the
shadow of an impending security audit
will. (If neither is motivating you,
then you have even bigger challenges.)
Fortunately, OTNs new Project
Lockdown technical article series has
arrived to serve this purpose.
Project Lockdown, published in
partnership with Oracle ACE Arup
Nandathe author behind the Oracle
Database 10g: Top Features for DBAs
seriestakes a unique and actionable
approach. If you had a single day to
secure your Oracle Database using
out-of-the-box featuresor more
realistically, a single week, month,
or quarterwhat would be on your
action item checklist? In Project
Lockdown, Nanda provides the
answers, not to mention the checklist
PDFs themselves.
Just by way of example, Phase 1
(duration of one day) includes simple
but detailed instructions for remov-
ing default passwords, configuring
Oracle binary permissions, securing
the Listener (a popular hacker target),
and trimming back sweeping privileges
such as DROP ANY TABLE. For those of
you committed to an extended project
over the course of a quarter, Phase 4
offers guidance for creating a Virtual
Private Database, implementing trans-
parent data encryption, creating secure
backups, and more.
A key point is that although many
of these best practices are designed to
foil external attacks, several of them,
28 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 20 06 ORACLE.COM/ORACLEMAGAZINE
such as auditing, are useful for contain-
ing internal threats (which are your
most likely risks, in fact) as well. (Of
course, Oracle Database Vault, the new
option to Oracle Database 10g Release
2 Enterprise Edition, is potentially your
best solution for preventing malicious
superusers from accessing applications
or performing tasks outside their autho-
rized responsibilities.)
Get your own lockdown project
started at oracle.com/technology/pub/
articles/project_lockdown.
THE RISING STARS OF BLOGS.ORACLE.COM
Its been three or four months since
blogs.oracle.com launched, and the
response has been awesomeat the
time of this writing, there have been
more than half a million page views
(collectively). The blog launch has
motivated scores of Oracle employees
to take advantage of this new platform
to more easily communicate and inter-
act with Oracle users, resulting in an
incredibly content-rich environment for
newcomers and experts alike.
Many new employee blogging
stars have risen at blogs.oracle.com.
Here are just a few, along with the
names of their blogs:
O

Steven Chan, Oracle E-Business
Suite Technology. This is perhaps
the best of the bunch. The volume of
information here for Oracle E-Business
Suite users is simply incredible, not to
mention straight from the technology
team behind the suite.
Sample post: In-Depth: Demilitarized
Zones and the E-Business Suite
blogs.oracle.com/schan
O

Nishant Kaushik, the Identity
Corner. Identity management is a hot
technology, and Kaushik does an excel-
lent job demystifying itexplaining
BY JU STIN KESTELYN
business drivers and technical underpin-
nings equally well.
Sample post: Analyzing Microsofts
Approach to Provisioning
blogs.oracle.com/identitycorner
O

Christopher Jones, Christopher
Jones on OPAL. The Oracle-PHP-
Apache-Linux (OPAL) stack gives LAMP
(Linux-Apache-MySQL-Perl/PHP/
Python/Primate) a run for its money,
and Jones is consistently adept at
explaining why.
Sample post: Getting Oracle
Connection Errors Faster in PHP
blogs.oracle.com/opal
O

Matt Wright, Matt Wrights Blog.
This blog is simply overflowing with
useful information about developing and
deploying Business Process Execution
Language (BPEL)based business flows.
Sample post: Sharing XML Schemas
across BPEL Processes
blogs.oracle.com/matt
With blogs.oracle.com, these and
other talented Oracle employee and
nonemployee bloggers have the oppor-
tunity to forge a new trusted relation-
ship with their respective communities.
Score one for corporate blogging.
Read more Oracle blogs for DBAs
and developers at blogs.oracle.com.
Justin Kestelyn, OTN Editor in Chief
justin.kestelyn@oracle.com
New Tech Articles, Columns,
& Notes
O
FOR DEVELOPERS:
oracle.com/technology/pub/articles/
tech_dev.html
Build an Online Reporting Application
Using Oracle XML Publisher
by Mark Rittman
Oracle ACE Mark Rittman explains how
to create an online reporting environ-

ment using XML Publisher technology,
step by step.
oracle.com/technology/pub/articles/rittman-
xmlpub.html
Hello Ajax! How to Do the Ajax Thing
with Oracle JDeveloper
by Frank Nimphius
Oracle ACE Frank Nimphius provides a
quick-start introduction to Asynchronous
JavaScript and XML (Ajax) by creating a
simple Hello World application.
oracle.com/technology/pub/articles/nimphius-
ajax.html
A Hype-Free Introduction to Ajax
by Chris Schalk
Get an overview of the core fundamen-
tals of Ajax (as well as its relationship
to JavaServer Faces) from Oracle ACE
Chris Schalk, without the usual hype.
oracle.com/technology/pub/articles/
schalk-ajax.html
Ruby on Rails on Oracle: A Simple Tutorial
by Richard Monson-Haefel
Learn the basics of Ruby on Railsthe
dynamic framework thats taking the
Web development community by
stormwith Oracle on the back end.
oracle.com/technology/pub/articles/haefel-
oracle-ruby.html
Grails on Oracle for Java Developers
by Tug Grall
Learn how to quickly build a Grails
application on Oracle Database 10g
Express Edition, and then deploy it to
Oracle Application Server 10g.
oracle.com/technology/pub/articles/grall-
grails.html
Adding Google-like Search Operators to
Simple Search Boxes
by Nick Bollweg
Give your users instant access to your
most important information. From the
Oracle+PHP Cookbook.
oracle.com/technology/pub/articles/oracle_
php_cookbook/bollweg-google.html
O
FOR DBAS/SYSADMINS:
oracle.com/technology/pub/articles/
tech_dba.html
Project Lockdown: Database Security
Best Practices
by Arup Nanda
Learn a practical, phased approach to
securing your database infrastructure
using built-in Oracle Database security
featuresover one day, week, month,
and quarter.
oracle.com/technology/pub/articles/project_
lockdown
Project Guide for Oracle RAC
Implementation
by Christopher Haskins
Get a step-by-step guide for defining,
designing, and delivering a successful
Oracle Real Application Clusters (Oracle
RAC) project in your organization.
oracle.com/technology/pub/articles/haskins-
rac-project-guide.html
New OTN TechCasts (Podcasts)
All OTN TechCasts (podcasts) are available at
oracle.com/techcasts
The Developers Guide to Oracle Fusion
Middleware and Microsoft Office
Oracle Fusion Middleware Product
Strategy Director Frank Knifsend chats
with Peter Lubbers, author of the
Oracle Application Server Developers
Guide for Microsoft Office Interoperability,
10g Release 3, about the various ways
developers can integrate Oracle Fusion
Middleware functionality with Microsoft
Office functionality and the technologies
that make it possible.
SOA Best Practices Roundtable Series
In this multipart Oracle TechCast series,
hear directly from Oracle customers
who have successfully deployed service-
oriented architectures (SOAs) at their
organizationsand about all the atten-
dant pitfalls and opportunities. O
ORACLE MAGAZINE
MOST POPULAR*
Content on OTN
For DBAs/Sysadmins:
1. Installing Oracle Database 10g on Linux x86, by
John Smiley
2. Oracle Database 10g: Top 20 Features for DBAs
(series), by Arup Nanda
3. Build Your Own RAC Cluster on Linux and FireWire,
by Jeffrey Hunter
4. Project Guide for Oracle RAC Implementation, by
Christopher Haskins
5. Oracle Database 10g Express Edition: Not Just for
Learners, by Lewis Cunningham
For Developers:
1. A Hype-Free Introduction to Ajax, by Chris Schalk
2. Ruby on Rails on Oracle: A Simple Tutorial, by
Richard Monson-Haefel
3. SOA Best Practices: The BPEL Cookbook, by
various authors
4. Installing PHP and the Oracle 10g Instant Client for
Linux and Windows, by Christopher Jones
5. Hello Ajax! How to Do the Ajax Thing with Oracle
JDeveloper, by Frank Nimphius
*For the two-month period ending May 31, 2006
OTN home
oracle.com/technology
OTN headlines
oracle.com/technology/pub/news
Free software downloads
oracle.com/technology/software
Documentation
oracle.com/technology/documentation
Technology and Developer
Centers
oracle.com/technology/tech
Podcasts
oracle.com/techcasts
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oracle.com/technology/pub/articles
Blogs
blogs.oracle.com
Discussion forums
forums.oracle.com
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 20 06 29
Altova MapForce 2006 The premier data integration and Web services implementation tool.

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O Integration with Microsoft Visual Studio .NET and Eclipse
O Easy modification of EDI transaction sets and messages

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O Numerous usability enhancements

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tool, makes it easy to convert between XML,
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data to WSDL operations. Simply drag connecting
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in data processing functions. MapForce converts
content on-the-fly and also auto-generates integration
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Web services applications. Get connected!
Download MapForce 2006 today: www.altova.com

MapForce is also available as part of

the acclaimed Altova XML Suite.
D I D Y O U KNOW
? a t O r a c l e BRIEFS
ORACLE HOLDS MARKET SHARE LEAD
Two independent analyst companies recently
published 2005 market share figures for
relational database management systems
(RDBMSs). Both showed Oracle on top by
a wide margin. Gartners research showed
that Oracle had a 48.6 percent share of the
market, followed by IBM, with 22 percent, and
Microsoft, with 15 percent, based on revenue
from licenses, updates, subscriptions and
hosting, technical support, and maintenance.
IDC, which bases its revenue numbers on
licenses, maintenance, and subscriptions,
showed that Oracle held a 44.6 percent
share, followed by IBM, at 21.4 percent, and
Microsoft, at 16.8 percent.
Sources: Gartner and IDC
www.gartner.com/press_releases/asset_152619_11.html
www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS20180306
SOA ON THE RISE; FLEXIBILITY SEEN
AS BENEFIT
Businesses and governments worldwide expect
to increase the percentage of applications run
on service-oriented architectures (SOAs) by
an average of 20 percent over the next three
years, according to consulting and outsourcing
firm Capgemini. The top reasons for using SOA
are innovation, compliance, and the speed of
change. The top benefits from using SOA were
seen as business flexibility, lower software
integration costs, and better alignment of IT
and business goals. The biggest obstacles to
using SOA are lack of understanding, difficulty
in justifying ROI, and shortage of needed skills.
Source: Capgemini
www.capgemini.com/m/en/n/pdf_Organizations_look_to
_Service-Oriented_Architecture_for_transformation_and_
innovation__says_Capgemini_survey.pdf
MIDDLEWARE MARKET GROWING; ORACLE
GROWING FASTEST
Worldwide application integration and
middleware software revenues totaled US$8.5
billion in 2005, up 7.1 percent over 2004,
according to Gartner. At 8.7 percent, Oracles
market share of the middleware market
was third, after IBM (37.2 percent) and BEA
Systems (14.5 percent) and ahead of Microsoft
(4.7 percent). Oracles market share grew the
most, rising 39.6 percent from 2004 to 2005;
IBMs market share rose 6.7 percent, BEAs 6.0
percent, and Microsofts 13.4 percent.
Source: Gartner
www.gartner.com/press_releases/asset_153343_11.html
DEPLOY LINUX FASTER WITH ORACLE
VALIDATED CONFIGURATIONS
ustomers looking to deploy Oracle
C solutions on Linux can turn to
the Oracle Validated Configurations
program for pretested, validated, and
supported architectures, including soft-
ware, hardware, storage, and networking
components. Available for download
from Oracle Technology Network, the
configurations help speed deployment
and reduce expensive testing, enabling
customers to achieve shorter time to
market and lowered infrastructure costs
while helping improve performance,
scalability, and reliability.
Oracle Validated Configurations are
a result of the companys real-world
testing environment and provide docu-
mented best practices, including details
on what to deploy, how to deploy, and
the most-robust hardware and soft-
ware combinations. As a result, Oracle
Validated Configurations can lead to
faster problem resolution and reduced
support costs.
The Oracle Validated Configurations
process enables Oracle to act as a trusted
advisor and work with customers and
partners to define and share best prac-
tices for secure, reliable, and efficient
Linux production deployments, says
Monica Kumar, director of product
marketing, Oracle.
ORACLE RETAIL MERCHANDISING
SYSTEM CERTIFIED WITH ORACLE
FUSION MIDDLEWARE
racle has certified Oracle Retail
O Merchandising Planning and
Optimization applications with Oracle
Fusion Middleware 10g. The certifica-
tion enables retail customers to protect,
extend, and evolve their investments in
Oracle Applications using Oracles
standards-based middleware products.
The certification makes it easier for
organizations to integrate their Oracle
Retail applications with other pack-
aged and custom applications by using
a service-oriented architecture (SOA).
Additionally, as the underlying SOA
ORACLE MAGAZINE
platform for Oracle Fusion Applications,
Oracle Fusion Middleware will help
customers move more easily to Oracle
Fusion Applications. Retailers will
benefit from the ability to integrate mul-
tiple systems in a secure manner and
adjust their processes and policies to
react to market changes.
Choice is paramount for retail-
ers, says Duncan Angove, senior vice
president and general manager, Oracle
Retail. Oracles retail customers have
a significant need to integrate their
diverse IT environments. Certifying
Oracle Retail solutions with Oracle
Fusion Middleware is a key milestone
in meeting current customer needs
and providing a path to Oracle Fusion
Applications.
ORACLE IMPROVES ENTERPRISE SINGLE
SIGN-ON IN ORACLE IDENTITY MANAGEMENT
racle has enhanced its best-in-class
O family of identity management
offerings with enterprise single-sign-on
capabilities, which increase user con-
venience, improve security, reduce the
number of help desk calls and associ-
ated costs, and assist in compliance
with password policies. Single-sign-on
support, which was previously avail-
able for Web-based applications, is now
also available for client/server, custom,
and host-based mainframe applications.
Oracle Enterprise Single Sign-On Suite
includes five distinct components.
Oracle Enterprise Single Sign-On
Logon Manager allows individuals to
securely use a single login credential
for all desktop, client/server, and legacy
applications. Oracle Enterprise Single
Sign-On Password Reset enables strong
password management for Microsoft
Windows through secure, flexible, self-
service interfaces. Oracle Enterprise
Single Sign-On Authentication Manager
allows organizations to use a combina-
tion of tokens, smart cards, biometrics,
and passwords for strong authentica-
tion throughout the enterprise. Oracle
Enterprise Single Sign-On Provisioning
Gateway enables organizations to
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 20 06 31
BRIEFS
directly distribute single login cre-
dentials to Oracle Enterprise Single
Sign-On Logon Manager, based on
provisioning instructions from Oracle
Identity Manager. The final component,
Oracle Enterprise Single Sign-On Kiosk
Manager, allows users to securely access
enterprise applications even at multiuser
kiosks and distributed workstations.
Oracle Enterprise Single Sign-On will
be available in the second half of 2006.
Oracle Enterprise Single Sign-On Suite
is US$60 per user. Oracle Enterprise
Single Sign-On Password Reset is avail-
able separately for US$7 per user.
OPEN SOURCE EDITION OF ORACLE
TOPLINK UNVEILED
opLink Essentials, the first compliant
T implementation of the Java Persistence
API (JPA), is now available. Oracle,
along with Sun Microsystems, was the
Enterprise JavaBeans 3.0 (EJB) specifica-
tion colead and delivered the JPAan
API for creating, removing, and querying
across lightweight Java objectsas part of
the specification. The official open source
reference implementation for the Java
Platform, Enterprise Edition 5 Software
Development Kit (SDK), TopLink
Essentials is also available from Oracle as
a standalone implementation.
The new JPA is the standard for
object-relational persistence introduced
in the EJB specification, which provides
a simplified approach to mappings and
application use of persistent entities
with capabilities suitable for mission-
critical enterprise applications. The JPA
can also be used for Java persistence
outside of EJB 3.0. TopLink Essentials
integrates easily with third-party frame-
works, such as Spring, helping provide
developers with the flexibility to use the
development environment and tools of
their choice.
The contribution of TopLink
Essentials to the Java Enterprise
Edition 5 SDK is consistent with our
efforts to raise the state of the art
within the developer community and
provide developers with technology
that makes their jobs easier, says
Steven G. Harris, vice president, Oracle
Fusion Middleware.
32 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 20 06 ORACLE.COM/ORACLEMAGAZINE
ORACLES PEOPLESOFT ENTERPRISE
RELEASE 9 DELIVERED
racle has delivered the first product
O of PeopleSoft Enterprise Release
9PeopleSoft Enterprise Learning
Management. Other product families
of PeopleSoft Enterprise Release 9 are
scheduled for delivery throughout the
remainder of the calendar year.
PeopleSoft Enterprise Release 9
leverages Oracles Fusion Middleware
and delivers Oracle Fusion capabilities
to PeopleSoft Enterprise customers. It
includes enhanced Web services func-
tionality, Oracle BPEL Process Manager,
Oracle Business Activity Monitoring, and
Oracle XML Publisher. This release is
the culmination of a year-long project
to integrate core components of the
Oracle Fusion Middleware family with
PeopleSoft applications, says Doris
Wong, general manager of PeopleSoft
Enterprise applications. Using Release
9, customers can deploy portable and
flexible business processes across hetero-
geneous IT environments and applica-
tions, resulting in less complexity, lower
costs, and less maintenance time.
PeopleSoft Enterprise Release 9 also
includes many enhancements across
its product families that improve busi-
ness processes and industry capabilities
and address customer requirements.
For example, the release includes new
capabilities for managing compliance
requirements, plus new talent man-
agement features such as integration
of applications and systems that store
human resources data for a single
enterprisewide system.
With a continued focus on improv-
ing customers overall ownership
experience, PeopleSoft Enterprise
Release 9 improves upon the imple-
mentation, use, and support of Oracle
Applications. Release 9 contains hun-
dreds of modifications that simplify
and improve the user experience in
addition to easing deployment and the
integration of systems with PeopleSoft
Enterprise applications.
This release supports Oracles efforts
to enable its customers to maximize the
value of their application investments.
Oracles new Applications Unlimited
program will continue this effort, by
providing ongoing enhancements to the
current Oracle Applications beyond the
delivery of Oracle Fusion Applications.
ORACLE ACQUIRES DEMANTRA, PORTAL
SOFTWARE, AND TELEPHONY@WORK
racle recently acquired Demantra, a
O leading global provider of demand
management, sales and operations plan-
ning, and trade promotions management
solutions. The acquisition will enable
Oracle to provide customers with a
comprehensive solution for the extended
enterprise that enhances demand vis-
ibility with powerful analytics for
more-accurate demand-driven planning,
forecasting, and modeling.
Oracle has also purchased Portal
Software, a leading global provider
of billing and revenue management
solutions for the communications and
media industry. Portal offers a billing
and revenue management solution with
a modern, object-oriented architecture
built on Oracle technology that can
bill and manage all communications
services, including wireline, wireless,
broadband, cable, Voice over IP, Internet
Protocol Television, music, and video.
Oracle has also acquired a provider
of IP-based contact center technology,
Telephony@Work, to further extend its
On Demand and customer relationship
management offerings. O
Oracle Validated Configurations
oracle.com/technology/tech/linux/
validated-configurations
Oracle Retail
oracle.com/industries/retail
Oracle Identity Management
oracle.com/products/middleware/
identity-management/identity-management.html
TopLink Essentials
oracle.com/technology/products/ias/toplink/jpa
PeopleSoft Enterprise Release 9
oracle.com/applications/peoplesoft-
enterprise.html
Oracle and Demantra
oracle.com/demantra
Oracle and Portal Software
oracle.com/portalsoftware
Oracle and Telephony@Work
oracle.com/telephonyatwork
 a t O r a c l e ORACLE NEWS
Faster, Easier Embedded Databases
Oracle unveils Berkeley DB Java Edition 3.0 with speed and ease-of-use improvements.
hen Oracle acquired
Sleepycat Software in
February 2006, some ques-
tioned whether Oracle would
maintain the Berkeley DB line of embed-
dable, open source databases. With
the release of Oracle Berkeley DB Java
Edition 3.0, Oracle has put those ques-
tions to restand given Java application
developers some useful enhancements.
The release makes speed improve-
ments and ease-of-use enhancements
that developers have been asking for,
and it does it in step with Sleepycats
preacquisition road map, says Rex
Wang, Oracles vice president of embed-
ded systems, formerly of Sleepycat.
It shows that Oracle is committed to
Berkeley DB and embeddable databases.
Oracle Berkeley DB Java Edition,
Oracle Berkeley DB, and Oracle Berkeley
DB XML are open source, embeddable
databases that provide developers with
fast, reliable, local persistence with little
or no administration. Oracle Berkeley
DB is the most widely used open source
database in the world, with deployments
estimated at more than 200 million.
Berkeley DB is targeted at developers
building applications that need blazing
performance but do not require the full
analytical power of SQL, says Wang. If
your data access patterns are predictable,
look at Oracle Berkeley DB. It executes
in the address space of the applica-
tion, has a small footprint, and operates
without human administration.
DATA AT THE EDGE
Oracles interest in embedded databases
is driven by market trends. As more-
powerful devices proliferate and as
networks become faster, more data is
moving from the core data center out to
BOB ADLER
the edge of the network, where it can
be accessed more quickly. According to
Rex Wang, Vice President of Embedded Systems
at Oracle
IDC, by the year 2012, there will be 17
billion devices connected to the internet.
Most of these will be at the edge or
outside the data center, and with that
many devices, theyd better be auto-
nomic and self-managing, says Wang.
They need an embedded database like
Oracle Berkeley DB.
Many new software services are also
appearing. Web services are an obvious
example, says Wang, but also telecom-
munications, voice and data services,
and hosted, on-demand services. These
services run in lights-out, always-on
environments with no human admin-
istration, and they frequently have
extreme performance and scalability
requirements. Again, an embedded data-
base like Oracle Berkeley DB is ideal.
ORACLE BERKELEY DB JAVA EDITION
Oracle Berkeley DB Java Edition is
a high-performance, transactional
storage engine written entirely in Java.
Developers use the Java Edition of
Berkeley DB when they want portability
ORACLE MAGAZINE
BY JEFF ERI CKSO N
to run on a wide variety of platforms,
and when they prefer Java for its ease of
development, says Wang.
Berkeley DB Java Edition 3.0 includes
a range of improvements. Oracle has
improved support of complex object
models with a new direct persistence
layer that adds a built-in Plain Old Java
Objectstyle object storage model. The
upgrade provides support for complex
object models without compromises
in performance. This helps developers
avoid development, runtime, and admin-
istrative overhead associated with storing
Java objects in relational databases with
object-relational mapping solutions.
Oracle also added a new deferred-
write database mode, which enables
pure in-memory operation and gives
developers greater flexibility in prior-
itizing database performance. The
deferred-write mode is ideal for situ-
ations involving temporary databases,
batch updates, or other instances where
database speed is critical.
AVAILABILITY AND PRICING
Oracle Berkeley DB Java Edition Release
3.0 is generally available under a dual
license. A no-cost open source license
permits redistribution if the application
using Oracle Berkeley DB Java Edition is
open source. In addition, a commercial
license is available for redistribution of
proprietary applications. O
READ more about Oracle Berkeley
DB Java Edition
www.sleepycat.com/products/bdbje.html
LEARN about Oracles complete line
of embedded databases
oracle.com/database/embedded.html
DOWNLOAD Oracle Berkeley DB
Java Edition
dev.sleepycat.com
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 20 06 33

b o o k BEAT
Enterprise Grid
Computing with Oracle
By Brajesh Goyal and
Shilpa Lawande
Oracle Press
www.oraclepress.com
ISBN: 0-07-226280-X
Ready to take full advantage of the agility,
reliability, and cost savings of grid computing?
Enterprise Grid Computing with Oracle provides
a road map for implementing Oracle enterprise
grid technology.
Coauthored by Brajesh Goyal, former principal
product manager for Grid Computing at Oracle,
and Shilpa Lawand, former principal developer
at Oracle, the book discusses the technologies
and practical methods involved in moving
toward the grid model at every layer of the IT
stackstorage, servers, databases, middleware,
and applications. Youll find out how to grid-
enable existing IT infrastructures, reduce islands
of computing resources, and share IT resources
across the enterprise.
Topics include building and managing a data
center based on the Enterprise Grid Alliance
reference model; lowering total cost of ownership
and improving responsiveness and flexibility
at various layers of the IT stack; and sharing
storage capabilities systemwide using storage
virtualization and provisioning.
The Relational
Database Dictionary
By C.J. Date
OReilly Media
www.oreilly.com
ISBN: 0-596-52798-5
Looking for a quick
database reference guide?
This pocket-size dictionary defines nearly
600 terms and concepts used with relational
databases, including Oracle.
As more and more people turn to databases
for both large systems and small Web-based
applications, misunderstandings arise about the
precise meaning of database-related terms, such
as foreign key, join, instantiation, table, and view.
These misunderstandings can affect the design,
programming, and use of database systems.
The Relational Database Dictionary provides
a single, compact source where designers,
programmers, database administrators, and
students of relational database systems can find a
glossary of precise definitions.
Author C.J. Date is a founder of relational
database theory. At IBM, he developed the
relational model based on E.F. Codds initial
definition, was a DB2 designer, and wrote An
Introduction to Database Systems.
Browse for Oracle books at oracle.com/
technology/books/10g_books.html.
34 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 20 06
c h a n n e l s PARTNER NEWS
ONE-STOP SUPPORT NOW INCLUDES SAP R/3
n coordination with SYSTIME, an
I Oracle Certified Advantage Partner,
Oracle now provides support and
maintenance for SAP R/3 applications
through Oracles One-Stop Support
program. Oracle will also establish a
dedicated solution support center for
providers that support SAP R/3 applica-
tions running on Oracle databases.
The One-Stop Support program
provides qualified independent software
vendor (ISV) partners with support
infrastructure and special access to
Oracle engineering resources. In the
past, the program provided seam-
less support for ISV applications and
the Oracle technology they run on;
now, ISVs will also be able to support
SAP R/3 applications that coexist with
Oracle-based applications.
Ninety-four percent of R/3 custom-
ers have not upgraded to new SAP ver-
sions, and the vast majority of those
companies run Oracle as well, explains
Oracle President Charles Phillips.
There are also many customers who
have purchased mySAP licenses but
havent yet installed them. With the
help of SYSTIME, were focused on
ensuring that these customers have a
superior ownership experience around
all of their applications.
ORACLE PARTNERS VALIDATE INTEGRATIONS
racle has validated many partners
O integrationsand many more
validations are in progress. Validation
acknowledges that the software has been
thoroughly tested to enable seamless
integration and optimal performance
with Oracle products. Many partners
provide validated integrations with more
than one Oracle application product
line. Two partners of note:
AppWorx, an Oracle Certified Partner
and a provider of business process auto-
mation software, has had its AppWorx
Version 7 validated with Oracle E-
Business Suite 11i Release 10. AppWorx
offers a single interface to monitor and
manage enterprisewide asynchronous
ORACLE.COM/ORACLEMAGAZINE
processes, enhancing the functionality of
Oracle Concurrent Manager. AppWorx
was already validated with Oracles
PeopleSoft Enterprise applications.
Perceptive Software, developer
of ImageNow document manage-
ment software, has had its product
integration validated with Oracle E-
Business Suite, Oracles JD Edwards
EnterpriseOne, PeopleSoft Enterprise
Student Administration, and PeopleSoft
Enterprise Financial Management
Solutions product suites. The validated
integration establishes a link between
documents stored in ImageNow and
records in the enterprise applications.
ORACLE PARTNERNETWORK UPGRADES
SOLUTIONS CATALOG
he new Oracle PartnerNetwork
T Solutions Catalog launches in
October 2006, giving customers and
prospects an enhanced and faster way
to connect with Oracles more than
17,500 partners. Powered by Oracle
Fusion Middleware, including Oracle
Application Server 10g and Oracle
Portal, the new catalog better serves
Oracles growing community of partners
and provides an improved experience
for users seeking a solution.
Now available in 13 languages, the
catalog can help customers shorten IT
procurement cycles by instantly locat-
ing partner solutions or services that
meet their needs. Extensive new search
functionality allows searches by solu-
tion type, product, hardware platform,
operating system, expanded geographic
specifications, and more. Companies can
also locate partners who have solution
integrationsbetween the partner prod-
ucts and Oracles applicationsvalidated
by Oracle, as well as partners using
leading technologies including service-
oriented architecture and grid.
Oracle Partners can simply and
securely publish their solution profiles
and manage leads, all within the same
portal interface. Straightforward, unique
URLs now make it easy to find partner
solutions via Web search engines.
 PARTNER SPOTLIGHT
usiness Process Execution Language (BPEL) is simplify-
B ing process integration and saving companies money
by providing a standard for assembling discrete services
into an end-to-end process. Below are five Oracle System
Integrator partners that are building solutions using Oracle
BPEL Process Manager, Oracles infrastructure for creating,
deploying, and managing business processes:
BIAS used Oracle BPEL Process Manager to integrate
systems between the Corrections Corporation of America
(CCA) and the Hamilton County Jail System in Tennessee.
CCAs system is used for booking and processing more than
200 inmates per day, and CCA plans to use the BPEL inte-
gration with other systems in the coming years.
CISCO, Inc., used Oracle BPEL Process Manager to create
a way for Farmers Mutual Hail, a provider of crop insurance
in 15 midwestern states, to allow its agents and policyhold-
ers to access policy information online with a self-registra-
tion process. Manual processes, modeled using Oracle BPEL
Process Manager human workflow, take over only if the self-
registration process determines its necessary.
System Integrators Embrace Oracle BPEL Process Manager
Innowave Technology used Oracle BPEL Process Manager
to integrate Data Select Systems COBOL-based CLCS III
application with an Oracle database. Data Selects CLCS
III systems service 40 percent of U.S. construction loans.
Seamlessly extracting and loading COBOL data into an
Oracle database without altering the CLCS III system was
critical for the companys continued success.
Sierra Atlantic provides engineering change order (ECO)
management for new and modified products in the form of
adaptable, preconfigured business workflows. Built using
Oracle BPEL Process Manager, the companys solution
can handle a range of ECOs, from routine documentation
changes to end-of-year product phase-outs.
SkillNets StoreHub solution, created with Oracle BPEL
Process Manager, addresses common retail challenges such
as stockout. In order to offer customer retention options, the
process must be streamlined in the context of a Substitute-
Delay-Leave framework. StoreHub orchestrates the stockout
business process across point of sale, inventory, catalog, and
customer relationship management in near real time.

IKAN ADDS MODELING CAPABILITY TO
ORACLE SQL DEVELOPER
kan, an Oracle Certified Partner, has
I released CWD4ALL for Oracle SQL
Developer, a modeling, mapping, and
diagramming tool that complies with
the Common Warehouse Metamodel
intelligence environments, and business
processes. It supports online transaction
processing, data marts, and data ware-
houses for online analytical processing.
It bridges ODBC and JDBC to enable
direct catalog capturing.
and optimizes data structures and access
algorithms accordingly, resulting in fast
response time and throughput. O
SYSTIME
www.systime.net

(CWM). Oracle SQL Developer is
Oracles graphical tool for creating and
browsing database objects; CWD4ALL
for Oracle SQL Developer gives Oracle
SQL Developer full entity-attribute-
WIPRO INFOTECH AND ORACLE DELIVER Oracle Validated Integrations
oracle.com/partnerships
REAL-TIME STOCK EXCHANGE SURVEILLANCE
ipro Infotech and Oracle have AppWorx
W implemented the first phase of a
new market surveillance system for the
www.appworx.com

Perceptive Software
www.imagenow.com
relationship modeling facilities. Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE). Called
Oracle PartnerNetwork
CWD4ALL for Oracle SQL Developer the BSE Online Surveillance System- Solutions Catalog
provides relational and physical integrated (BOSS-i), the new system solutions.oracle.com
mapping and diagramming of Oracle monitors trading data in the exchanges BIAS
databases, with full data definition lan- derivatives and equities (cash) markets. www.biascorp.com
guage generation. CWD4ALL for Oracle BOSS-i monitors all major exchange CISCO
SQL Developer also allows exporting parameters in real time, looking for www.ciscoinc.com

to Oracle Analytical Workspaces, and
supports forward- and reverse-engineer-
ing capabilities to and from Oracle8i
Database, Oracle9i Database, and
Oracle Database 10g from within Oracle
SQL Developer.
CWD4ALL for Oracle SQL Developer
simplifies and accelerates the complex
aspects of analyzing, designing, and
implementing data models, business
suspicious activity. Using rules-based Innowave Technology
www.innowavetech.com
advanced analytics, its alert-generation
engine notifies a surveillance console Sierra Atlantic
www.sierraatlantic.com
when such activity is detected. Real-time
SkillNet
monitoring of the exchanges more than www.skillnetinc.com
5 million daily transactions, as well as
CWD4ALL for Oracle SQL Developer
management of generated data, are made www.cwd4all.com
possible through Oracle TimesTen In-
Wipro Infotech
Memory Database, a memory-optimized www.wipro.in
database that manages data in memory

ORACLE MAGAZINE SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 20 06 35

 c h a n n e l s PEER-TO-PEER BY B LA IR CAMPBELL

By the Book
Three peers extol the pleasures of reading, both on the job and off.
Jaromir Nemec That kind of problem can easily be peerSPECS
Company: Capgemini, a global
If you could change a feature of missed in the developing/testing consulting, technology, and
Oracle Database, what would it be? environment because of small outsourcing firm

The SQL profile is a very data volume and loadand when Job Title/Description:
Senior Oracle DBA, providing help
exciting feature. Id appreciate the application moves to produc- and advice to project teams and
the ability to define the profile tion, people are disappointed by developerswith a preference
for avoiding problems over
on a predicate level that could poor response time. Having a look solving them
be reused in all statements upriver at the way developers Location: Brussels, Belgium
using this predicate. work and providing sound advice Length of Time Using Oracle
Tell us about the paper you can save us a lot of annoyance later. Products: 13 years
wrote and presented at the U.K. Oracle User Whats your favorite thing to do
Group Exhibition & Conference 2005 titled Are Your Statistics Bad outside of work? Reading scientific periodicals, novels, and
Enough? You can tell pretty quickly whether your statistics are comics. Some of my favorites are Hermann Hesses Narcissus
stale or fresh, but its difficult to decide if theyre appropriate and Goldmund; Douglas Hofstadters Gdel, Escher, Bach; Art
or misleading. In my presentation, I proposed a method that Spiegelmans Maus; and Jacques Tardis comic books about
makes it possible to measure the quality of database statistics. World War I.
Its based on the access and filter predicates used in statements
accessing the data. Simply put, its like a JUnit test for DBAs. Jeffrey Hunter
If you were going to the space station Whats your favorite tool or tech-
for six months, which Oracle reference peerSPECS nique on the job? Using Oracle
books would you take? I personally Company: T-Mobile, an extended SQL trace data for
international cell phone and
like books by Jonathan Lewis wireless service provider
application system and SQL
he wrote Cost-Based Oracle Job Title/Description: tuning. Its not just a tool
Fundamentals [Apress, 2005] and Freelance database consultant, for performance tuningits
responsible for enterprise
Practical Oracle8i [Addison-Wesley, integration solutions and the unmatched as a tool for under-
2001]. Apart from a lot of useful design of the data warehouse standing the internals of how
technical details, they offer guidance Location: Vienna, Austria the Oracle kernel works.
on how to think while working Length of Time Using Oracle Which new features of Oracle Database
Products: 15 years
with Oracle Database. 10g are you finding most valuable? The new Oracle Automatic
Storage Management feature has made it incredibly easy for
Bruno Vroman us to provision and manage storage with both single-instance
How did you get started in IT? I studied mathematics at university and Oracle Real Application peerSPECS
and was fond of pure math, like algebra and logic. Then I Clusters deployments. Company: The DBA Zone, a
took my first IT course and thought: This is applied logic! What advice do you have about provider of remote managed
database administration services
This is what I want to do! I immediately switched my focus getting into Web and database
Job Title/Description: Senior
to applied mathematics. development? Download the latest DBA, responsible for designing
You mention that youd rather avoid problems than solve them. Tell version of Oracle JDeveloper 10g and implementing highly available
database solutions; ensuring
us more about that philosophy. When and get Oracle JDeveloper 10g database availability; and
something goes wrong with appli- Handbook [Oracle Press, 2004]. application, system, and SQL tuning
Location: Butler, Pennsylvania
cation performance, its often due Oracle JDeveloper 10g provides a
Oracle Credentials: Oracle-
to bad practicefor example, unique development environment certified DBA (Oracle7, Oracle8,
requiring the scanning of GBs of capable of using Oracle-specific Oracle8i, Oracle9i ) with 12 years of
experience using Oracle products
data for a simple query, when frameworksOracle Application
a slightly different approach Development Framework, for
oracle.com/technology/community/
would produce the same results exampleas well as non-Oracle oracle_ace
at a fraction of the workload. specific frameworks. O

ORACLE MAGAZINE SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 20 06 37

 c h a n n e l s CUTTING EDGE
Calling, Chilling, and Campaigning
Wireless Skype, cooler servers, and more-effective ads
Skype Anytime, Anywhere
Skype is changing the world of commu-
nications by allowing users to talk from
PC to PC for free using internet telephony.
Skypes limitationuntil nowhas been that
users needed to be near a PC with an internet
connection. NETGEAR is taking Skype to the next
level with the Skype WiFi Phone, which leverages
wireless internet networks to allow users to make free
calls to other Skype users anywhere in the world, anytime
there is Wi-Fi access, without a PC. The phones display shows
all of a users contacts who are currently online. And like other
Skype phones, NETGEARs phone lets users make calls to ordi-
nary phones for just pennies a minute. NETGEAR is making
true mobile wireless internet telephony a reality, especially as
cities such as San Francisco move to Wi-Fienable the entire
city at no cost to end users. Who needs a cellular phone?
Cool It
Walk into any server room and youll feel the heatand
every new generation of processors generates even more.
Engineers must find cooling fans that are both small
enough to fit inside smaller server chassis and powerful
enough to dissipate increasing amounts of heat. HP engi-
neers have turned to model jet planes for inspiration. The
company is using electric-ducted fans (EDFs), originally
developed to power radio-controlled jets, to cool its next
generation of servers. Essentially propellers in a box, the
fans produce enough air pressure to cool even the hottest
of servers. In EDFs, the blades are placed inside a tube, or
duct. Shorter than typical propeller blades, these blades
spin faster and create more thrust. The duct reduces noise
and prevents air vortexes from forming around the tips of
the bladeswhich saps the thrust produced by traditional
propellers. Since servers dont
need thrust, the blades
have been redesigned to
produce pressure. The
fan blades force air into a
servers chassis, so that a
certain volume of air per
minute flows past the
heat sinks, carrying heat
away through convection.
ORACLE MAGAZINE
Measuring Memorable
Advertisements
Do you have a favorite television commer-
cial, yet you have no idea what product
is being advertised? While many advertis-
ing campaigns are memorable, some fail
because viewers dont retain information
about the product or company. Most busi-
nesses face the enormous and potentially
costly issue of deciding how to advertise
their product effectively. A company called
NeuroFocus has
a solution that
measures the
effectiveness of all
types of advertis-
ing, including
online, TV, radio,
and print. A team
of neurophysiolo-
gists and psycho-
metrics scientists
use quantitative indicators of attention,
emotional engagement, and memory
calculated from each millisecond of neu-
rological data recorded by high-density
arrays composed of millions of sensors as
test subjects are shown advertisements.
This measurement is used to determine
which aspects of the message contrib-
ute most and least to its overall effect.
The solution offers potential benefits for
advertising and public relations agencies,
corporate marketing departments, political
campaign offices, and design firms. O
NETGEAR Skype WiFi Phone
www.netgear.com/products/details/SPH101.php
HP Electric-Ducted Fans
www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press_
kits/2006/blades/products.html
NeuroFocus
www.neurofocus.com
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 20 06 39
SECURITY

40 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 20 06 ORACLE.COM/ORACLEMAGAZINE
 INSIDE ORACLE DATABASE VAULT SECURES THE INSIDE OF THE ENTERPRISE.
BY DAV ID A. KELLY

reating a data security strategy that fits

your business is more than simply ensur-
ing that basic access controls are defined
or proper firewalls are in place. Having a compre-
hensive security plan means going beyond traditional
security approaches to find flexible solutions that
can help reduce internal and external risks, improve
accountability, and enable organizations to do busi-
ness more efficiently.
For example, running a profitable TV production and
GETTY IMAGES/IMAGE EFFECTS BY DESIGN STAFF

broadcast company requires more than simply broad-

casting half-hour shows and half-minute commercials

ORACLE MAGAZINE SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 20 06 41

it means enabling secure access to a wide
range of critical corporate data for both
internal and external users. One company
that has done this successfully is Artear, one
of Latin Americas leading television produc-
ers and broadcasters. Artear used Oracle
Label Security to move the management of
security out of the application and into the
database while they were migrating from an
AS/400 to a clustered Linux environment.
Using Oracle Label Security eliminated
the internally developed security efforts and
reduced the amount of investment required
to develop and manage the security aspects
of Artears key business applications, while
enabling flexible and fast access for a wide
range of users. Because much of the data is
sensitive and we have to provide a wide level
of access, we needed the flexibility to control
who views the data, says Graciela Mucci,
CIO, Artear.
Access has become an issue for many
companies. Businesses have optimized their
supply chains and use customer relationship
management software to manage relation-
Using Oracle Label Security eliminated Artears internally developed security efforts and reduced the amount of
ships with their clients. In doing so, systems investment required to develop and manage the security aspects of the companys key business applications,
have become much closer to each other and while enabling flexible and fast access for a wide range of users, says Graciela Mucci, Artears CIO.
much closer to the end users, writes Ron
Ben-Natan in Implementing Database Security one example of how organizations are meeting these new
and Auditing (Digital Press, 2005). Sure, we use firewalls security requirements.
to secure our networks and we dont connect databases Oracle is helping companies formulate a strategic approach
directly to the Internet, but databases are much more to todays data security issues by extending its products in
exposed than they used to be. Ten years ago the database was multiple ways. With new solutions like Oracle Database Vault,
accessed by applications that were only available to internal Transparent Data Encryption, Oracle Secure Backup, and
employees. Now it is (indirectly through the application) Oracle Identity Management, Oracle makes it possible for
accessed by anyone who has access to the Web site (i.e., organizations to ensure that their data is protected and that
everyone in the world). they can meet security, compliance, and risk management
challenges efficiently and cost-effectively.
GUARDING AGAINST THREATS Extending the protection around the database is criti-
In fact, for most organizations, traditional security approaches cal. When youre looking at some of the major compliance
authentication, authorization, and access controlsare drivers like Gramm-Leach-Bliley for customer information
just the starting point. But with increased or Sarbanes-Oxley for the integrity of financials, then the
security and privacy pressures ranging databases become incredibly important systems of record for
from ever-more-sophisticated internal the types of information that auditors look closely at. Thats
and external attacks to increased why enhancing the security tools and protection mechanisms
regulations such as HIPAA around the database makes sense, says Trent Henry, senior
and Sarbanes-Oxley, orga- analyst, Burton Group.
nizations need to move What weve seen at a lot of companies is that when audi-
beyond the traditional tors come in, they find that privilege isnt separated among
authentication, multiple users or that there are separation-of-duties problems,
authorization, and such as DBAs being able to do much more with a repository
access approaches. than they should be able to, Henry says. One of the key con-
Artears use of cerns is integrity of the information and making sure that it
Oracle Label cant get changed in an unauthorized way.
Security is just In response to those types of internal threats, Oracle
Oracle Label Security allowed us to apply these access controls where it matters most:
the centralized database on a scalable Oracle RAC system.
Graciela Mucci, CIO, Artear

extended its security capabilities with the release of
Oracle Database Vault, which gives organizations the mecha-
nisms to restrict access to super and privileged users with
database realms. A database realm allows an organization
to define a protection zone around a specific application,
part of an application, or a set of data. Access to this zone
is protected from power users, such as those with the DBA
role. Additionally, Database Vault multifactor authorization
can block access based on factors such as time of day (for
example, only between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m.), IP address limita-
tions (so that someone cant log in remotely), or other con-
siderations. Rules can be associated with dozens of database
commands, enabling strict control over their usage.
Oracle Database Vault allows you to control the super
and privileged user access, says Wynn White, senior direc-
tor, security and identity marketing, Oracle. By using Oracle
Database Vault, you have more-granular access control mecha-
nisms to specific data sets, as well as the ability to restrict
access for individuals only to the specific data they need to do
their jobs. This is something new to the industry.
Oracle Database Vault helps organizations manage aspects
of regulatory compliance. Weve been spending a lot of our
time with companies whose external auditors have raised
the issue of data security from a financial reporting integrity
issue, says Jay Thompson, a managing director at Protiviti, a
leading international provider of independent internal audit
and business and technology risk consulting services.
Some companies will find that using [Oracle] Database
Vault is a very simple way for them to restrict access selectively
to data, and theyll be able to address a significant security risk
issue theyre facing by limiting access to sensitive information,
he adds.
PROTECTING FROM INTERNAL THREATS
Today, reducing risk and meeting auditing requirements means
being able to protect against not only traditional external

SOLVING THE AUDIT ISSUE

Todays organizations must not only comply with
a wide range of regulatory requirements but also
prove their compliance through audits. While
some databases and other products provide
auditing capabilities, ensuring their accuracy is
tougher than simply turning them on.
Theres an increasing need for companies
to put systems in place that can monitor every-
thing thats going on in a database system so
an organization can validate that the activities
are approved, identify exceptional activities that
may need to be investigated further, and have
a trusted record of activities on their systems,
says Cliff Pollan, CEO at Lumigent, an Oracle
partner that provides audit applications that can
help organizations analyze audit data from both
Oracle and non-Oracle database systems.
Auditing information can also be used to
enable organizations to react when some change
has occurredmalicious or notto a database,
according to Ted Gary, product manager at
Tripwire, an independent software vendor whose
Tripwire Enterprise 5.5 supports change auditing
for Oracle databases.
Our customers are trying to deliver services
that comply with regulations and that meet
service-level agreements and have appropriate
levels of security, says Gary. What they find is,
oftentimes the great culprit to achieving those
things is changes made internally by their own
people. While you want to monitor for external
hacking, many of the security problems our
customers are having result from unauthorized
changes to configuration settings or something
else in the software stack.
ENTER ORACLE AUDIT VAULT
Compliance regulations have changed the way
databases are secured and audited. Audit trails
contain a wealth of valuable information, and
auditors are placing a great deal of focus on the
audit logs. The first thing that auditors ask for
when they come in for a compliance audit is to
see your audit logs, says Jack Brinson, principal
product manager (database security), Oracle
Audit Vault.
Customers in every industry are being asked
to turn on auditing to track activity for compli-
ance and internal security requirements, Brinson
says. One of the major challenges is the audit
logs are distributed in multiple silos across the
enterprise. For many years, customers have been
asking for an audit warehouse that centralizes
the audit silos into a secure repository where you
can do analysis and reporting on the consoli-
dated audit data.
Oracle Audit Vault gives organizations a secure
repository for enterprise audit databasically an
audit warehouse or a way to collect and ensure
the security of auditing information from both
Oracle and non-Oracle systemsand provides
insight into who did what to which data when,
including privileged users who have direct access
to the database.
Understanding who accessed, altered,
updated, deleted, or merely viewed sensitive
data is an essential component to satisfying
compliance requirements and protecting data,
says Brinson. Oracle Audit Vault provides the
capability to detect, monitor, alert, and report
the history of privileged user changes, schema
modifications, and even data-level access. By
consolidating and centralizing all the information
that is captured across different systems, com-
panies can do audit reporting from this reposi-
tory, making the data meaningful.
Oracle Audit Vault is in beta testing and is
scheduled for release in late 2006.

ORACLE MAGAZINE SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 20 06 43

 threats but new internal threats as wellsomething that most
organizations are just starting to take seriously.
I think that many companies have a handle on the exter-
nal security threats and have good tools and processes for
dealing with them. More recently, were finding that there are
a lot of potential internal threats, so the challenge for organi-
zations is how to go about focusing on solving those internal
data security threats without overdoing it and restricting busi-
ness, says Thompson.
Oracle Database Vault is a good example of a preven-
tive control that Oracle essentially leads the market with,
Thompson continues. Going forward, I believe these capabili-
ties will be a fundamental requirement to stay in the data-
base market.
FLEXIBLE SECURITY
While restricting internal access to corporate data through
technologies such as Oracle Database Vault is important, cre-
ating flexible security architectures that can enable organiza-
tions to do more than they could previously is often equally
important. Artear manages this balance by using Oracle Label
Security to enable highly flexible but extremely secure inter-
nal and external access to critical sales, billing, and business
systems and data.

O R AC L E D ATA B A S E S E C U R I T Y
Oracle Database security features help ensure
regulatory compliance, protect from insider
threat, promote information consolidation
and sharing, and protect sensitive Oracle Audit Vault
information on media. Administrators can consolidate and protect
audit information, enabling centralized
analysis and reporting on audit data.

Fine-Grained Auditing
DBAs specify the
conditions necessary to Oracle Identity Management
generate an audit Sysadmins manage the lifecycle of user
record. identities within and beyond the firewall.
Strong authentication lowers risk of
security breaches. With Oracle Identity
Management, DBAs manage database
users and authorizations in one
central place.

Oracle Secure Backup

Data-to-tape encryption
protects against the misuse of
sensitive information if backup
tapes are lost or stolen.

Transparent Data Encryption
Protect information without change to
the application by transparently
encrypting data and decrypting it
when it is read back to the user.
Oracle Label Security
Control access to critical business data
using data classification and
label-based access control.
Virtual Private Database
Customized security policies support
security when standard object-level
privileges and database roles dont
meet application security
requirements.
000000000010111000000000
010101100000000001010111
000000000000010100000000
001100000000000000110001
000000000001111
001111000000000
010111100000000000101111
0101 00000000101111
0000000
0000001100100000000
00001100100000000
000010000000000001011010
001011010 Oracle Database Vault
0000000000
0000011100000000
00011100000000 Managers control access to data and
0010010000
0000000000011010
00000000011010 applications, even among administrators,
000000000011001000000000
HIGHLY
001011000000000000000100 protecting against insider threat from
000000000100100100000000 malicious intent, negligence, or oversight.
SENSITIVE The Command Rules and Realms features
add rules and protection zones
FIDENTIAL through which users access the restricted
information. Multifactor authorization
enforces how, when, and where
applications can be accessed by verifying
IP address, authentication method, and
time of day.
STEVE LYONS

44 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 20 06 ORACLE.COM/ORACLEMAGAZINE

SO06_Security.indd 44 7/18/06 10:22:59 AM

The grid infrastructure allows us to save
on hardware and software investments
while offering a higher level of service that
avoids business losses.
Graciela Mucci, CIO, Artear
Instead of maintaining security policies in our applica-
tions and database, Oracle Label Security allowed us to apply
these access controls where it matters most: the centralized
database on a scalable Oracle RAC [Real Application Clusters]
system, says Artears Mucci. Instead of having to change our
application logic each time we add a new TV channel, we are
able to use Oracle Label Security to quickly and easily change
or create access policies. For example, we are now able to add
new TV channels much more rapidly than ever before.
All of Artears applications run on a single grid infrastruc-
ture, where the company has dynamic flexibility to reassign
capacity on demand among the applications, to better dis-
tribute loads or skirt hardware malfunctions. Mucci explains:
The grid infrastructure allows us to save on hardware and
software investments while offering a higher level of service
that avoids business losses from downed environments or
fragmented infrastructure that is unable to react to business
capacity needs.
REDUCING RISK
In addition to improving security management, eliminating
internally developed security efforts, reducing investment
costs, and freeing up development resources and shorten-
ing project lifecycles, the move to Oracle Label Security has
helped to reduce risk. We are able to rely upon the strong,
well-tested security infrastructure that Oracle Label Security
provides and avoid depending upon our programmers for cre-
ating and modifying the security infrastructure each time we
add a new station or role, which would be very susceptible to
errors, says Mucci. Instead we can rapidly and confidently
deploy profiles that have been previously created. Oracle Label
Security gives us security and confidence.
Artear has a four-node cluster running Oracle Database 10g
and Oracle RAC on IBM Blade HS20 with Novell SUSE Linux
Enterprise Server for its production site and has a similar two-
node development/test cluster. It also uses Novell eDirectory
as the LDAP solution; Oracle Label Security provides the flex-
ibility for keeping information securely separated.
Artear has used Oracle Label Security to help build a con-
solidated application environment for its mission-critical appli-
cations, including a Film Library Rights Management system;
a Video Tape Library; broadcasting and cable sales manage-
ment applications (for five broadcast stations) that manage
program scheduling, inventory, revenue management, and
ORACLE SOFTWARE SECURITY ASSURANCE:
STRONG FROM THE GROUND UP
A complete security strategy starts well before deployment of a new
application or database. In fact, it starts before an organization purchases
a database. Weve taken a lot of measures to ensure the security of our
products and enable fast response to vulnerabilities, says Darius Wiles,
senior manager, security alerts, Oracle. For example, weve adopted
practices internally, including training developers on the types of attack
mechanisms used by hackers, security code reviews, and using internal
and external teams to try and break into products before theyre shipped.
Were doing a lot to make Oracle products stronger and even more secure.
The Oracle Software Security Assurance process helps ensure that
security is designed and built into products and provides a consistent
way to apply patches and critical fixes. It covers everything from product
definition and development to continuous assurance, guaranteeing that
security considerations are given high priority.
In the product definition stage, developers use security standards,
tools, software libraries, and formal secure coding standards. These func-
tions and libraries are developed by experts; many of them are subjected
to third-party testing and independent certification. Critical security func-
tionality is consolidated into core modules and services that are used by
development teams to ensure uniformity and security across Oracle prod-
ucts. Members of a Security Steering Committee review and coordinate
efforts, helping to cross-pollinate security technology across divisions.
Oracles development processes incorporate security into functional
specification, design, implementation, and testing of products. In the
specification phase, security plans must be incorporated for the design to
be approved. The design phase aims to reduce the vulnerability of a pro-
duction system to attack, including restricting user privileges, removing
unneeded functionality, and closing off nonessential modes of access to
the system, such as unused default user accounts or network ports. This
configuration effort helps ensure that products are secure out of the box.
Secure development tools include security-oriented regression testing
as part of Oracles quality assurance process, and testing with specialized
security vulnerability analysis tools in the product development phase.
Oracle also uses ethical hacking to find product defects that could
allow a user to bypass security mechanisms. Both internal and external
teams do product assessments on Oracle products before their release.
Finally, security depends on ongoing assurance. A good example of
this process is Oracles critical patch update scheme. In the past, Oracle
issued security fixes on a one-off basis as needed. While this addressed
the need to correct potential security threats, many organizations asked
for a regular, planned patching cycle to allow testing and roll-out to be
scheduled in advance. As a result, Oracle now offers customers a Critical
Patch Update capability as part of Software Security Assurance.
With Critical Patch Update, fixes are bundled into a single unit so that
every quarter theres only one thing for customers to test and apply to
their systems, says Wiles. The patches are cumulative, meaning each
patch includes the contents of previous patches. This allows customers
to skip an updatefor example, because theyre at financial year-end
and dont wish to patch their systemsand simply pick up the next
patch, which will include everything they need. The whole scheme is
designed to maximize flexibility and make it easier for customers to apply
security fixes to their systems.
ORACLE MAGAZINE SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 20 06 45
 managing new employees
and changing employee
roles if someone is promoted
more; a billing system for financial or transferred. A critical benefit
management that integrates with SAP; and a is also the systems ability to react
data warehouse. instantaneously and remove or revoke
Many of the applications are used by employees of the security privileges when an individual leaves
different stations as well as by advertisers, who are pro- the company.
vided direct access to their own information. Because
much of the data is sensitive and the wide level of THE BIG PICTURE
access we need to provide, we need the flexibility to While security, risk management, regulatory compliance, and
control who views the data, says Mucci. Artear pro- auditing have taken on increasing importance for almost all
vides services to other members of Grupo Clarin com- organizations, Oracle has been steadily increasing its enterprise
panies (its sister companies), so it needs to segregate access to security footprint and capabilities, which span solution areas
data not only by advertiser but also by company and role. such as identity management, encryption, and audit.
Artears Oracle Label Securitybased The Oracle database will be an
solution allows the company to define increasingly important component of
the policies without depending on which SNAP SHOT the security infrastructure, says Paul
database or platform it is developing on. Artear Needham, director, database security
For example, the same assignment of roles www.artear.com.ar product management, at Oracle. Our
and functions is used for Oracle and Lotus Location: Buenos Aires, Argentina strategy has really been about moving
Notes. In addition, the combination of Industry: High technology from manual processes to automated pro-
Oracle Label Security and Novells eDirec- Employees (Grupo Clarin): 8,000 cesses for all types of security technolo-
Oracle products: Oracle Database 10g
tory gives Artear a single point of admin- gies. As we move forward, were building
Release 2, Oracle Label Security, Oracle Real
istration and delegation for all aspects of Application Clusters
in more automation and transparency, just
managing users, an important feature for as we did in Oracle Database 10g Release

Come join the leading edge!!

Oracle US and Oracle Canada are currently accepting resumes for the following areas:

Technology Consultants Please send resume to: We offer a 401k-retirement plan,

Architects for Oracle 10g RAC, narecruitconsult-ats_us@ which includes matching as
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Copyright 2006, Oracle. All rights reserved. Oracle, JD Edwards, PeopleSoft, and Siebel are registered trademarks of Oracle Corporation and/or its afliates. Other names may be trademarks of their
respective owners.

46 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 20 06 ORACLE.COM/ORACLEMAGAZINE
The challenge for organizations is how to go about focusing on solving those internal
data security threats without overdoing it and restricting business.
Jay Thompson, Managing Director, Protiviti

2 with Oracle Transparent Data Encryption and its ability to
help customers address critical business requirements quickly.
The same process is happening with Oracle Database
Vault, a product that addresses many of the key business con-
cerns that organizations face today: regulatory compliance,
separation of duty, strong internal controls, and concerns
around database consolidation security as well as report-
ing. Customers want to be able to keep their power users
and super users (or DBAs) from accessing application data,
and Oracle Database Vault enables organizations to do that,
explains Needham.
be considered across the organization, says Oracles White.
Security has evolved from a technology to a business issue,
with applicability to all organizations across all industries
which makes it more important than ever before. By delivering
a broader footprint of security technologies, Oracle ensures the
protection of an organizations information assets. O
David A. Kelly (dkelly@upsideresearch.com) is a business, technology, and travel
writer who lives in West Newton, Massachusetts.

STRATEGIC VISION
READ about information security
But it doesnt stop there. A strategic data security vision oracle.com/solutions/security
includes a much broader landscape than ever beforeespe-
LEARN about secure development processes
cially with the increased threat of internal attacks, theft, or oracle.com/solutions/security/secure-development-processes.html
simple mistakes, and the necessity of meeting new regulatory DISCOVER Oracle Database Security
compliance and auditing requirements. oracle.com/database/db-security.html

IT and data security is no longer a specialized niche within DOWNLOAD Oracle Database 10g
the IT organization as it used to be, but something that has to otn.oracle.com/software/products/ias

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ORACLE MAGAZINE SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 20 06 47

Refining

>
the Whe l
>

>
BY A L A N JOCH

>
Oracle Data Hubs centralize and synchronize
the truth of your enterprise.

>
ts a classic courtroom drama. Actor Jack Nicholson, playing the besieged Col.
Jessep in the movie A Few Good Men, is directed by Tom Cruises Lt. Kaffee to tell
the truth. From the witness stand, Jessep glowers at Kaffee and snaps, You cant
handle the truth!
Obviously, Jessep wasnt talking to a business executive. Businesspeople not only can
handle the truth, its something they thrive on. Its the incomplete, duplicate, fuzzy, and
slippery facts that pass as corporate truth that drive executives crazy.
For years, companies of all sizes and industries have been challenged to find ways
to create a single source of truth about their customers and products, often with little
success. That challenge has now been made easier because of Oracles expanding
family of data hub technologies. Data hubs provide a central place where companies
can store customer and product information thats been standardized, enriched, dedu-
plicated, and made available to any enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer
BOB ADLER

relationship management, engineering, or other production system that needs the infor-
mation. Gone are the frustrations of inaccurate records and not knowing if Jennifer

ORACLE MAGAZINE SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 20 06 49

[The data hub] is really about improving the efficiency of the overall corporation. We
believe this is the right infrastructure to have in place.
Jeff Valine, Director of IT Applications and Project Management, IHOP

Jones and J. Jones are different clients or one

and the same.
For example, IHOP, the iconic, nearly 50-
year-old family restaurant chain, began a com-
prehensive effort in 2003 to replace manual
business processes and knock down depart-
mental data silos. Each department had its
own view of who our customers were, says Jeff
Valine, director of IT applications and project
management for the Glendale, California,
company. These views ranged from restaurant
guests to the nearly 400 franchisees that operate
more than 1,200 IHOP restaurants in North
America. If you asked three departments for a
list of customers, you would literally get three
different lists.
Businesses find that data discrepancies do
more than spawn frustration, they also hurt cus-
tomer service. If companies have information
stored in multiple places, they cant coordinate
activities intelligently, says Bill Swanton, vice
president of research for AMR Research, in
Boston, Massachusetts. The last thing you want
is to have a salesman pitch a new product to a
customer who has just finished making an irate
service call.

REDUCING ERRORS, DUPLICATIONS

For IHOP, just as bad as the departmental data
discrepancies were the inefficiencies and errors IHOPs Jeff Valine says when franchisee information was stored in a desktop database and then
that cropped up when the companys franchise moved to paper, there was a lot of duplication and chance for input errors. With Oracle Customer
development and legal departments stepped Data Hub, the data flows from one department to another without any paper being generated,
reducing inefficiencies, he says.
candidates through the franchise qualification
process. Business development people main- program in Java using Oracle Application Server. Once youve
tained franchisee information in a desktop database before got that data hub infrastructure in place you can quickly tap
transferring relevant details in paper documents sent to legal, into that data and bring up a new application, says Valine.
which promptly keyed the information into a spreadsheet. For Valine, the success of IHOPs data hub isnt only mea-
There was a lot of duplication and chance for input errors, sured in return on investment dollars, but by knowing the
Valine says. company is built on the right business foundation. Its really
Then IHOP made Oracle Customer Data Hub, part of the about improving the efficiency of the overall corporation, he
Oracle Fusion Middleware product family, a core component says. We believe this is the right infrastructure to have in place.
of its technical reorganization effort. Now, with a customer Implementing a data hub typically follows clearly defined
data hub in place, the data flows from one department to the steps. First, companies choose the core identifying attributes
other without any paper being generated, he adds. that ensure a unique occurrence of a master record. This is
RAFFI ALEXANDER

Earlier this year, IHOP launched a custom application on usually a collaborative effort among departmental users, privacy
top of the data hub that allows the company to track mile- officers, and IT. For example, attributes in a business custom-
stones for new restaurants, including major steps such as real ers identifying data often include the company name, corporate
estate approvals and construction timelines. IHOP built the Web site address, master phone number, and physical address.

50 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 20 06 ORACLE.COM/ORACLEMAGAZINE
 >
The second step is the easiest. What infor-
mation (data elements) does the company
want to store about each master record? In
larger application portfolios, each source
system has some elements of truth to con-
tribute to the master record. For example, the
accounting application may contain the single
source of truth for the bill-to address, but the
service application contains the single source
of truth for the installed-at address. The Data
Hub technology lets companies source each
data element from each data source if neces-
sary to build the composite master record.
The single-source-of-truth record is further
supported by a metadata framework that
allows companies to personalize the data
models by adding unique attributes to them
without programming.
After the record is uniquely identified, a
robust rules-based matching engine deter-
mines whether the record is a duplicate. If it
is, then the hub doesnt create a new record in
the data registry. Instead, it adds a record in a
cross-reference table.
Data models structure and store the data,
but the next step is to ensure the information
itself is accurate, up-to-date, and complete.
For companies that are new to managing
data quality, often the best strategy is to take
an important subset of the total records and The Oracle Product Information Management Data Hub definitely saves time and eliminates duplication
develop the data quality business processes of effort and redundant entries for the same part, says Matthias Kenngott, IT Director at Glacier Garlock
and corresponding matching, validation, and Bearings, Heilbronn, Germany.
enrichment rules, says Peter Heller, senior
director of applications product marketing at greater reality is that most large organizations run dozens of
Oracle. Most companies are surprised at how bad their data business systems with customer and product information, and
quality is, and very early into the project they realize the need the ability to successfully cross-reference that data has become
for dedicated data quality resources. Data hub best practices an essential competitive advantage. Enter data hubs.
call for a central data librarian supported by a data governance Hubs not only store and maintain accurate records, they
committee from various lines of business to centralize data provide an integration layer for synchronizing the data among
quality business practices, hub operations, and manage the information sources. Hubs based on open standards, such
complete data lifecycle, he says. as Oracles, work with any combination of applications from
various vendors. Further, workflow capabilities in Oracles
DOING MORE data hubs automatically route information from department
Large companiesand even smaller companiesshould do to department for sign-offs, which can reduce approval times
more to manage data. Even if a company runs a single enter- from days or weeks to hours, AMR Researchs Swanton adds.
TON HENRIKS

prise software package, each department that touches cus- Oracle has unified its customer data management across
tomer information needs to coordinate its data management Oracles portfolio of applications and product lines: Oracle
processesand most companies dont, says Heller. And the Customer Data Hub has been integrated with Oracles

ORACLE MAGAZINE SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 20 06 51

PeopleSoft Integrated Customer The hub is one single place where
Master and soon will be integrated SNAP SHOTS we store our information about a
with Oracles Siebel Universal product, but also attach our draw-
Customer Master. Soon Oracle cus- IHOP ings for it. We can find out every-
www.ihop.com
tomers running mixed environments thing about a part from anywhere in
Location: Glendale, California
will be able to create a customer Industry: Hospitality the enterprise, Kenngott says.
record in one product line and have Employees: 897 The hub also makes sense of the
it automatically synchronized with Oracle products: Oracle Database 10g, Oracle Database 9i, frequent changes made to parts.
each of the others, Heller says. Oracle E-Business Suite 11.59, Oracle Customer Data Hub, When you modify an existing part,
The Oracle Product Information Oracle Customer Relationship Management Suite, Oracle you create a link [in the Oracle PIM
TeleSales, Oracle Property Manager, Oracle Sales Online,
Management Data Hub (Oracle Data Hub] to the subsystem with
Oracle Collaboration Suite, Oracle Portal
PIM Data Hub) addresses some of the old part number and cross-
the most nagging problems within Glacier Garlock Bearings reference the new part, says
engineering and manufacturing www.garlockbearings.com Kenngott. The PIM Data Hub simul-
companiesaccurately managing Location: Heilbronn, Germany taneously updates the part reference
parts data. Some part designs are in Industry: Industrial manufacturing in the old system. For new parts,
constant evolution, while other stan- Employees: 1,200 GGB just creates a new part number
Oracle products: Oracle Product Information Management
dard designs remain constant but in the Oracle PIM Data Hub. If it is
Data Hub, Oracle Order Management, Oracle Inventory, Oracle
are prone to duplication when inac- Purchasing, Oracle Manufacturing, Oracle Financials created in Oracle, it is automatically
curate records make it difficult for available in old systems as well.
engineers to determine that the parts Now, if a GGB facility doesnt
already exist. stock a requested part, it can search
Maintaining associated engineering drawings and materials the hub for parts stocked at any other GGB site throughout
hazards sheets for parts is another management problem. The the world. In the past, a GGB facility may have ordered the
bulk of data around products comes from a wide variety of creation of the requested part, assuming one with those speci-
sources. Some of the information is highly confidential, some fications didnt exist, which was a prime cause of part dupli-
of it globalized, and most of it requires strict audit and con- cations. The Oracle PIM Data Hub definitely saves time and
trols. Worst of all it is largely free-form, unstructured informa- eliminates duplication of effort and redundant entries for the
tion, making it hard to coordinate, version, and communicate same part, Kenngott says.
consistently, Heller says. Consequently its an important GGB plans to connect its suppliers and automotive cus-
feature that the Oracle Product Information Management Data tomers with the new parts management system. And if the
Hub can securely handle this diversity of information. company continues to acquire other firms, something it has
Data reliability for parts and materials is important for done frequently in the past, the new Oracle PIM Data Hub
Glacier Garlock Bearings (GGB), a division of EnPro Industries based infrastructure will be a plus.
and the worlds largest manufacturer of metal-polymer plain If the new company has additional ERP systems, we only
bearings. GGB manages 15 sites worldwide from its Heilbronn, need to define the data that will flow between the Oracle PIM
Germany, headquarters. As the company evolves its lean man- Data Hub and their new applications to involve them in our
ufacturing strategy, it relies on universal part numbers to elimi- strategy and tools, says Kenngott. Were well positioned for
nate the duplications and inconsistencies that hampered parts the future. O
management in the past. We looked around and saw that the
[Oracle] PIM Data Hub could help us solve this issue, says Alan Joch (ajoch@worldpath.net) is a technology writer based in New England who
Matthias Kenngott, IT director at GGB. specializes in enterprise, Web, and high-performance-computing applications.
GGB now uses Oracle PIM Data Hub to manage all of its
parts and synchronize the data between the Oracle hub and
three ERP systems. Oracle is now the master for all product
data information, Kenngott says. It stores data in a format
that the other ERP systems understand. READ about data hubs
By culling duplicate part numbers, Oracle PIM Data Hub oracle.com/data_hub
helped GGB reduce the master list from 50,000 to about Learn more about data management
30,000 items. Even so, only about 2,000 standard parts Data Management Dynamics: the ROI from Data Quality
www.oracle.com/data_hub/roi-from-data-quality-white-paper.pdf
that could be easily identified by their attributes existed Common Sense Guide to Customer Data Management
among the entire 30,000-item collection. GGB had to rely oracle.com/data_hub/oraclecdm_wp_march2005.pdf
on engineering drawings to identify the rest. However, the DISCOVER Oracle Fusion Middleware
Oracle PIM Data Hub keeps the relationships between parts oracle.com/products/middleware

and drawings manageable, even when parts are modified.

52 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 20 06 ORACLE.COM/ORACLEMAGAZINE
 SPECIAL ADVERTISING SECTION

How Dell
Does IT When the computer company moved one of its critical supply chains from a
legacy UNIX system to industry-standard technology and Oracle Database 10g,
it boosted performance and cut $5 million out of IT costs.

t Dell, fast, flexible, and lean supply chains operational, we dont build and ship products.

The right IT platform

A lie at the heart of the business. Indeed,
Dells supply chain capabilities are a key
competitive differentiator for the companyone
helps Dell manufacturing that enables Dell to deliver built-to-order comput-
facilities like the one ers to customers quickly and cost-effectively. And
above stay up and running that means that when it comes to the information
and turning out some systems that support that supply chain, there
100,000 systems a day. is little room for error. If these systems are not
If we dont do that, we dont book revenue
which makes these systems mission-critical,
says Duane Miller, senior manager of Worldwide
Procurement IT at Dell.
Not long ago, however, Dells IT professionals
saw potential problems looming on the horizon.
The database that was the foundation of its supply
chain applications was running on a legacy UNIX

S1
 SPECIAL ADVERTISING SECTION

systemand with the ongoing success operational, because the problem is chain database platformand man-
of Dell products and the resulting IT stopping manufacturing at one of our agers wanted to do so quickly, before
workloads, that system was reaching domestic or international facilities. the coming holiday season, when the
the limits of its capacity. Whats more, the IT group could companys sales tend to spike.
We were starting to get Sev 1 calls see that things werent going to be
regularly, says Miller. Such calls, he getting any easier. The demand for Saying good-bye to UNIX
explains, occur when an outage in the Dells products was increasing, and Dells challenge was hardly unique:
supply chain management system forecasts called for higher production Running out of headroom on a large
interrupts production. They are the volumes in the near future. In addition, legacy server is a familiar problem for
highest level of severity in terms of the company was bringing on new IT professionals in many organizations.
problem calls, based on the degree of factories the system had to support. Traditionally, the solution has been to
impact to the business. With those calls, To handle these growing workloads, add another legacy server, in essence
its all hands on deck, and we drop the IT department clearly needed to implementing a relatively large amount
everything and get them back up and increase the capacity of its supply of capacity in one passand then hope
the new server will meet the companys
needs for several more years. But Dell
IT leadership took a look at advancing
technology and decided there was a
better way.
We saw that there was an oppor-
tunity to move the database from the
expensive UNIX environment to a more
cost-effective standards-based envi-
ronment that could provide the high
levels of performance we needed,
Dell on Dell at a Glance says Miller. The platform Dell selected:
groups of Dell PowerEdge servers
Business system running Oracle Database 10g with
Database supporting a supply chain involving: Oracle Real Application Clusters, and
More than 10 manufacturing plants worldwide drawing on Dell/EMC storage devices.
1 million part numbers The platform uses the Linux operating
3 million inventory movements per day system, reflecting a growing trend in
More than 2 million bills of materials per year the Oracle community: According to
1.8 million purchase order lines per year an Independent Oracle Users Group
member survey in early 2006, Linux will
Old environment overtake Suns UNIX-based Solaris as
Sun UNIX server the top operating system for Oracle
database deployments in 2007.
New environment The demands on the Dell and Oracle
Dell PowerEdge servers platform were clearly going to be signif-
Oracle Database 10g with Oracle Real Application Clusters icant. The database has to support a
Dell/EMC storage devices range of vital supply chain processes,
including configuration management,
Benefits procurement, material-cost manage-
More than $5 million in IT savings ment, inventory, and accounts payable.
90 percent reduction in the number of product units not manufactured In terms of workloads, that means han-
due to system outages dling the volumes of information needed
40 to 50 percent shorter financial closings to manage 1 million Dell part numbers
Increased IT flexibility and scalability across nearly 200 product families. It
Reliable, cost-effective support for critical supply chain also means tracking nearly 3 million
inventory movements a day, more than

S2
 SPECIAL ADVERTISING SECTION

The availability of our supply chain systems is paramount

to keeping our factories running. . . . any downtime costs us

thousands of dollars per minute.

Curt Johnson, director of Worldwide Procurement IT, Dell

2 million bills of materials a year, and
nearly 1.8 million purchase order lines
per yearand doing so with high levels
of reliability and speed. The availability
of our supply chain systems is paramount
to keeping our factories running, says
Curt Johnson, director of Worldwide Pro-
curement IT at Dell. And because were
building more than 100,000 systems each
day, any downtime costs us thousands
of dollars per minute.
Not surprisingly, Dells IT group put
the platform through an extensive and
rigorous evaluation. Given the high
stakes involved, the choice was certainly
not a matter of simply choosing the com-
panys own servers, says Miller. We
built an environment where we could
simulate a full online set of users, as well
as the batch processing we use to inter-
face this data with numerous other appli-
cations. The group also put the system
to the test in the real world, implementing
and evaluating it in its Malaysian opera-
tions before rolling it out globally.
The system passed these various
tests, and today Dells supply chain
database is run on clusters of up to six
Dell PowerEdge servers, depending
on the region being supported, with
mirrored disaster recovery systems at
remote sites. That means that Dell has
redundancy at both the backup and
cluster levels. If a server node goes
down, its workload can be picked up
instantly by another node in the cluster.
Additionally, individual nodes can be
brought down one at a time for mainte-
nance without affecting the operation
of the overall systemas opposed to
having to take the entire UNIX server
down when maintenance was required.
And new nodes can be easily added to
the cluster to increase capacity.
In recent years, Dell and Oracle have
tested and validated a variety of configu-
rations using Dell PowerEdge servers
and Oracle software, including such
clustered systems. As a result, Dells IT
group has been able to take advantage
of the strengths of both companies tech-
nologies. In terms of performance, for
example, using Oracle Database 10g,
Dell servers lead other vendors servers
in the 300GB clustered TPC-H price/
performance results. The PowerEdge
servers also include Dell OpenManage
tools, which offer integrated deployment,
monitoring, and change-management
capabilities for updating server software,
operating systems, databases, and appli-
cations, all from a single console.
Dells IT group has also drawn on
Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Grid
Control tools to streamline the monitoring
and management of its databases. Grid
Control lets us manage the clustered
database on multiple servers through
one central location, says Ravee Avutu,
senior manager of Database Manage-
ment Services at Dell. This has helped
us improve reliability and reduce man-
agement costs.
With the new system, Dell IT is now
supporting supply chain operations at
more than 10 plants around the world,
as well as several merging centers in the
U.S., where products such as computers,
printers, and flat panels are consolidated
into orders for more efficient shipping.
Within months, Dell plans to have all of its
regions using Dell and Oracle Database
10g, giving the company a powerful, con-
sistent platform worldwide.
Better performance, lower cost
In operation, the Dell and Oracle plat-
form has proven to be highly effective.
The reliability and stability has just been
phenomenal, says Miller. For example,
Dell tracks the number of product units
that are not manufactured due to system
outagesand that figure has been
reduced by more than 90 percent. At
the same time, he adds, weve seen
tremendous performance improvements.
The new environment can process sig-
nificantly more data than before.
That improvement is especially
evident during weekly, end-of-quarter,
and end-of-month financial processing
times, which have been cut by an esti-
mated 40 to 50 percentor more. Basic
month-end batch jobs that used to take
eight hours now take two to three hours.
In more complex cases, there can be
some 40 steps involved in closing the
books and calculating cost, a process
that used to take 13 hours or more to
complete. Those closings are now com-
pleted in six hours or less. Such reduc-
tions have been key, because during
these closing processes, the supply
chain system is shut downand so is

S3
 SPECIAL ADVERTISING SECTION
manufacturing. Looking ahead, Dell
plans to use the Dell and Oracle platform
to separate the closing process from
production, so that manufacturing will
not be interrupted at all.
Among other things, the systems
performance helps Dell do more with
the same manufacturing capacity. With
fewer disruptions, we are basically
creating more capacity for those facil-
ities, which they can use to build more
product, says Miller.
The new platform has also brought
significant benefits to Dells IT group
itself. With the switch to more cost-
effective technology and sophisticated
management tools, Dell has seen more
than $5 million in IT savings, as well as
process improvements across its IT pro-
duction, disaster recovery, and develop-
ment activities. In addition, says Miller,
this greater reliability has kept us from
having to spend a lot of time trouble-
shooting issues, and let us keep focused
on what we need to be focused on
delivering new functionality to our
business users.
That ability to provide enhanced sup-
port to the business is being strength-
ened by the high level of flexibility that
is inherent in the new system. Its very
easy for us to move services from one
node to another to adjust to changing
workloads, says John Harvill, develop-
ment lead for Worldwide Procurement
at Dell. For example, if a batch or
online processing server is down, we
can move the work from one node to
another, without interruption. Or, if the
company needs to add another factory,
we can easily scale out to support it. In
the past, that would have involved the
fairly painful process of adding a whole
new large UNIX server. Now we can
add a separate node and a little storage,
and were good to go.
Looking back at the decision to move
July 2006. Printed in the U.S.A. Dell, the DELL logo, OpenManage, and PowerEdge are trademarks of Dell Inc. Oracle is a registered trademark of Oracle Corporation. Linux is a registered
trademark of Linus Torvalds. Microsoft and Windows Server are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation. Other trademarks and trade names may be used in this document to refer to
either the entities claiming the marks or their products. Dell disclaims any proprietary interest in the marks and names of others. 2006 Dell Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in any manner
whatsoever without the written permission of Dell Inc. is strictly forbidden. For more information, please contact Dell Inc.
S4
Combined Expertise, Complete Solutions
D ell and Oracle work together on a number of fronts to help companies take
advantage of cost-effective, powerful alternatives to legacy systems.
Experts from both companies collaborate to develop complete solutions,
says Reza Rooholamini, director of Software Development at Dell. Through these
efforts, Dell is able to provide pre-engineered, tested, and validated Intel-based
Oracle database solutions on Red Hat Linux and Microsoft Windows Server
2003. We test and support the entire solution stackservers, storage, switches,
operating systems, and Oracle Database software, says Rooholamini. In
addition, Dell Services and Oracle Consulting Services work together to provide
fixed-fee and custom services designed to accelerate implementation and help
organizations make the best use of the technology.
These collaborative efforts are in keeping with the long-term visions of both
companies. Oracles Grid Computing strategy focuses on delivering flexible,
reliable database throughput; the dynamic provisioning of database workloads on
grids of industry-standard servers; and the ability to easily add more capacity to
grids. Dells Scalable Enterprise vision complements that strategy with its focus
on standardizing the core elements of IT infrastructure to deliver superior value,
and ultimately enabling customers to simplify operations, improve utilization, and
scale effectively.
The effectiveness of the Dell and Oracle partnership is perhaps best illustrated
by the fact that both companies use Dell and Oracle platforms in their own opera-
tions. Oracle develops and tests much of its software on Dell PowerEdge servers
and relies on more than 20,000 Dell Linux servers to power key elements of its
Global IT operations. Similarly, Dell entrusts several mission-critical business
systems to PowerEdge servers running Oracle Database 10gincluding not only
the companys supply chain, but also its European order management system.
to the Dell and Oracle platform, Miller Resources
says the experience holds lessons for IT
departments everywhere. We ran into Dell PowerEdge servers
a problem with the old UNIX system that www.dell.com/PowerEdge
a lot of companies run intoand we Dell/EMC and Dell PowerVault storage
found a solution that gives us the per- www.dell.com/storage
formance, flexibility, and scalability we Dell Scalable Enterprise vision
need for Dells business. Weve been able www.dell.com/enterprise
to significantly lower our IT costs at the Dell and Oracle Database 10g
same time. And most of all, weve been www.dell.com/oracle10g
able to reliably support the Dell supply Oracle and Dell
chain, and play a vital role in helping www.oracle.com/dell
Dell continue to meet the needs of our www.dell.com/oracle
end customers.
Oracle Database 10g

#1 Database
In The World
Other
17.2%
Yet again...
Microsoft
16.8%
Oracle
44.6%
IBM
21.4%

2005 Worldwide Relational Database Management System

Software Revenue

Source: IDC Report, May 2006.

oracle.com
or call 1.800.ORACLE.1
#1 Database means number one in terms of software revenue (license + maintenance)
in the worldwide relational DBMS market. Source: IDC, Worldwide RDBMS 2005 Vendor.
Shares: Preliminary Results for the Top 5 Vendors Show Continued Growth (IDC #201692), May 2006.

Copyright 2006, Oracle. All rights reserved. Oracle, JD Edwards, PeopleSoft and Siebel are registered trademarks of Oracle Corporation and/or its affiliates.
Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.
CONTENT AT YO
anaging streams of unstructured datadocuments,
spreadsheets, presentations, and image filesis a
problem that wont disappear soon. Organizations
generate and receive a relentless influx of infor-
mation from online and offline systems, but companies that
cant manage unstructured content effectively not only suffer
productivity losses, they risk being out of compliance with
government and industry regulations.
How widespread is this problem? John K. Waters writes
in Application Development Trends (Managing Unstructured
Information, February 1, 2005) that more than 80 percent
of the information that companies generate is unstructured
and that managing it has become critical. Just about every
company is coping with an explosion of [data], he writes,
and finding ways to use that unstructured data has become a
competitive differentiator.
With hundreds of team members working on more than
2,000 concurrent projects, POWER Engineers constantly con-
58 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 20 06 ORACLE.COM/ORACLEMAGAZINE
Handle all your unstructured data with
tends with vast quantities of documents, all of which must
be consistently accessed, archived, and shared. The company,
headquartered in Hailey, Idaho, specializes in the energy, facili-
ties, and communications markets.
To streamline its activities, POWER Engineers is migrat-
ing from a paper-based archiving process to an Oracle-based
content management solution that uses a single, integrated
repository for capturing, classifying, retaining, and retiring
content based on enterprisewide policies. Our products are
documents to our clients, says Loren Dugan, IT director at
POWER Engineers. As such, we need to find a way to better
support how theyre generated, how theyre maintained, how
theyre delivered to the clientsand how theyre destroyed
when the documents reach the end of their lifecycle.
Oracles content management solution is centered around
two new database options. Oracle Content Database (Oracle
Content DB) enables customers to manage large volumes
of unstructured content in a single Oracle database. Oracle
UR FINGERTIPS BY DAV ID B AUM

Oracles content management solution.

Records Database (Oracle Records DB) provides for the life-

cycle management of electronic records, so organizations can
fulfill regulatory compliance mandates in an accurate,
repeatable way.
Both of these options use Oracle Database 10g as
the repository for storing and managing unstructured
content. Customers can now use Oracle Database 10g to
store everything: data; files; metadata; text indexes; relation-
ships between objects, security, and access control, says
Andy Mendelsohn, senior vice president of Database Server
Technologies at Oracle. Everything you need to know about
your content is in there, and its all managed in a consis-
tent, auditable, highly controlled way. Unlike the proprietary
BOB ADLER/DESIGN STAFF

content management systems of the past, Oracle has created

easy-to-use Windows and Web interfaces to help organiza-
tions more easily control, secure, and manage large volumes of
structured and unstructured content.
This solution has worked for POWER Engineers. The
management and control of documents is
the backbone of our business. Using and
searching for documents and records is
much more efficient and effective with a
single repository, says Dugan.
We chose Oracles database before we
even chose the ERP [enterprise resource
planning] system. We were sold on the
fact that we needed a world-class database
to support our existing enterprise applica-
tions. Knowing that Oracles database is
the underlying fabric holding everything
together for us makes me sleep better at
night, he says.
Before selecting Oracles content man-
agement system, Dugan and his colleagues
at POWER Engineers evaluated several
third-party content management systems,
but they found them all too expensive
and difficult to usemainly because they
depend on external connections between
an Oracle database and third-party file
systems to link documents, images, and
other content.

THE RIGHT STUFF

The Oracle solution had the capabilities
they needed: It allowed the engineering
company to manage both structured data
and unstructured content in a cohesive
way. This includes not just transactional
POWER Engineers stores more than 3 million documents, many of which need to be kept for 20 years. Says the
and analytical data, but also documents, companys Loren Dugan, What I like best about Oracles system is its simplicityfrom a usability standpoint,
PDF files, all types of images, e-mail and from the ability to archive records quickly and destroy them quickly at the end of their lifecyle.
messages, URLs, HTML files, spreadsheets,
and much more. bution part of the grid. Information on these power systems
Oracles vision for enabling content management through- can become a large security issue if it were to fall into the
out the enterprise was exactly what POWER had in mind, wrong hands.
Dugan says. From that perspective, it aligned well with what The Oracle infrastructure is ideal for POWER Engineers
we wanted to do with our business. growing repository of more than three million documents,
The Oracle solution is also very secure. The security many of which need to be stored for 20 years. The company
model within Oracle Content DB is extraordinarily flexible, is scanning many of these documents into Oracle Content
with fine-grained permissions and access-control policies DB using technology from Kofax, an Oracle partner based in
specified by folder or document, together with both out-of- Irvine, California, which provides information capture solu-
the-box and customer-defined roles, says Rich Buchheim, tions for transforming paper documents into an electronic
senior director of enterprise content management strategy at form that is accessible to POWER Engineers business appli-
Oracle. Users dont need to know anything about databases, cations and databases. All approved project data, including
or do any special archiving, retrieval, or record keeping to hard-copy documents relating to each project, is stored in a
take advantage of these services. We handle all that under single repository, allowing the company to track and manage
the covers, while the users see a familiar environment of data much more easily than before.
files and folders. Additionally, thanks to Oracle Records DB, POWER
POWER Engineers appreciates that level of security. We Engineers has a sustainable solution for regulatory compli-
support more than 2,000 clients in various engineering proj- ance, which reduces the risk associated with content loss
ects, and they want to know that the information that we and legal discovery while still keeping management tasks
BOB RIVES

house for them, from their projects, is safeguarded, Dugan relatively simple. What I like best about Oracles system is its
says. For examplepower substations, or the power distri- simplicityfrom a usability standpoint, from an administra-

60 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 20 06 ORACLE.COM/ORACLEMAGAZINE
 We estimate that the
Oracle solution is about
one-sixth the cost of
any other platform we
looked at.
Anthony Abbattista, Vice
President of Enterprise Technology, Strategy,
and Planning, Allstate Insurance Company

tion standpoint, and from the ability to

archive records quickly and destroy them
quickly at the end of their lifecycle,
Dugan says.
Many organizations can identify with
POWER Engineers issues. To keep up
with a companys growing base of infor-
mation, Oracle Content DB manages all
kinds of documents. Instead of having
file servers scattered all over their orga-
nization, users can consolidate informa-
tion into one secure, centrally managed
location, says Oracles Mendelsohn.
Meanwhile, Oracle Records DB manages
the retention lifecycle of these docu-
ments, such as moving them from
higher- to lower-cost storage devices and
managing the destruction of obsolete
Securing and managing documents inside the Oracle content management solution helps Allstate with its
documents over time. compliance initiatives, says Anthony Abbattista, the companys Vice President of Enterprise Technology,
Additionally, as more and more busi- Strategy, and Planning.
ness processes are migrated online and the
boundaries of the enterprise are extended to include custom- compatible Web services, protocol services, and Java APIs that
ers and partners, many companies need to integrate docu- can be surfaced in a wide variety of business applications,
ments into complex workflows. While this has been difficult such as the Oracle E-Business Suite, says Oracles Buchheim.
to accomplish with other content management systems, pri- A great deal of unstructured content is often associated
marily due to their proprietary interfaces, the Oracle solution with business applications, but now customers can inte-
uses Business Process Execution Language and Web services to grate everything into their business processes, he adds. For
integrate documents into standard business processes. example, a simple bill of materials has many types of content
Patricia Cupoli, the Data Management Associations attached to it: CAD/CAM drawings, URLs, documents, and so
international liaison for the Institute for Certification of forth. Using Oracle Content DB, all that content is securely
Computing Professionals, says that more people need the stored in the Oracle database for easy access, routing, and
information that unstructured data provides. It is the inte- integration with corporate business processes.
gration of structured and unstructured data that is a chal- Many Oracle partners are taking advantage of this open
lenge. . . . Business users want to browse and search across architecture to extend the Oracle content management envi-
all types of data for such opportunities as understanding ronment with content-enabled industry applications. For
customer issues, she writes in DM Review (June 22,2006). example, Open Text, a leader in enterprise content manage-
[Unstructured] data needs to be managed as a corporate ment software, is delivering content-enabled solutions that
asset to provide value. It has to be identified, captured, solve industry-specific problems. These industries include
ANDREA MANDEL

organized, and made accessible and sharable. energy, financial services, telecommunications, and insurance,
Oracle provides different ways to access unstructured and Open Text is using Oracle Content DB to deliver its next
content stored in the database. As part of its content manage- generation of solutions. Open Texts solutions also enable
ment solution, Oracle has developed a set of J2EE- and .NET- customers to access and manage content from Oracles Siebel,

ORACLE MAGAZINE SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 20 06 61

Using and searching for documents and records is much more efficient and effective
with a single respository. We chose Oracles database [first].
Loren Dugan, IT Director, POWER Engineers

PeopleSoft, and JD Edwards applications, as well as future Document management and retention policies can be
Oracle Fusion Applications. applied on a folder-by-folder basis and controlled as part of
an integrated business process. For example, workflows can
LOW-COST CONTENT MANAGEMENT be associated with specific folders and automatically trig-
Integrated content management is especially important gered when events, such as document check-in or deletion,
for large, information-intensive corporations like Allstate occur in them. This allows Allstate to devise custom work-
Insurance Company, the second- flows that drive review and approval
largest property and casualty cycles, notify users when a new docu-
insurer in the United States.
SNAP SHOTS ment version has been checked in, or
In a company of Allstates size, POWER Engineers prevent the deletion of a document
there are many business drivers www.powereng.com without a managers permission.
Location: Hailey, Idaho
for a good document management Securing and managing documents
Industry: Engineering and Construction
solution, says Anthony Abbattista, Employees: 700
inside the Oracle content management
Allstates vice president of Oracle Products and Services: Oracle Content DB, Oracle solution will help us with our compli-
Enterprise Technology, Strategy and Records DB, Oracle Content Services, Oracle Real-Time ance initiatives. First of all, we want
Planning. First, theres a massive Collaboration, Oracle Projects, Oracle Financials, Oracle a secure doc store. We want to know
amount of content that weve been Human Resources, Oracle Purchasing, Oracle iLearning whos looking at documents, whos
digitizing over the last few years as creating them, and what the lifecycle
Allstate Insurance Company
we make our processes better and has been over time. Secondly, when we
www.allstate.com
more efficient. Second, we have Location: Northbrook, Illinois want to retrieve documents, a content
regulatory requirements that neces- Industry: Insurance management solution allows us to
sitate better storage, retention, and Employees: More than 40,000 tag and organize those records in the
retrieval cycles. Oracle Products and Services: Oracle Content DB, Oracle appropriate way, Abbattista says.
The Data Management Records DB, Oracle Content Services Allstate sees these technology
Associations Cupoli agrees. In this improvements as a means to improve
age of Sarbanes-Oxley and other regulations, the overwhelm- service to customers and employees. The Oracle solution
ing amount of unmanaged, unstructured data could increase already stores several hundred million documents. Over
a companys exposure, she writesespecially since the time, we hope to combine our structured and unstructured
unstructured data is not easily accessible or found. content in a way that gives us record management capabili-
Allstate was attracted to the reliability and comparative ties second to none, says Abbattista. In essence, we want to
low cost of the Oracle content management platform. We provide a taxonomy for data. While the data itself might not
estimate that the Oracle solution is about one-sixth the cost be structured, being able to find, index, search, and align it to
of any other platform we looked at, Abbattista adds. Thats our compliance initiatives is really important. Getting every-
largely because the solution builds upon our existing infra- thing into a database helps us accomplish that objective. O
structure, is extremely effective in its use of resources, and
was engineered to be a robust product. As part of our enter- David Baum (david@dbaumcomm.com) is a freelance business writer based in
prise architecture, we have been able to deploy it as a Web Santa Barbara, California.
service, making it very easy for our application programmers
to integrate it into our IT environment.
With Oracles solution, Allstate will easily be able to specify
which content should be retained, for how long, and in what READ more about
form. For example, financial statements must be retained Oracle Content DB
oracle.com/database/contentdb.html
without change for a set period of time, along with an audit-
able log that controls check-in, check-out, and change man- Oracle Records DB
oracle.com/database/recordsdb.html
agement. The company can integrate with familiar desktop
and business applications, providing a document audit trail LEARN about content management for the entire enterprise
oracle.com/technology/products/contentdb/pdf/contentdb-bus-whitepaper.pdf
that lets them quickly find vital information. Once the reten-
DOWNLOAD Oracle Database 10g
tion period has expired, the content management solution will oracle.com/technology/software/products/database/oracle10g
also administer the disposal of documents in a prescribed way.

62 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 20 06 ORACLE.COM/ORACLEMAGAZINE
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on what you do best. We connect technology with processes to drive Bring this ad with you
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 d e v e l o p e r INDUSTRY STANDARD
Getting Rich with Ajax
Build rich internet applications with Asynchronous JavaScript and XML.
f youve ever used Google Maps
to get directions or Flickr to share
photos, youve seen how todays
dynamic Web applications blur
the line between traditional Web and
desktop applicationswith no browser
plug-ins or proprietary browser fea-
tures required. Two of the
technologies responsible for
creating these rich internet
applications are Asynchronous
JavaScript and XML, known
collectively as Ajax.
Ajax is a combination of
technologies used to build
highly interactive, browser-
based user interfaces (UIs),
and it substantially enhances
the interactivity, performance,
and usability of Web applica-
tions. This article outlines
the core fundamentals of
Ajax, what you can do with
Ajax today, and how Oracle
supports Ajax.
REMOTE SCRIPTING REDUX
All hype aside, Ajax isnt really new.
In the past, it was referred to as remote
JavaScript or remote scripting, and
the major browsers have supported it
for several years now, explains Chris
Schalk, principal product manager and
Java evangelist for Oracles Application
Server and Development Tools divi-
sion. Google Maps marks a renais-
sance in the user experience for Web
applications, but the technology
behind it has been out for a while.
Ajaxin a nutshellprovides the
ability to fetch data without the need
for the entire page to be refreshed.
Before Ajax and its clever uses of
STEPHANIE LEE
remote scripting, Web applications
often required a full-page refresh
when the user changed anything on an
application page, such as selecting a
category and expanding or collapsing a
form. The application user often had to
wait for complete page refreshes several
times on a single Web pagenot very
sophisticated compared to todays rich
user experience. With Ajax you get
much better interactivity and you can
stay on the same page longer, unlike
with traditional Web applications,
where youre always navigating between
multiple pages, refreshing entire pages
each time, explains Schalk. Ajax has
also become synonymous with rich-
client architecture in general, so things
like sliders and accordion panels can
interact with the UI in a much more
interactive way without requiring full-
page refreshes each time.
Schalk explains that Ajax applica-
tions require two core technologies: a
JavaScript-enabled browser that sup-
ports XMLHttpRequest objects and an
HTTP server that can generate XML
or other markup, including JavaScript
Object Notation. Because all the popular
browsers support JavaScript and the
necessary XMLHttpRequest objects, and
ORACLE MAGAZINE
BY R IC H SCHWERI N
because any Web server technology can
generate XML (or any markup), the core
Ajax technology is widely available.
An Ajax application in its simplest
form is a standard HTML user interface
with JavaScript components and func-
tions that interact with an HTTP server
that can generate XML or
other markup dynamically,
says Schalk. Any dynamic
Web technology, ranging
from CGI to servletsinclud-
ing JavaServer Faces [JSF]
can serve as a server-side
Ajax technology.
ORACLE JDEVELOPER AND AJAX
RENDER KIT
Most application develop-
ment technologies benefit
greatly from well-defined
development frameworks,
and Ajax is no exception.
One such Ajax-related
framework is Oracle
Application Development Framework
(ADF) Faces, the ADF view technol-
ogy based on JSF. Oracle ADF Faces
provides a rich set of various JSR 127
compliant UI components with built-in
functionality, such as data tables, hierar-
chical tables, and color and date pickers
that can be customized and reused in
applications. This means that develop-
ers can take advantage of Ajax without
necessarily having extensive knowledge
of underlying Ajax technologies.
Whereas most Ajax toolkits force
developers to learn JavaScript and
DHTML [Dynamic HTML], Oracle
abstracts the Ajax technologies into a
JavaServer Faces render kit, which is
offered as part of Oracle ADF Faces,
says Ted Farrell, chief architect and
vice president of tools and middleware
at Oracle. This means that developers
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 20 06 65
INDUSTRY STANDARD
Ajax Under the Hood
Figure 1 shows the key elements of a core Ajax
application, including the following:
O

An HTML page that contains UI elements that
interact with the Ajax JavaScript functions
and the Ajax JavaScript functions that
interact with an Ajax server
O

A server that can process XML HTTP
requests and generate XML
An Ajax application typically includes a
static or generated (via JSP/JSF) HTML
user interface page. This page usually
contains elements such as an input field,
a button, or anything that can be linked
to Ajax-enabled JavaScript. Imagine, for
example, a fictitious e-commerce site
called the Acme Store. It has a store locator
Figure 1: Key Ajax application elements
button that enables users to find the store
closest to a given zip code. Clicking the
button fires an Ajax-enabled JavaScript function
that passes the zip code to an Ajax server object (processAjaxResponse) is set to fire when the
that will return a list of stores.
In this example, the Ajax JavaScript func-
just need to program to the same
JSP/JSF APIs they already know, and
that the Oracle Ajax render kit will
generate the JavaScript, DHTML,
SVG [Scalable Vector Graphics], and
XMLHttpRequest code that is sent to
and from the browser.
Oracle will submit the Ajax render
kit to the open source community as a
follow-up to a previous donation of JSF
components to the Apache MyFaces
project. The Oracle Ajax render kit is
one of four render kits Oracle offers.
The others are HTML, which primarily
generates HTML and some JavaScript;
Telnet, which takes JSF components
and renders them out into telnet; and
Mobile, which takes components and
renders them for mobile devices.
Oracle ADF Faces and the Oracle
Ajax render kits are not the only Oracle
tools available for developers working
with Ajax. Oracle JDeveloper 10g pro-
vides a wide spectrum of options in
terms of what can be built with Oracle
ADF technology, so when it comes
to Ajax, developers have choices,
explains Farrell. You can program in
JavaScript directly, or you can down-
66 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 20 06 ORACLE.COM/ORACLEMAGAZINE
tion first checks to see if the browser supports
asynchronous XMLHttpRequests and then
invokes the Ajax request. Because the request
<html>
<head>
<script>
//AJAX Javascript Functions Generic HTTP
XMLHttpRequest(): XML over HTTP
Listener &
- or -
markup (XML)
ActiveXObject(Microsoft.XMLHTTP):
... Generator
</script>
</head>
<body>
(PHP, Servlet ...)
HTML UI Content
</body>
</html>
AJAXPage.html Application Server
is made asynchronously, a callback function
response returns from the Ajax server object.
As the response comes in, the callback function
load the Oracle ADF Faces components
and the Oracle Ajax render kit, and
then you get a very visual, standards-
based environment. Oracle JDeveloper
adapts to developers programming
styles, so different developers working
on the same team can edit exactly the
same data in a variety of ways theyre
most comfortable with.
ORACLE BACKS OPEN AJAX
Although Oracle recently joined the
Open Ajax initiative to promote Ajax,
Farrell explains that Oracles support
for Ajax isnt newAjax technology
has been part of the Oracle Fusion
Middleware architecture for more than
two years. Oracle is strongly com-
mitted to Ajax technology, and many
of our products, including Oracle
JDeveloper 10g Release 3, utilize Ajax
standards, says Farrell. As a result,
Oracle is making it easier for develop-
ers to reap the benefits of Ajax today
and in the next generation of applica-
tion development.
The initial supporting members of
the Open Ajax initiative include BEA,
Borland, Dojo Foundation, Eclipse
processes the incoming XML data containing the
list of stores. It then uses JavaScript document
object model methods to dynamically update the
Web page with the new list of stores.
In addition to responding to a button
click as in this Acme Store example, Ajax
client functions can be invoked via other
means to improve the end-user experience.
For example, as a user types individual
characters, an Ajax request could be made
with the onKeyUp JavaScript eventan
Ajax autocompletion feature can be imple-
mented this way. An Ajax client request
could also be made with a timer to provide
an Ajax autosave feature that could auto-
matically save all the information in a form
to prevent accidental loss of data in the
event of a browser crash.
For more-detailed information on the pro-
grammatic workings of Ajax, see A Hype-Free
Introduction to Ajax, at oracle.com/technology/
pub/articles/schalk-ajax.html.
Foundation, Google, IBM, Laszlo
Systems, Mozilla, Novell, Openwave,
Oracle, Red Hat, Yahoo!, Zend, and
Zimbra. The initiative promotes
Ajaxs promise of universal compatibil-
ity with any computer device, applica-
tion, or operating system, and easy
incorporation into existing and future
software programs. O
Rich Schwerin (rich.schwerin@oracle.com) is a product
marketing manager with Oracle technology marketing.
READ more about Ajax
oracle.com/technology/tech/java/ajax.html
adaptivepath.com/publications/essays/
archives/000385.php
A Hype-Free Introduction to Ajax
oracle.com/technology/pub/articles/schalk-ajax.html
JOIN the Ajax community
ajaxmatters.com
DISCOVER Ajax development with
Oracle JDeveloper
oracle.com/technology/pub/articles/
nimphius-ajax.html
DOWNLOAD Oracle JDeveloper and
Oracle ADF
oracle.com/technology/products/jdev
& 
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 Take even more control
of your database applications
with SQL Detective 3.4
The World Class Tool for Everybodys Budget

1. SQL Editor - a multi-session, multi-threaded, multi-page
utility that executes any SQL statement or script, PL/SQL
Command, and most SQL*PLUS commands (a syntax
highlighting editor).
2. Select rows, select any single cell or range of cells and
copy them directly into other file formats with only a few
mouse clicks. Or, for more powerful controls, use the
Export utility.
3. Toggle column visibility or move column position using
drag&drop via the unique ColumnSelector.
4. Sort data local or server side; toggle sort direction or
sequence with a single click on any column header.
5. Execute single or multiple statements in the editor or use
Direct Execution on the output tab of your choice using
a single click.
6. Set the unique Smart Output to automatically select the
most logical output tab at statement execution.
7. Re-execute any previously executed statement with a sin-
gle click using the SQL Execution History list; load pre-
saved scripts from a file; or paste one from the clipboard.
1. The Object Navigator offers a new way to quickly select
DB objects, filter content, customize, save and reload scenes
(snapshots) of your Object Navigator workspace.
2. The ObjectSelector tree shows DB and repository objects
hierarchically, displaying object types in different colored
icons: disabled objects in grey, and invalid objects in red.
3. The ContentSelector contains open objects and displays
the active object in tabs and its information in sub-tabs.
4. Scenes are Object Navigator workspace snapshots of all
open objects, pane sizes and positions. Re-load a scene
and see frequently used objects with a single click.
Add or remove objects or navigate through scenes using
the SceneSelector.
5. Customize active object display by toggling visibility of
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Visit www.sqldetective.com to learn why 3.4 is one of the most powerful,
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 d e v e l o p e r FRAMEWORKS
Harnessing the Active Data Model
Going beyond basic data access with custom service methods
ne of the key benefits of using
Oracle Application Development
Framework (ADF) Business
Components is its built-in
support for an active data model. If youve
worked with Oracle Forms or other
4GL tools, youll find active data model
support in Oracle JDeveloper using ADF
Business Components to be very famil-
iar. You design your application module
by creating a set of master/detail view
objects, and then you create a user inter-
face by dragging and dropping data attri-
butes or collections from the data model
onto a visual page designer. At runtime,
your application pages always reflect the
current state of the data model, with no
additional coding required. And you can
modify the built-in data access functional-
ity by adding custom methods to your
application module, in much the same
way you would add form-level procedures
and functions in the Oracle Forms world.
In this column, Ill describe how the
active data model works. Ill show you
how to add custom service methods to
application modules as well as how to
use those custom methods when build-
ing a user interface.
UNDERSTANDING THE ACTIVE DATA MODEL
Without ADF Business Components in
your J2EE development toolkit, youd
likely spend a lot of time performing
many tedious tasks when building user
interfaces. These tasks include invoking
methods of a business service to retrieve
initial data, tracking the specific data that
a client user interface (UI) has created
or modified, passing those data changes
back to service methods for validation
and storage, and retrieving the data
again to ensure that the display is up-
to-date with any data changes made by
server-side business logic. This create,
retrieve, update, delete, and save cycle
is very common in enterprise business
applications, yet it takes a lot of work to
develop from scratch.
ADF Business Components provide
a more generic approach that can save
you a lot of development time. With ADF
Business Components, the application
module implements a base set of generic
service methods that enable an active data
model. The client UI code works with the
interfaces in the oracle.jbo package that
provide a higher-level API to query, create,
delete, modify, and save rows in the data
model. In addition, when you build UI
displays that use the Oracle ADF Model
layer for declarative data binding, you
usually dont need to write any client-side
code at all to work with the active data
model. Your displays are bound declara-
tively to view object instances in the data
model as well as to any custom business
service methods you create (in case you
need to invoke other business service
functions). When the client updates data,
your ADF Business Components auto-
matically validate and save the changes.
And when custom business logic changes
values in a row, your ADF Business
Components automatically update the
display with the latest information.
The two simple examples that follow
show the benefits of using an active data
model within an application:
O

In a project management application,
a manager assigns a task to an employee
specified by that persons employee
ID. At the moment the manager makes
the assignment, business logic encap-
sulated in an entity object in the busi-
ness domain layer automatically checks
that the assigned employee ID is valid.
Then another business rule updates the
assigned date to the current date. After
these changes are made, the user inter-
face automatically shows the updated
assigned date.
ORACLE MAGAZINE
BY STEVE MUENCH
O

In a page with a tree display that
shows master/detail information for a
given node, the user selects a node. A
business service method in the applica-
tion module then automatically performs
a query to retrieve master/detail infor-
mation. Finally, the display updates to
reflect the new master/detail data.
If you dont use an active data model,
you will have to write much more code
in the client to handle the straight-
forward, everyday CRUD (create, read,
update, and delete)style operations
described earlier. By using an Oracle
ADF application module to implement
your business service, you can spend less
time on plumbing and focus your time
on the business logic to make the appli-
cation work as your end users expect.
ADDING A CUSTOM SERVICE METHOD
Whenever you have code in your busi-
ness service layer that manipulates view
objects, you should encapsulate that
code within a custom method in your
application modules Java class. Among
the most common candidates for custom
methods are code that configures view
object properties to query the correct
data to display, code that iterates over
view object rows to return an aggregate
calculation, and code that performs any
kind of multistep procedural logic with
one or more view objects.
By adopting this application best prac-
tice, you gain several important benefits.
You can more easily create multiple client
pages that call the same code, and you
can easily improve your implementation
later without affecting client interfaces.
You can also simplify the work required
to perform regression tests on your busi-
ness service functions. Furthermore, you
make it possible to invoke business func-
tionality from within your pages declara-
tively (as well as programmatically).
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 20 06 69
FRAMEWORKS

codeLISTING 1: A simple custom service method in an application module
public void deleteCurrentEmpAndCommit() {
Row empRow = getEmpView().getCurrentRow();
if (empRow != null) {
empRow.remove();
getDBTransaction().commit();
} be successfully added, all the types in
} its method signature must implement
codeLISTING 2: An application module custom interface
package oramag.frameworks.example.common;
import oracle.jbo.ApplicationModule;
public interface HRService extends ApplicationModule {
void deleteCurrentEmpAndCommit();
} method to the application module class
To add a custom service method to an
application module in Oracle JDeveloper,
simply enable a custom Java class for
your application module, navigate to it
in the Java code editor, and type the Java
code for a new public method into the
application modules Java implementa-
tion class. Listing 1 shows a simple
deleteCurrentEmpAndCommit() method
that could be used in an HRService appli-
cation module. This method accesses the
current row in an EmpView view object
instance in the data model and calls its
remove() method to delete it. The
deleteCurrentEmpAndCommit() method
then accesses the current transaction
and calls its commit() method to save
the changes.
Although a custom application
module method can accept arguments
if necessary, note how easy it is for the
code in custom methods to refer to a
view object instance in the data model,
using generated accessor methods such
as getEmpView(). By calling the
getCurrentRow() method on a view
object (as shown in Listing 1), you can
access the same current row for any view
object the client user interface uses. As
a result, there is often no need to pass
parameters from the client if the goal is
simply to pass values from current rows
of other view object instances in the
same application modules data model.
PUBLISHING CUSTOM SERVICE METHODS
TO CLIENTS
When you add a public custom method
to your application module class, you
also need to include the method in the
application modules client interface to let
client UIs invoke it. In Oracle JDeveloper,
to publish a method from your applica-
tion modules custom Java class on the
client interface, use the Client Interface
panel of the Application Module Editor.
Select one or more desired methods from
the Available list, and click > to move
them to the Selected list. Then click OK
to save your changes.
When you publish custom service
methods on the client interface, Oracle
JDeveloper creates a Java interface
with the same name as the application
module in the common subpackage of
your application modules package (as
illustrated in Listing 2). For an appli-
cation module named HRService in
the oramag.frameworks.example package,
this custom interface would be named
HRService and reside in the oramag
.frameworks.example.common package.
The interface extends the base
ApplicationModule interface in the oracle
.jbo package, reflecting the fact that a
client can access all of the base function-
ality your application module inherits
from the ApplicationModuleImpl class.
Whenever you add methods to or
remove them from the Selected list in
the Client Interface panel, the corre-
sponding service interface file gets
updated automatically. Oracle JDeveloper
also generates a companion client proxy
class that is used when you deploy
your application module for access by a
remote client. For the HRService applica-
tion module in this example, the client
proxy file is called HRServiceClient and
is created in the oramag.frameworks
.example.client subpackage.
You can include most custom methods
in the client interface. For a method to
the java.io.Serializable interface and any
checked exceptions must be JboException
or a subclass. Your method can also throw
any unchecked exceptionjava.lang
.RuntimeException or subclass thereof
without any problems. If you add a
but dont see it in the Available list, first
check that it doesnt violate any of the
rules above. If it seems that your added
method should be legal, try recompiling
the application module class and visiting
the Application Module Editor again.
The online version of this article, at
oracle.com/technology/oramag/oracle/
06-sep/o56frameworks.html, includes
information on calling a custom service
method. For more details about working
with ADF Business Components, see
the Oracle ADF Developers Guide for
Forms/4GL Developers manual on OTN at
oracle.com/technology/documentation/
jdev/b25947_01. O
Steve Muench is a consulting product manager for
Oracle JDeveloper and an Oracle ACE. In his more than
16 years at Oracle, he has developed and supported
Oracle tools and XML technologies and continues to
evangelize them. Muench coauthored the Oracle ADF
Developers Guide for Forms/4GL Developers (Oracle,
2006) and wrote Building Oracle XML Applications
(OReilly Media, 2000). He shares tips and tricks on OTN
(oracle.com/technology) and in his Dive into BC4J and
ADF blog (radio.weblogs.com/0118231).
READ online-only article content
oracle.com/technology/oramag/oracle/06-sep/
o56frameworks.html
READ more about Oracle
JDeveloper 10g and Oracle ADF
oracle.com/technology/products/jdev
oracle.com/technology/products/jdev/tips/
muench/designpatterns
oracle.com/technology/documentation/jdev/
b25947_01
DOWNLOAD Oracle JDeveloper 10g
oracle.com/technology/products/jdev

70 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 20 06 ORACLE.COM/ORACLEMAGAZINE
 d e v e l o p e r ODP.NET
Debugging PL/SQL from .NET
Debug PL/SQL in Microsoft Visual Studio with Oracle Developer Tools.
ebugging PL/SQL code in
Microsoft Visual Studio is as
easy as debugging native .NET
code, thanks to the PL/SQL
debugger in Oracle Developer Tools for
Visual Studio .NET (ODT). This column
demonstrates how to set up PL/SQL
debugging in ODT and how to create
and step through PL/SQL code from
within your .NET solution.
To use PL/SQL debugging in ODT,
you must have the following:
O
Access to Oracle9i Database Release 2
(9.2) or Oracle Database 10g
O
Oracle Data Provider for .NET (ODP
.NET) release 10.2.0.2 or later installed
O
ODT (10.2.0.2 or later) installed
O
Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 (or
Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003)
installed
To step through the PL/SQL code that
accompanies this column, you must also
have access to the HR sample schema
included with Oracle Database.
THE INTEGRATED PL/SQL DEBUGGER
The new, integrated PL/SQL debugger
in ODT 10.2.0.2 allows you to remain
inside Visual Studio for end-to-end
debugging of your .NET and Oracle
solution. You can now debug PL/SQL
code such as procedures and functions
(both standalone and packaged), object
methods, and triggers from within the
Visual Studio environment in the same
way you would debug your C# or VB
code. With the ODT integrated PL/SQL
debugger, you can do traditional debug-
ging tasks such as setting break points,
viewing and modifying variable values,
and examining the call stack.
You use the PL/SQL debugger in one
of three modes:
Direct database debugging. The direct
database debugging mode allows you
to debug PL/SQL code directly from the
Visual Studio environment. When you
use the direct database debugging mode,
you do not need a Visual Studio solution
or .NET codeyou work directly with
the PL/SQL code in the database.
External application debugging. If you
need to debug the PL/SQL code that
is called by a compiled binary or an
application that is on a non-Windows
platform, use the external application
debugging mode. This mode allows
you to debug PL/SQL programs that are
called by any application (built with
Oracle Database client libraries 9.2 or
later) located on any platform without
requiring you to modify the application.
Multitier application debugging. The most
powerful option during the development
of a .NET application is the multitier
application debugging mode, which
enables you to seamlessly debug both
.NET and PL/SQL code from within
your Visual Studio solution. You can
step directly from your .NET code into
the PL/SQL code and back out again.
This article shows how to use the
multitier application debugging mode.
Because this mode allows you to work
with both .NET and PL/SQL code simul-
taneously during a debugging session,
Ive found it to be the most commonly
used of the three modes.
CREATE A NEW CONNECTION
The first step to PL/SQL debugging
with ODT is to create a new con-
nection in Oracle Explorer in Visual
Studio. If Oracle Explorer is not visible,
select View -> Oracle Explorer from
the main menu. The top-level node of
Oracle Explorer is Data Connections.
To create a new connection in the
Data Connections node, right-click
Data Connections and select Add
Connection. In Data source name,
select or type in the name of the data-
ORACLE MAGAZINE
BY M A R K A. WI LLI AMS
source you want to use. The datasource
is also commonly known as the tns-
alias or tnsnames file entry. Click Use a
specific user name and password. In
the User name field, enter HR. In the
Password field, enter the password for
the HR user in your database. Ensure
that the Role list has the value Default.
Change the proposed Connection name
to HR.ORAMAG. Click Test connection
to make sure the connection details are
all correctly specified. Click OK to com-
plete the connection setup.
Repeat the steps above to establish an
additional connection for the SYSTEM
user with the SYSDBA role if you have
the privileges to do so. Name the con-
nection SYSTEM.ORAMAG. You will need
this SYSTEM connection to grant the
appropriate debugging privileges to HR.
GRANT THE REQUIRED PRIVILEGES
If you are using Oracle Database 10g
(10.1 or later), you or your DBA must
grant two necessary privileges to the
HR user: DEBUG CONNECT SESSION
and DEBUG ANY PROCEDURE. If you
are using Oracle9i Database (9.2), only
the DEBUG ANY PROCEDURE privi-
lege is required. (As an alternative to
the DEBUG ANY PROCEDURE privi-
lege, you can grant both DEBUG and
EXECUTE permissions on the particular
PL/SQL program being debugged). With
these privileges, the HR user can debug
PL/SQL code from within the Visual
Studio environment.
To grant these privileges, use
the DBA connection and the query
window provided by ODT. To open
the query window, right-click the
SYSTEM.ORAMAG node under Data
Connections in Oracle Explorer and
select Query Window. To grant the first
privilege, type GRANT DEBUG CONNECT
SESSION TO HR in the query editor and
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 20 06 71
ODP.NET

click Execute. To grant the second privi-
lege, delete the existing text in the query
editor, type GRANT DEBUG ANY PROCEDURE
TO HR, and click Execute.
codeLISTING 1: The HR.ORAMAG PL/SQL package code
CREATE OR REPLACE PACKAGE HR.ORAMAG IS
TYPE T_IN_VALUES IS TABLE OF NUMBER INDEX BY BINARY_INTEGER;
TYPE T_OUT_VALUES IS TABLE OF NUMBER INDEX BY BINARY_INTEGER;

PROCEDURE DETERMINE_PRIMES (P_IN_VALUES IN T_IN_VALUES,

CREATE THE PL/SQL PACKAGE AND BODY P_OUT_VALUES OUT T_OUT_VALUES);
With a connection to the database created
and the necessary privileges granted, you FUNCTION IS_PRIME (P_NUMBER IN NUMBER) RETURN NUMBER;

can now create the PL/SQL example code
used in this article to demonstrate the fea-
tures of the PL/SQL debugger. You create
a PL/SQL package and a PL/SQL package
body. The PL/SQL package describes and
exposes (or publishes) the functionality
in the package body, which is where the
functionality described in the package is
implemented. The PL/SQL code example
in Listings 1 and 2 determines whether
each number in a PL/SQL array is a prime
number and creates a new row in the
JOBS table using a PL/SQL record.
To create the PL/SQL code, use
the query window within ODT. To
display the query window, right-click
the HR.ORAMAG connection node
in Oracle Explorer and select Query
Window from the context menu. Enter
the text of Listing 1 in the Query Editor
field, and click Execute to create the
package. Next, replace the text in the
Query Editor field with the text of
Listing 2 and click Execute to create the
package body. The Listing 1 and Listing
2 code is available in the Database.sql
script included with this columns code
download, at oracle.com/technology/
oramag/oracle/06-sep/o56odp.zip.
You must compile the PL/SQL code
with debug information to enable
debugging. To do this, go to Oracle
Explorer and expand the Packages
node. Find the ORAMAG package;
right-click it; and from the menu, select
Compile Debug. The icon next to the
ORAMAG package and the individual
procedures and functions underneath
it will change to reflect that it has been
compiled with debug information.
CREATE THE .NET PROJECT
To create a new .NET project to test
and debug the PL/SQL code, select
File -> New -> Project from the Visual
Studio main menu. Select Visual C#
Projects from the Project Types list.
IS_NOT_A_PRIME CONSTANT NUMBER DEFAULT 0;
IS_A_PRIME CONSTANT NUMBER DEFAULT 1;
JOBS_REC jobs%rowtype;
PROCEDURE ADD_NEW_JOB (P_JOB_ID IN JOBS.JOB_ID%TYPE,
P_JOB_TITLE IN JOBS.JOB_TITLE%TYPE,
P_MIN_SALARY IN JOBS.MIN_SALARY%TYPE,
P_MAX_SALARY IN JOBS.MAX_SALARY%TYPE);
END ORAMAG;
Select Console Application from the
Templates list, and give the new project
a name such as SepOct2006 in the Name
field. You must add a reference to the
ODP.NET assembly to your project to
access the PL/SQL code. To add the refer-
ence, select Project -> Add Reference
from the Visual Studio main menu.
Select Oracle.DataAccess.dll from the
Component Name list. Now that the
reference to the ODP.NET assembly has
been added, replace the template C# code
generated by Visual Studio with the code
in Listing 3, available with this columns
code download and in the online version
of this column at oracle.com/technology/
oramag/oracle/06-sep/o56odp.html.
When you create a new project,
the Enable the Visual Studio hosting
process debug option is enabled by
default. Oracle recommends that you
disable it, by selecting Project ->
Properties from the Visual Studio
main menu, clicking the Debug tab,
and unchecking Enable the Visual
Studio hosting process in the Enable
Debuggers list. Alternatively, you
will need to start and then terminate
the debugger once before the PL/SQL
debugger can work properly.
CONFIGURING THE DEBUGGER OPTIONS
To debug the PL/SQL code seamlessly
from the Visual Studio environment, you
need to configure ODT to locate the
PL/SQL code to be debugged: Select
Tools -> Options from the Visual
Studio main menu, select Oracle
Developer Tools from the Options list,
and then click the check box next to
HR.ORAMAG in the Available Database
Connections list. The PL/SQL debugger
may identify the code to be debugged by
looking for any checked connections, so
if you have other connections defined,
ensure that they are not checked.
In the same location, you will see
a TCP/IP port range. During PL/SQL
debugging, Oracle Database will connect
to Visual Studio via TCP/IP on a random
port within this range. Make sure this
range represents open ports on your
machine and that they are not blocked
by a firewall.
The last step in configuring ODT
to debug PL/SQL alongside your .NET
code is to enable application debug-
ging. To do this, select Tools -> Oracle
Application Debugging from the Visual
Studio main menu and ensure that
there is a check mark next to Oracle
Application Debugging in the menu,
indicating that it is enabled.
DEBUGGING THE PL/SQL CODE
Now that you have created the PL/SQL
code, granted the appropriate privileges
to the HR user, and created a C# project,
you can debug the code from within the
Visual Studio environment.
Setting break points. You must set break
points in both your C# and PL/SQL
code to stop the debugger during execu-
tion. Set a break point in your C# code

72 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 20 06 ORACLE.COM/ORACLEMAGAZINE
 after the ExecuteNonQuery call, which
executes the DETERMINE_PRIMES PL/
SQL procedure. In addition, set a break
point in your PL/SQL code after the
BEGIN keyword in the DETERMINE_
PRIMES procedure. If you dont set a
break point in your PL/SQL code, the
debugger will not stop inside the PL/
SQL code body. If you dont set a break
point in your C# code, the debugger
will not stop inside the C# code when
you return from the PL/SQL code. To
compile and run the solution in debug
mode, select Debug -> Start Debugging
from the Visual Studio menu. The
program will begin running, and the
ODT debugger will stop execution on
your break point in the PL/SQL code
(see Figure 1). Press the F11 key to step
through the PL/SQL code line by line.
Viewing and modifying variable values.
Figure 1: The PL/SQL debugger and array expansion during debugging While debugging the example, you can
watch the C# application set up and
call the DETERMINE_PRIMES PL/SQL
procedure, which accepts an array in
its first parameter. When working with
the PL/SQL debugger in Visual Studio,
you can see each element in an array
at debug time with the live data that
was passed to the procedure from the
.NET application. Figure 1 shows the
debugger stopped on the break point
in the DETERMINE_PRIMES PL/SQL
procedure with the passed-in array
P_IN_VALUES expanded in the Locals
window, which displays local variables.
In addition to examining types such
as arrays while debugging, you can
examine other complex types, such as
each element in a PL/SQL record type or
a user-defined type.
To continue executing the program,
press the F5 key until the Visual Studio
Figure 2: Examining a PL/SQL record type within the PL/SQL debugger debugger halts execution on the break
point you previously set in the C# code.
Set a break point in the ADD_NEW_JOB
PL/SQL procedure. You can then press
F5 once more to continue execution until
you reach the break point in the ADD_
NEW_JOB procedure. To step through
this procedure line by line, press F11.
Figure 2 illustrates drilling down into
the JOBS_REC PL/SQL record type in
the ADD_NEW_JOB stored procedure.
Figure 3: Viewing a PL/SQL call stack To view or drill down into a global

ORACLE MAGAZINE SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 20 06 73

ODP.NET

codeLISTING 2: The HR.ORAMAG PL/SQL package body code PL/SQL package variable such as JOBS_
REC, you must use the Watch window,
CREATE OR REPLACE PACKAGE BODY HR.ORAMAG IS
a built-in window in Visual Studio that
PROCEDURE DETERMINE_PRIMES (P_IN_VALUES IN T_IN_VALUES,
P_OUT_VALUES OUT T_OUT_VALUES) IS allows you to examine specific program
BEGIN variables. To add JOBS_REC to the
for i in p_in_values.first..p_in_values.last
loop
Watch window, right-click JOBS_REC in
p_out_values(i) := is_prime(p_in_values(i)); the code and select Add Watch from the
end loop; context menu.
END DETERMINE_PRIMES;
View the PL/SQL call stack. Another
FUNCTION IS_PRIME (P_NUMBER IN NUMBER) RETURN NUMBER IS important PL/SQL debugging feature is
l_sqrt number := 0;
the ability to view the PL/SQL call stack.
l_sqrt_ceil number := 0;
l_divisor number := 0; By examining the call stack, you can
l_divisor_squared number := 0; determine the code path to the current
begin
if p_number < 2 then
point in the execution of your program.
return IS_NOT_A_PRIME; To view the call stack, click Visual
end if; Studios Call Stack tab, which is available
if p_number != ceil(p_number) then by default in debug mode. Figure 3 illus-
return IS_NOT_A_PRIME; trates the call stack within the IS_PRIME
end if; PL/SQL function in the package body.
if p_number = 2 then You can double-click on any level
return IS_A_PRIME; of the stack to go to the corresponding
end if;
line of code.
if mod(p_number,2) = 0 then
return IS_NOT_A_PRIME; SUMMARY
end if;
With the example code provided with
l_sqrt := sqrt(p_number); this column, you can take your own tour
l_sqrt_ceil := ceil(l_sqrt); of the PL/SQL debugger. It offers the
if l_sqrt = l_sqrt_ceil then same debugging features you are already
return IS_NOT_A_PRIME; familiar with from your experience in
end if;
debugging C# or VB code, and the ability
l_divisor := 3; to seamlessly debug both .NET and PL/
SQL code from a common environment is
for i in 1..l_sqrt_ceil
loop
a welcome addition to the tools available
l_divisor_squared := l_divisor * l_divisor; for the .NET and Oracle programmer. O
if mod(p_number,l_divisor) = 0 and l_divisor_squared < p_number then
return IS_NOT_A_PRIME; Mark A. Williams (mawilliams@cheshamdbs.com)
end if; is an Oracle ACE, an Oracle Certified Professional
DBA, and the author of Pro .NET Oracle Programming
if l_divisor_squared > p_number then
return IS_A_PRIME; (Apress, 2004).
end if;

l_divisor := l_divisor + 2;
end loop;
END IS_PRIME; READ online-only column content
oracle.com/technology/oramag/oracle/06-sep/
PROCEDURE ADD_NEW_JOB (P_JOB_ID IN JOBS.JOB_ID%TYPE, o56odp.html
P_JOB_TITLE IN JOBS.JOB_TITLE%TYPE,
P_MIN_SALARY IN JOBS.MIN_SALARY%TYPE, VISIT the .NET Developer Center
P_MAX_SALARY IN JOBS.MAX_SALARY%TYPE) IS oracle.com/technology/dotnet
BEGIN DOWNLOAD
jobs_rec.job_id := p_job_id;
the sample code for this column
jobs_rec.job_title := p_job_title; oracle.com/technology/oramag/oracle/06-sep/
jobs_rec.min_salary := p_min_salary; o56odp.zip
jobs_rec.max_salary := p_max_salary;
ODP.NET 10g
insert into jobs (job_id, job_title, min_salary, max_salary) oracle.com/technology/tech/windows/odpnet
values (jobs_rec.job_id, jobs_rec.job_title, jobs_rec.min_salary, jobs_rec.max_salary); Oracle Developer Tools for Visual
END ADD_NEW_JOB;
Studio .NET
oracle.com/technology/tech/dotnet/tools
END ORAMAG;

74 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 20 06 ORACLE.COM/ORACLEMAGAZINE
 d e v e l o p e r BROWSER-BASED
Express Lockdown
Lock down your Oracle Application Express applications.
hen talking about Oracle
Application Express, I find
that the concept of authen-
tication is easy to explain.
Access control within applications,
however, seems to be a bit more difficult
to convey. With that in mind, Id like to
walk through the process of creating an
application and then locking it down so
that only privileged users can perform
specific operations. In doing so, Ill take
advantage of a feature newly added to
Oracle Application Express in version
2.2: the Access Control Page wizard.
STEP 1: SET UP THE TABLES
To get started, create (or have your
administrator create) a new work-
space. Once logged in to your Oracle
Application Express workspace, create
an application based on the employee
data in the provided spreadsheet:
1. Click Application Builder.
2. Click Create.
3. Select Create from Spreadsheet, and
click Next.
4. Select Upload file, and click Next.
5. Click Browse; select the om_
employees.csv script, available with the
sample application code for this article at
oracle.com/technology/oramag/oracle/
06-sep/o56browser.zip; and click Next.
6. Enter OM_EMPLOYEES into the Table
Name field, and click Next.
7. Enter Employee and Employees into
the Singular Name and Plural Names
fields, respectively.
8. Click Next.
9. Select DEPARTMENT_ID in the
Summary by Column field, and click
Next.
10. Click Next again on each of the sub-
sequent pages, accepting the defaults,
to complete the wizard. (On the User
Interface page, select a theme other than
the defaultTheme 1, if you like.)
11. Click Create on the last page of
the wizard to confirm your decision to
create an application.
STEP 2: TAKE A QUICK LOOK AT
THE APPLICATION
At this point, you can see the application
in action by clicking Run Application
on the success page. Log in, using the
same username and password you used
to log in to your Oracle Application
Express workspace. The application is a
simple one that allows you to view and
update the employee data you uploaded
in step 1. Clicking the Analysis tab
provides you with access to visual and
tabular breakdowns of the number of
employees in each department.
STEP 3: ADD AN ACCESS CONTROL PAGE
Traditionally, you would secure the
application by first defining a set of
authorization schemes that determine
if the current user has specific privi-
leges based on some rules. With those
schemes defined, the next step would
be to flag the various parts of the appli-
cation, including user interface compo-
nents and application logic, to render
or process only after they pass those
security checks.
Oracle Application Express 2.2,
however, introduces a much more
streamlined approach to creating and
managing those authorization schemes,
with the Access Control Page wizard.
Using this wizard creates two tables
in your application schema as well as
a screen for managing the values they
store. The wizard also creates three
authorization schemes that check those
tables to see two things: (1) the access
mode of the application overall and (2)
whether the current user has been iden-
tified as having Admin, Edit, or View
privileges. Using this new wizard saves
ORACLE MAGAZINE
BY R A J MATTAMAL
you from having to create this plumb-
ing, so you can focus on securing the
areas that need securing.
To start the Access Control Page
wizard, do the following:
1. In the developer toolbar at the
bottom of the screen, click Create.
2. Select New Page, and click Next.
3. Select Access Control, and click Next.
4. Accept the default administration
page number, 8, and click Next.
5. Select Use an existing tab set and
create a new tab within the existing
tab set.
6. Select TS1 (Employees, Analyze) in
the Tab Set field.
7. Enter Administration in the New Tab
Label field, and click Next.
8. Click Finish.
If you click Run Page on the success
page of the wizard, youll see the access
control page you just added to your
application. The page is divided into
two regions, one where you set the
Access Mode of the application and
another where you populate a list of
privileged users.
STEP 4: IDENTIFY PRIVILEGED USERS
Select the second Access Mode option,
Restricted Access, and click Set
Application Mode. In the Access
Control region, youll specify which
users have what privileges. To keep
things simple, the users of your appli-
cation will be the employees in the
om_employees.csv spreadsheet. Within
that list, give JCHEN administrative
privileges, AFRIPP edit privileges, and
LPOPP view privileges.
1. Click Add User.
2. Enter JCHEN in the Username
field, and select Administrator in the
Privilege column.
3. Click Apply Changes, and then click
Add User.
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 20 06 75
BROWSER-BASED
4. Enter AFRIPP in the Username field,
and select Edit in the Privilege column.
5. Click Apply Changes, and then click
Add User.
6. Enter LPOPP in the Username field,
and select View in the Privilege column.
7. Click Apply Changes.
As mentioned earlier, the completed
application will treat employees in the
spreadsheet as users. To implement this
rule, you must add a tiny authentication
function to the current authentication
scheme. First, lets create the function:
1. Click the Logout link, to log out of
your application (because youll have
to log in as a privileged employee when
youve completed step 5).
2. Enter the Application Express devel-
opment environment by clicking Edit
Application in the developer toolbar at
the bottom of the screen.
3. Click the SQL Workshop tab.
4. Click SQL Commands.
5. Copy and paste the function code from
Listing 1 into the SQL Command field.
6. Click Run.
With the function created, now make
the current authentication scheme use it:
1. Click the Application Builder tab.
2. Click OM_EMPLOYEES.
3. Click Shared Components.
4. Click Authentication Schemes.
5. Click Application Express Current.
6. In the Authentication Function field
in the Login Processing section, replace
the -BUILTIN- value by entering return
om_custom_auth.
7. Click Apply Changes.
STEP 5: APPLY AUTHORIZATION RULES TO
APPLICATION COMPONENTS
The final step is to apply the autho-
rization schemes in the appropriate
places. The first step in this process is to
decide which users should be allowed
to perform what actions. The easiest
approach Ive found is to start with the
most-common application actions and
privileges. So to start with, allow users
to access the application only if theyve
been granted at least View privileges:
1. In the breadcrumb links in the upper
left corner of the Application Express
development environment screen, click
the Application nnn link, where nnn
76 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 20 06 ORACLE.COM/ORACLEMAGAZINE
codeLISTING 1: om_custom_auth function
create or replace function om_custom_auth (
p_username in VARCHAR2,
p_password in VARCHAR2)
return BOOLEAN is
begin
for c1 in (select 1
from om_employees
where upper(userid) = p_username
and upper(last_name) = upper(p_password))
loop
return true;
end loop;
return false;
end;
/
represents the numeric ID associated
with your current application.
2. Click Edit Attributes.
3. Click Security.
4. Select access control view in the
Authorization Scheme field in the
Authorization section.
5. Click Apply Changes.
The next level of common applica-
tion actions involves editing. Only users
with at least Edit privileges should be
able to edit or delete data, so allow only
Edit- and Administrator-privileged users
to see the Edit icon when viewing the
report on page 1 of your application:
1. Click the Edit icon (resembling a
pencil over a pad) in the upper right
corner of the screen to navigate to the
definition of page 101.
2. Enter 1 in the Page field, and click Go.
3. Click the Report link in the Regions
section.
4. In the list of report columns, click the
Edit icon in the ID row.
5. Select access control edit in the
Authorization Scheme field in the
Authorization section.
6. Click Apply Changes.
In the same way you hid the Edit
icon for unprivileged users earlier, apply
the access control edit scheme to the
Create button on page 1. Then apply
the same rule to the whole of page 2,
by selecting access control edit in
the Authorization Scheme field of the
page-level attributes page.
The last steps for securing your
application are to allow only admin-
istrators to access the Administration
page, page 8, and its associated tab.
Restrict this access by selecting access
control administrator in the
Authorization Scheme field of the
page-level attributes page for page 8.
Hide the tab from nonadministrators
by applying the administrators autho-
rization scheme to the Administration
tab of your application.
Your application is now secure, and
users are able to perform only actions
for which they have privileges. Test
it out by logging in (credentials are
now userid/last_name) as each of the
three users you empowered, and youll
see that they can do only what youve
allowed them to do. O
Raj Mattamal is a vice president at Sumner
Technologies. Before joining Sumner, he was with
Oracle for more than 10 years, helping customers in a
wide range of industries deliver Web-based solutions
on Oracle Database. Mattamal has developed Web
systems for various lines of business, and his main
focus recently has been Web application development
using Oracle Application Express.
LEARN more about
Oracle Application Express
oracle.com/technology/products/database/
application_express
oracle.com/technology/products/database/
application_express/documentation.html
REQUEST a free Oracle Application
Express workspace
apex.oracle.com
DOWNLOAD
Oracle Application Express
oracle.com/technology/products/database/
application_express/download.html
sample application code
oracle.com/technology/oramag/oracle/06-sep/
o56browser.zip
Oracle Fusion Middleware

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Single Sign-on Access Management Identity Administration User Provisioning Federated Identity
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or call 1.800.ORACLE.1

Copyright 2006, Oracle. All rights reserved. Oracle, JD Edwards, PeopleSoft and Siebel are registered trademarks of Oracle Corporation and/or its affiliates.
Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.
 d e v e l o p e r PL/SQL PRACTICES
On Generics and Traces
Best practices for string procedures and tracing
hat is the best way to write
generic procedures to work on
strings and/or lists of strings? For
example, what is the best way to
write a function to parse a delimited string into
a collection, with a specific separator? I assume
that function parameters should be declared as
VARCHAR2(with no length) and internal strings
should be declared as VARCHAR2(32767). What
is the best way of representing a list of strings
in the most generic way possible? Also, is there
a good way to extend the code to support CLOBs
(character large objects) as well, without dupli-
cating the code (to cover every possible combi-
nation of parameter types)?
Sounds as if you like to write generic,
reusable code. So do I. It is intellectually
stimulating and can save me lots of time,
because I can avoid writing the same
things over and over again.
On the other hand, it is also impor-
tant to recognize that a generic program
is usually more complex and harder to
test than more-specific variations on an
algorithm. Working out requirements for
something that should be truly generic is
never as easy as it seems at first glance.
Furthermore, we often venture unknow-
ingly into the dangerous terrain of
overdesign. Gee, why dont I make this
program really flexible by adding five
other parameters to modify the default
behavior of the program?
Before I answer your questions, Id like
to offer some high-level advice on your
next generic utility creation adventure:
O

Dont overdesign. Be very practical
about what you need now and what you
can clearly see you will need in the near
future. Dont daydream about possible
requirements as you design your program.
O

Dont overcode. Make sure that you
hew closely to the design you have
settled on. Again, when you are writing
generic code, you will find yourself
thinking about more and more possibili-
ties, even as you write the program.
O
Cut your losses. You might find as you
start to build your generic program
that it is tougher than you expected.
Listen to your intuition. If the little
voice inside your head is saying, Yes, I
know I can do this. . . but is it really all
that important? you should think seri-
ously about abandoning your generic
approach and instead write a more spe-
cific program from scratch that meets
your current requirements.
Having said all that, your question
covers three areas:
1. How should you declare internal
stringslocal variables inside your
generic functions? When declaring
a local variable of type VARCHAR2,
you must specify a maximum length.
The question then becomes how best
to do this. Should you declare it as
VARCHAR2(32767), because that is
the largest possible value? Will that use
excessive amounts of memory, if only
small string values are manipulated?
2. What is the best way to declare and
work with lists of strings?
3. How can you best write programs to
work with both VARCHAR2 variables
and CLOBs?
Here are my answers, followed by
examples and additional explanations:
1. The best way to declare your local
variables is to define a subtype that is
based on the biggest possible string size
in a shared utility package. All of your
string functions can then reference that
subtype when declaring local variables.
If you create a single package contain-
ing all your string functions, you can
declare the subtype in that package. And
you will not use up any more memory
than needed, because Oracle Database
allocates memory as needed for string
variables declared with a length of
32,767 characters.
ORACLE MAGAZINE
BY STEVEN FEUERSTEI N
2. To work with a list of strings, you need
to declare the list based on an already-
defined collection type. You can use a
type offered by Oracle Database, such as
DBMS_SQL.VARCHAR2S or DBMS_SQL
.VARCHAR2A. You can also define your
own type and then reference that type.
3. You should use CLOBs only when
you need to manipulate strings longer
than 32,767 bytes or characters in
length. Assuming, then, that you are
running Oracle9i Database Release 2,
you should generally be able to use the
same code for many of your functions,
because the newer versions of Oracle
Database allow you to execute built-in
string functions natively against CLOBs,
as well as VARCHAR2 string variables.
Lets take a look at each of these
answers in more detail.
Avoiding hard-coded VARCHAR2 constraints.
A program I often use to demonstrate
various best-practices techniques is a
simple variant on SUBSTR, which I
call BETWNSTR. The built-in SUBSTR
function takes a string, the starting loca-
tion, and the number of characters,
and returns that portion of the string.
You can get more information about
SUBSTR from the Oracle Database SQL
Reference, at download.oracle.com/docs/
cd/B19306_01/server.102/b14200/
functions162.htm#SQLRF06114.
SUBSTR is dandy, but I often have
the starting and ending locations in a
string and want the substring between
those two positions. To use SUBSTR, I
must calculate the number of characters
between start and end. I find that I always
forget the relevant formula (end start +
1). So I put together an itty-bitty function
to remember the formula, as follows:
FUNCTION betwnstr (
string_in IN VARCHAR2
, start_in IN PLS_INTEGER
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 20 06 79
PL/SQL PRACTICES

, end_in IN PLS_INTEGER codeLISTING 1: string_pkg with BETWNSTR

)
CREATE OR REPLACE PACKAGE string_pkg
RETURN VARCHAR2 IS
IS SUBTYPE maxvarchar2_t IS VARCHAR2 ( 32767 );
l_return VARCHAR2(32767);
FUNCTION betwnstr (
BEGIN string_in IN VARCHAR2
l_return := SUBSTR ( string_in, , start_in IN PLS_INTEGER
start_in, end_in - start_in + 1 ); , end_in IN PLS_INTEGER
)
RETURN l_return; RETURN VARCHAR2;
END betwnstr; END string_pkg;
/

Here are two notes to make about CREATE OR REPLACE PACKAGE BODY string_pkg
this implementation: IS
O

I have declared a local variable, but I
FUNCTION betwnstr (
string_in IN VARCHAR2
dont really need it here. It is present to , start_in IN PLS_INTEGER
demonstrate the best practice of how to , end_in IN PLS_INTEGER
best declare such variables. )
RETURN VARCHAR2
O

This is a simplified implementation of IS
BETWNSTR to demonstrate best prac- l_return maxvarchar2_t;
tices. It does not handle all the cases a BEGIN
l_return := SUBSTR ( string_in
real between string utility should. , start_in
Now I am going to move the , end_in - start_in + 1 );
BETWNSTR function into a package and RETURN l_return;
END betwnstr;
move the hard-coded local variable dec- END string_pkg;
laration, as shown in Listing 1. /
Notice that I have now declared the
following subtype:
duced in Oracle9i Database Release string_in IN VARCHAR2
SUBTYPE maxvarchar2_t IS 2). You can also define your own type, , start_in IN PLS_INTEGER
VARCHAR2 ( 32767 ); again perhaps in your centralized string , end_in IN PLS_INTEGER
package, and then reference that type. )
I use that subtype in my declaration Suppose I want to add a function RETURN VARCHAR2;
of the local variable. to my string package that accepts a list
It is true that I do still have a hard- of elements separated by a delimiter (a FUNCTION list_to_collection (
coding of the number 32767 in my comma-delimited list, or a string such string_in IN VARCHAR2
package, but it appears only once and as that returned by DBMS_UTILITY , delim_in IN VARCHAR2
serves as the single point of definition .FORMAT_CALL_STACK, delimited by DEFAULT ,
for the new, biggest VARCHAR2- new-line characters) and returns a col- )
allowed datatype. lection whose elements are those strings RETURN DBMS_SQL.varchar2a;
If Oracle Database increases the between delimiters. I can take one of END string_pkg;
maximum size for a VARCHAR2, I can two approaches: /
make a change in one place and recom- 1. Use a collection type defined by
pile string_pkg and all programs that Oracle Database and available automati- 2. Alternatively, I define my own collec-
use this package, and then my applica- cally to all programmers, such as those tion type in the package and then use
tion will be able to immediately take found in the DBMS_SQL package. Here that in the function interface:
advantage of the expanded datatype. is an example of the function header for
Work with lists of strings. As noted above, this approach: CREATE OR REPLACE PACKAGE
to work with a list of strings you need string_pkg
to declare the list based on an already- CREATE OR REPLACE PACKAGE IS
defined collection type. You can use string_pkg SUBTYPE maxvarchar2_t IS
a type offered by Oracle Database, IS VARCHAR2 ( 32767 );
such as DBMS_SQL.VARCHAR2S SUBTYPE maxvarchar2_t
(maximum of 255 characters per string) IS VARCHAR2 ( 32767 ); TYPE maxvarchar2_aat IS
or DBMS_SQL.VARCHAR2A (maximum TABLE OF maxvarchar2_t
of 32,767 characters per string, intro- FUNCTION betwnstr ( INDEX BY PLS_INTEGER;

80 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 20 06 ORACLE.COM/ORACLEMAGAZINE
 FUNCTION betwnstr (
string_in IN VARCHAR2
, start_in IN PLS_INTEGER
, end_in IN PLS_INTEGER
) rithm for its implementation. Given the
RETURN VARCHAR2;
FUNCTION list_to_collection (
string_in IN VARCHAR2
, delim_in IN VARCHAR2
DEFAULT ,
) this column at oracle.com/technology/
RETURN maxvarchar2_aat;
END string_pkg;
/ WHATS THE DBMS_OUTPUT OVERHEAD?
The first option (using DBMS_SQL
.VARCHAR2A) saves some typing and
can be used with programs that are
already using collections based on the
DBMS_SQL type. The downside is that
it introduces an external dependency in
this package. Because the DBMS_SQL
package is present in all versions of
Oracle Database, its hard to get too
worried about this external dependency.
Generally, though, you are better off
avoiding such dependencies or at least
minimizing the number of dependen-
cies in a program. The second option (a
collection type defined directly within
the package specification) allows you to
define a completely self-contained utility.
Functions for VARCHAR2s and CLOBs. In
Oracle9i Database Release 2 and above,
you can in many circumstances treat
VARCHAR2 and CLOB interchangeably.
Visit the PL/SQL Semantics for LOBs
section in the Oracle Database Application
Developers GuideLarge Objects, at
download.oracle.com/docs/cd/B19306_
01/appdev.102/b14249/adlob_plsql_
semantics.htm#i1008068, to get more
details about how Oracle Database will
implicitly convert between VARCHAR2
and CLOB, and how you can apply
many of the standard VARCHAR2 built-
in functions directly to CLOBs.
Because CLOBs can be much larger
than VARCHAR2 strings, you can think
of a VARCHAR2 variable as being (logi-
cally) a subtype of CLOB. So a function
that works with CLOBs should also
work with VARCHAR2s.
One might then be tempted to say,
Lets just use CLOBs as the standard
datatype for string functions. I could
then build a VARCHAR2 skin that
simply invokes the CLOB-based algo-
performance characteristics of CLOB,
however, it is recommended that you
use CLOB only when youre sure that
VARCHAR2 (32767) is not big enough.
For additional discussion on this
topic, refer to the online version of
oramag/oracle/06-sep/o56plsql.html.
What is the overhead involved in having
DBMS_OUTPUT calls in production code where
serveroutput is turned off? Ive read about how
to selectively call or compile code, but I cant
find anything that says, Yes, there is consider-
able overhead in making DBMS_OUTPUT calls;
conditionally skip them where possible or No,
there is minimal impact; dont go to the effort
of trying to conditionally make the calls.
What a fine and very practical ques-
tion you ask.
Before I answer it, Ill briefly describe
how DBMS_OUTPUT works and
provide some information about tracing.
How DBMS_OUTPUT works. The
DBMS_OUTPUT package provides a
procedure (PUT_LINE) that writes text
out to a buffer (an array in memory) if
output has been enabled. Host environ-
ments like SQL*Plus can then call the
DBMS_OUTPUT.GET_LINES procedure
to retrieve the contents of the buffer and
display those strings through some kind
of visual interface. DBMS_OUTPUT is,
therefore, only useful when executing
code from an environment that can/will
display output from this built-in package.
DBMS_OUTPUT is certainly the sim-
plest and most direct means of seeing
what is happening inside your PL/SQL
subprogram. The need for the host envi-
ronment to extract data from the buffer,
however, limits the usefulness of DBMS_
OUTPUT as a tracing mechanism.
Tracing issues and requirements. Tracing
generally refers to implementing a
mechanism in your code so that you
can trace or watch what is going on in
your code. Tracing is different, by the
way, from debugging. When you trace,
ORACLE MAGAZINE
you run your application and gather
information about its real-time behavior.
Afterwards, you examine the trace to
identify bugs. When you debug, you
step through the code line by line and
examine the goings-on in your code.
This is a crucial technique for identify-
ing the cause of a bug.
There are a variety of tracing scenarios:
O

Development tracing. I want to trace
the execution of my program during
development, to understand, test, and
debug the code thoroughly. I neither want
nor need tracing in my production code.
O

Production tracing. I need to include
optional tracing in my production appli-
cation. If a user reports a problem, I can
then turn on tracing within production,
gather the necessary information, and
then perform my analysis.
O

Tracing flexibility. In some simple
cases, I can rely solely on DBMS_
OUTPUT to display tracing data to
the screen. In many other situations,
however, I will want to use a different
repository for my trace. For example,
suppose my program runs for hours. I
want to see the trace information while
the program continues to execute. So
I will write information out to a table
using an autonomous transaction proce-
dure. I can then see the output immedi-
ately from another session.
As with every other aspect of your
application design, you should think
through the kinds of tracing you need
and the repositories in which the trace
information must be written before you
begin writing your application.
Testing. To answer your question, I put
together a scriptlocated in Listing 2
of the online version of this column,
at oracle.com/technology/oramag/
oracle/06-sep/o56plsql.htmlto test the
overhead of calling DBMS_OUTPUT
.PUT_LINE. I explain it and the results
in a bit more detail below, but I will first
offer my conclusions to you:
1. The impact on application performance
is (here comes one of those classically
infuriating answers) application-specific.
That is, a call to DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_
LINE all by itself doesnt incur very much
overhead. (For example, over 100,000
invocations of my test code, calling
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 20 06 81
PL/SQL PRACTICES
Test case Length of string
DBMS_OUTPUT enabled 10
DBMS_OUTPUT disabled 10
DBMS_OUTPUT enabled 10000
DBMS_OUTPUT disabled 10000
DBMS_OUTPUT disabled NULL
Call to N/A
DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE
removed
Table 1: Analysis of DBMS_OUTPUT.PUTLINE overhead
DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE and passing
NULL, took .61 seconds. Removing the
call to this built-in reduced execution time
to .11 seconds.) What can take a lot of
time is evaluating the value that you pass
to the single string parameter of DBMS_
OUTPUT.PUT_LINE. More on this below.
2. The more important question when
examining the issue of tracing in ones
code is, What is the best way to do it,
from the standpoint of readability and
maintainability of code? (Hey, this
is, after all, a best-practices column!)
Generally, ones code is more readable
when it is not littered with lots of calls to
trace programs.
The results are in. Having said all that,
lets now take a look at the results of
my analysis of the overhead of calling
DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE. I will then
conclude with more best-practice
oriented comments.
To construct the script to analyze
overhead in DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE
in Listing 2, here is the approach I took:
O

I used consecutive calls to DBMS_
UTILITY.GET_CPU_TIME to compute
elapsed time down to the hundredth of a
second (you can substitute this program
with DBMS_UTILITY.GET_TIME if you
are not yet running Oracle Database 10g).
O

I recorded the results in a database
table, because DBMS_OUTPUT must
be disabled for at least part of this
script and is, in any case, the focus of
our analysis and should not be used to
record and display results.
O

For most of the tests, I passed a
string that requires some effort to con-
struct each time the built-in is called.
Specifically, I used RPAD to create a
string of a length specified at the time
the test is run, and concatenated to that
82 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 20 06 ORACLE.COM/ORACLEMAGAZINE
Number of calls Elapsed time
(hundredths of seconds)
1000000 767
1000000 392
1000000 984
1000000 739
1000000 61
1000000 11
a date and a Boolean. This may be more
work than is usually performed when
you call DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE,
but it is surely not outside the realm of
normal tracing activity.
O

I called DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE
with the following variations: output
enabled, output disabled, pass just a
NULL, and dont call DBMS_OUTPUT
.PUT_LINE at all.
Table 1 shows what I found after
running this script.
As you can see, there is certainly
overhead associated with calling DBMS_
OUTPUT.PUT_LINE, and the scale of
that overhead depends very much on the
amount of work it takes to construct and
pass the string to DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_
LINE. Is this overhead considerable or
minimal? I cannot answer that question
for youit depends on your application.
Tracing recommendations. I offer the fol-
lowing tracing recommendations:
O

Never call DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE
directly in your application code. Create a
wrapper that accepts the application data
you want to see in your trace and then
calls DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE. Why
do I suggest this? Prior to Oracle Database
10g, DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE will
raise an error if you try to display strings
with more than 255 characters (that limit
has now been raised to 32K). Also, you
may want to send trace information to a
file or table rather than the screen, and a
direct call to DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE
forces you to sacrifice that flexibility.
O

If you are running Oracle Database
10g Release 2, take advantage of condi-
tional compilation so that you can easily
compile out the trace calls when your
program goes into production (unless
you need production-time tracing, of
course). Now, one issue I believe you
will currently encounter when using lots
of conditional compilation statements
in your code ($IF, $ENDIF, $ERROR,
$$ccflagname, and so on) is that the code
is harder to read. I expect, however, that
the various PL/SQL editors, such as Toad,
SQL Navigator, PL/SQL Developer, and
the latest entryOracle SQL Developer,
will soon offer toggles to hide this logic
as you are editing and reviewing your
code, greatly improving that situation.
O

If you are not yet running Oracle
Database 10g Release 2, also consider
enclosing trace calls inside your own
conditional statement, which might look
like this:
IF trace_pkg.trace_enabled
THEN
trace_pkg.trace (l_my_data);
END IF;
With this approach, the argument(s)
passed to the trace mechanism will be
evaluated only if tracing is enabled.
You can, therefore, keep to an absolute
minimum the overhead your application
will experience when tracing is disabled. O
Steven Feuerstein (steven@stevenfeuerstein.com)
is a PL/SQL evangelist, having written 10 books on
the subject, including Oracle PL/SQL Programming
and Oracle PL/SQL Best Practices (OReilly Media).
Feuerstein serves as a senior technology advisor for
Quest Software and is currently building a unit testing
tool for PL/SQL programs (www.unit-test.com).
READ online-only column content
oracle.com/technology/oramag/oracle/06-sep/
o56plsql.html
READ more
Best Practice PL/SQL
oracle.com/technology/pub/columns/plsql
Feuerstein
www.oreillynet.com/cs/catalog/view/au/344
LEARN more about
conditional compilation
oracle.com/technology/tech/pl_sql/pdf/
Plsql_Conditional_Compilation.pdf
DOWNLOAD Oracle Database 10g
oracle.com/technology/software/products/database/
oracle10g
 t e c h n o l o g y PARTITIONING
Partition Decisions
Understand your partition choices, and choose the best partition and key for your data.
he partitioning feature of Oracle
Database enables you to partition
stored data segments such as tables
and indexes for easier manage-
ment and improved performance. Oracle
Database provides many types of parti-
tioning options, including
range, list, hash, range/list,
and range/hash. The real
challenge for database
designers is not creating
the partitioned objects;
rather, its the decision that
precedes itwhat type of
partitioning to use and what
column to use as a partition
key. This article describes
how to choose the best par-
titioning strategy, including
the best partition type and
best partition key column.
A QUICK PRIMER
Partitioning, in a nutshell,
stores a data segment such as a table
as multiple segments while retaining a
logically monolithic structure. The most
popular partitioning option is range par-
titioning, with which you define a range
of values for each partition. For example,
in a table of customer transactions called
TRANS, you can range-partition it by
using the TRANS_DT (transaction date)
column as the partition key so that a
first partition holds records in which the
TRANS_DT value is between January 1
and March 31, 2005; the second partition
holds records in which the TRANS_DT
value is between April 1 and June 30; and
so on. Listing 1 creates this table.
After youve created the TRANS
table, you will seeif you query the
DBA_TABLES dictionary viewthat the
PARTITIONED column value is YES. You
GIL ADAMS
can get further details about the parti-
tioning, such as the type of partitioning
scheme and the number of partitions,
from the DBA_PART_TABLES view. You
can get the details of each partition, such
as the name and the upper boundary
of the partition, from the DBA_TAB_
PARTITIONS view, as shown in Listing
2. Note that this view shows the high
value of a partition, which is actually the
lower boundary of the next partition.
A partition holds records up to but not
including its high value. For instance,
the upper boundary of the Y05Q2
partition is 2005-07-01 00:00:00,
meaning this partition contains values
up to 2005-06-30 23:59:59. Records
with TRANS_DT values of 2005-07-01
00:00:00 and later will be stored in the
next partitionY05Q3.
In the TRANS table example, you
could find a column that can be grouped
into ranges of values such as dates, but it
may not be possible to group all columns
that way. For example, a column holding
names of U.S. states contains a finite and
small number of values. This type of
column calls for list partitioning, in which
the partitions hold discrete values instead
of ranges. Here is an example:
ORACLE MAGAZINE
BY A RU P N A N DA
create table sales (
product_id number,
trans_amt number,
sales_dt date,
state_code varchar2(2)
)
partition by list (state_code)
(
partition ct values (CT),
partition ca values (CA),
partition def values (default)
);
Sometimes it may not be pos-
sible to define the ranges ofor
a set of known values foreach
partition. A typical example is a
table, CUST, containing custom-
ers, with the CUST_ID column
as the primary key. The CUST_
ID value is an incrementally
increasing but rather meaning-
less number, so a range partition
based on these values may also
be rather meaningless.
You can partition the CUST table
by using hash, where a hash function
is applied to the partition key of each
row and, based on the output, the row
is placed in an appropriate partition.
All the hash partitions hold an equal
number of rows. Here is how you create
the CUST table with four hash partitions:
create table cust (
cust_id number,
cust_name varchar2(20)
)
partition by hash (cust_id)
partitions 4;
INDEXES
You can create two types of indexes on
partitioned tables:
Local. The index is partitioned in exactly
the same way as the base table. For
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 20 06 83
PARTITIONING

instance, you can create a local index on codeLISTING 1: Script for creating the TRANS table with range partitions
the TRANS_AMOUNT column of the
create table trans (
TRANS table as follows: trans_id number,
trans_dt date,
create index in_trans_01 product_code number,
store_id number,
on trans (trans_amount) trans_amount number(12,2)
local; )
partition by range (trans_dt)
(
This creates a range-partitioned index, partition y05q1 values less than (to_date(04/01/2005,mm/dd/yyyy)) tablespace y05q1,
on the TRANS_DT column, the same way partition y05q2 values less than (to_date(07/01/2005,mm/dd/yyyy)) tablespace y05q2,
the TRANS table is partitioned. All the partition y05q3 values less than (to_date(10/01/2005,mm/dd/yyyy)) tablespace y05q3,
partition y05q4 values less than (to_date(01/01/2006,mm/dd/yyyy)) tablespace y05q4,
index entries for a specific partition, such partition pmax values less than (maxvalue) tablespace users
as Y05Q1, will exist only inside the cor- )
responding partition of the index.
Global. The index can span all partitions
codeLISTING 2: TRANS partition details
in the base table. For example, suppose
col partition_position format 999 head Pos
there is a primary key on TRANS, on the
col partition_name format a10 head Name
TRANS_ID column. The primary key col high_value format a50 head High Value
can be anywhere inside the table, across select partition_position, partition_name, high_value
from dba_tab_partitions
all the partitions. In this case, the index
where table_name = TRANS order by 1;
entries of a partition of the table may
exist outside the corresponding partition Pos Name High Value
------- ------------- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
of the index. For such a situation, create
1 Y05Q1 TO_DATE( 2005-04-01 00:00:00, SYYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI:SS, NLS_CALENDAR=GRE...
a global index, as follows: 2 Y05Q2 TO_DATE( 2005-07-01 00:00:00, SYYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI:SS, NLS_CALENDAR=GRE...
3 Y05Q3 TO_DATE( 2005-10-01 00:00:00, SYYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI:SS, NLS_CALENDAR=GRE...
4 Y05Q4 TO_DATE( 2006-01-01 00:00:00, SYYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI:SS, NLS_CALENDAR=GRE...
alter table trans
5 PMAX MAXVALUE
add constraint pk_trans
primary key (trans_id)
using index global; codeLISTING 3: Script for creating the ADVERTISING table
create table advertising (
THE PARTITION DECISION ad_id number,
Now that youve seen the basics of parti- ad_dt date,
product_code number,
tioning, here comes the tough part: How
ad_cost number,
do you decide on the type and columns channel varchar2(10)
used for partitioning? Your choice of )
partition by range (ad_dt)
partitioning has to address key partition-
(
ing objectives for manageability and partition y05q1 values less than (to_date(04/01/2005,mm/dd/yyyy)) tablespace y05q1,
performance. How you partition will partition y05q2 values less than (to_date(07/01/2005,mm/dd/yyyy)) tablespace y05q2,
partition y05q3 values less than (to_date(10/01/2005,mm/dd/yyyy)) tablespace y05q3,
be based on the priorities you assign to
partition y05q4 values less than (to_date(01/01/2006,mm/dd/yyyy)) tablespace y05q4,
your objectives. I break down the objec- partition pmax values less than (maxvalue) tablespace y05q4
tives into the following categories: );
O
Performance

O
Ease of administration

O
Data purge limit the scope of the search. Consider min(trans_amount)

O
Data archiving
O
Data movement
O
Data lifecycle management
O
Efficiency of backup
Performance. This, of course, is the
primary objective of many partition-
ing schemes. Performance advantages
come from partition pruning or parti-
tionwise joins, so if your queries do a
lot of full-table scans, partitioning will
help immensely, because partitions will
a scenario involving the TRANS table. from trans
Suppose everyone is interested in the where product_code = 8
aggregate sales figures but product man- group by trans_dt;
agers (PMs) are interested in the sales
figures of their respective products only, You can improve the performance of
not in all the sales. So the PM of product this query by building an index on the
code 8 issues this SQL statement PRODUCT_CODE column, but it will
several times an hour: increase the execution time on INSERT
statements and might also adversely influ-
select trans_dt, sum(trans_amount), avg ence the execution plans of other queries
(trans_amount), max(trans_amount), on the same table. Therefore, it might

84 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 20 06 ORACLE.COM/ORACLEMAGAZINE
be judicious not to create the codeLISTING 4: Results from hash-partitioned tables
index but to list-partition the PLAN_TABLE_OUTPUT
table on the PRODUCT_CODE ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
column, with one partition per Plan hash value: 2303213640
PRODUCT_CODE value. The ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PMs query will still do a full- | Id | Operation | Name | Rows | Bytes | Cost (%CPU) | Time | Pstart | Pstop |
table scan, but this time the ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| 0 | SELECT STATEMENT | | 1 | 78 | 11 (19) | 00:00:01 | | |
scope of the full table is actu- | 1 | HASH GROUP BY | | 1 | 78 | 11 (19) | 00:00:01 | | |
ally the partition, not the entire | * 2 | HASH JOIN | | 1 | 78 | 10 (10) | 00:00:01 | | |
table. This enhances the perfor- | 3 | PARTITION HASH SINGLE | | 1 | 39 | 4 (0) | 00:00:01 | 4 | 4 |
|* 4 | TABLE ACCESS FULL | TRANS | 1 | 39 | 4 (0) | 00:00:01 | 4 | 4 |
mance immensely. Recall that | 5 | PARTITION HASH SINGLE | | 1 | 39 | 5 (0) | 00:00:01 | 4 | 4 |
list partitioning was preferred |* 6 | TABLE ACCESS FULL | ADVERTISING | 1 | 39 | 5 (0) | 00:00:01 | 4 | 4 |
over range partitioning in this ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
case because the PRODUCT_ Predicate Information (identified by operation id):
CODE is a discrete value. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
If two rather large tables
2 - access(T.TRANS_ID=A.AD_ID AND T.PRODUCT_CODE=A.PRODUCT_CODE)
are often joined together in 4 - filter(T.TRANS_ID=101)
SQL statements, consider the 6 - filter(A.AD_ID=101)
potential benefits of partition-
wise joins. Suppose you have
another table called ADVERTISING, in the same way. In this case, range parti- product_code number,
which contains detailed information tioning on the columns being joined and store_id number,
on the companys advertising. Here is a partitioning on the same ranges is the trans_amount number(12,2)
description of the ADVERTISING table: most effective. Listing 3 shows the script )
for creating the ADVERTISING table with partition by hash (trans_id)
Name Null? Type this range partition. (
------------ ----------- -------------------------------- Similarly, if you often join these partition trans1 tablespace trans1,
AD_ID NUMBER tables on the PRODUCT_CODE partition trans2 tablespace trans2,
AD_DT DATE column, then that column should be a partition trans3 tablespace trans3,
PRODUCT_CODE NUMBER strong candidate for the partition key. partition trans4 tablespace trans4
AD_COST NUMBER And because product code values are in )
CHANNEL VARCHAR2(10) a specific set, the partitioning scheme /
should be list partitioning. create table advertising (
Suppose that PMs often query the If the ADVERTISING and TRANS ad_id number,
ADVERTISING and TRANS tables to see tables are not joined on some specific ad_dt date,
the revenue vis--vis various advertising date or date fields but rather on some product_code number,
amounts spent to check the effectiveness sequential number such as the AD_ID or ad_cost number,
of the advertising campaigns. Here is the TRANS_ID value, you should reevaluate channel varchar2(10)
query they use to find out the revenue the partitioning strategy. Because records )
numbers and advertising expenditures have unique values in those columns, you partition by hash (ad_id)
for a specific period for each product: cant choose a list-partitioning strategy (
(which requires discrete, finite values). partition ad1 tablespace ad1,
select t.product_code, sum(trans_amount), A range partition would be ineffective, partition ad2 tablespace ad2,
sum(ad_cost) because the sequentially increasing values partition ad3 tablespace ad3,
from trans t, advertising a in these two columns would require partition ad4 tablespace ad4
where t.trans_dt = a.ad_dt numerous partitions to be created that )
and t.product_code = a.product_code might not have any specific meaning. /
and trans_dt between 1-aug-05 and In such a case, the hash partition After the tables are created, you can
1-sep-05 is useful. It makes sure the records are use the DBMS_XPLAN tool to check to
group by t.product_code; evenly spread over all the partitions. You make sure the partitions are used prop-
can create the tables as follows: erly. First you have to generate a plan for
Here the tables are joined on the the PMs product query:
columns TRANS_DT and AD_DT, both create table trans (
date columns. To enhance performance, trans_id number, explain plan for
you might decide to partition both tables trans_dt date, select t.product_code, sum(trans_amount),

ORACLE MAGAZINE SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 20 06 85

PARTITIONING
sum(ad_cost)
from trans t, advertising a
where t.trans_id = a.ad_id
and t.trans_id = 101
and t.product_code = a.product_code
group by t.product_code;
Then you can see what the plan
looks like:
select * from table(dbms_xplan.display);
The output is shown in Listing 4.
Note the PSTART and PSTOP columns,
which indicate which table partitions
were selected. For the line with Id=4,
the values of these columns are 4 and
4, which indicates that the fourth parti-
tion of the TRANS table was selected,
where the record with TRANS_ID=101
resides. Note the line with Id=6,
which shows that the optimizer will
search only partition 4 of the joined
ADVERTISING table as well, not the
entire table. In the absence of an index,
this hash-partition strategy makes the
PMs query much faster than a full-table
scan on the entire table, for both the
TRANS and ADVERTISING tables.
Ease of administration. Partitioning is
always introduced as a technique for
managing large objects. Although its
applicable to objects of any size, the
advantages are more obvious in large
tables. When you rebuild an index
on a nonpartitioned table, your only
option is to build the entire index in
one statement. If the table is partitioned,
however, you can rebuild partitions of
local indexes one at a time. For instance,
in the case of the TRANS table, you
can rebuild the Y05Q1 partition of the
IN_TRANS_01 local index:
alter index in_trans_01 rebuild partition
y05q1;
as opposed to rebuilding the IN_
TRANS_01 index as a whole. The
advantage of this approach is even more
pronounced when you load a specific
partition and the index needs to be
rebuilt only on that partition, not on the
rest of the index. In addition to doing
index rebuilds, you can also move tables
86 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 20 06 ORACLE.COM/ORACLEMAGAZINE
across tablespaces, export tables, delete
data, and so onone partition at a time.
Data purge. Suppose that TRANS is a
table in an OLTP system and you want
to remove old records, such as the
ones with TRANS_DT values in the
first quarter of 2005. The conventional
method is to delete the records, but dele-
tion causes undo and redo information
to be generated, which impacts database
performance. This can also be a very
time-consuming operation, depending
on the volume of data being purged. An
alternative to deleting records is to drop a
partition. In the case of the TRANS table,
if you decided to drop all the records
from the first quarter of 2005, youd issue
alter table trans drop partition y05q1;
Thats it. After you execute this
command, the partition disappears from
the table. This statement does not actu-
ally delete anything from the table; it
merely updates the data dictionary to
indicate that the Y05Q1 partition no
longer belongs to the table. Because no
data moves (except a small amount of
information in the data dictionary), undo
and redo generation is minimal, making
the operation extremely fast compared
to the deletion approach and virtually
impact-free in terms of performance.
Note that a regular DELETE statement
deletes table rows from wherever they
exist, leaving empty spaces in the blocks.
Although the table data may be sparse,
the overall size of the segment may still
be large and have a very high high-water
mark (HWM, the largest size the table has
ever occupied). A high HWM slows full-
table scans, because Oracle Database has
to search up to the HWM, even if there
are no records to be found. When a parti-
tion is dropped, the segment itself is gone
and the HWM of other segments remains
the same, so the query runs faster.
While the DELETE statement deletes
the rows, the corresponding index entries
are also adjusted, causing fragmentation,
which may impact performance.
When a partition is dropped, the
corresponding partition of any local
index is also dropped. If there is a global
index, however, that index can become
unusable when you drop the partition.
To prevent the index from becoming
unusable, in Oracle9i Database and later,
you can update the global index when
you drop the partition. The following
drops the Y05Q1 partition and updates
the global index:
alter table trans drop partition y05q1
update global indexes;
If you decide not to do an automatic
index update as part of dropping the
partition, that global index will become
unusable. You will have to rebuild the
index to make it usable, but you can
defer that task to later, after youve
dropped other partitions or done some
other operations.
You can manually rebuild the global
index on TRANS, by using
alter index pk_trans rebuild;
The online version of this article
at oracle.com/technology/oramag/
oracle/06-sep/o56partition.html contin-
ues the partition priority discussion.
CONCLUSION
The most important decisions in parti-
tion design are choosing the partitioning
scheme and the column(s) to partition
on, and these decisions depend heavily
on the priorities of potentially conflicting
objectives. Once you are familiar with
the advantages of each type of partition-
ing scheme, you will be able to choose
the scheme and column(s) appropriate
for your partitioning needs. O
Arup Nanda (arup@proligence.com) has been an
Oracle DBA for more than 12 years, handling all
aspects of database administrationfrom performance
tuning to security and disaster recovery. He is a
coauthor of PL/SQL for DBAs (OReilly Media, 2005). He
was Oracle Magazines DBA of the Year in 2003.
READ online-only article content
oracle.com/technology/oramag/oracle/06-sep/
o56partition.html
READ more about partitioning
oracle.com/solutions/business_intelligence/
partitioning.html
 t e c h n o l o g y SEARCH
Secure Search Returns Best Results
Oracle Secure Enterprise Search provides the right intranet search.
f your company is like most, data
some meant to be shared and some
notis stored in multiple locations.
Those locations may include
O
File servers
O
E-mail messages and attachments
O
ERP modules
O
An intranet
O
Configuration manage-
ment repositories
O
Multiple databases
O
Applications with existing
search interfaces
O
Document archives
O
Desktop/laptop computers
The only thing more
difficult than keeping
track of all these different
datasources is finding one
specific piece of data in
them when you need it. I
recently challenged a group
of students at a university
to find that days lunch
menu. I knew that it was
available for everyone to see on the uni-
versity intranet, and the printed copy
of the menu was in my hand. They had
five minutes to find it onlineplenty
of time for an entire class to find one
current document.
Only two people found it. The reason:
The students had too many poten-
tial datasources to look through, and
the storage location for the menu had
recently changed. This task challenged
30 students who had grown up with
computers and were computer science
majors to look for five minutes for some-
PHIL SALTONSTALL/GETTY IMAGES
thing very specific. How much more
difficult is it for people in your organiza-
tion who perhaps did not grow up with
computers or may even be somewhat
intimidated by them to have to look for
something about a general topic saved
somewhere roughly two years ago?
One way to tie many of these data-
sources together and make everything
accessible is to use a crawler. Search
companies such as Google and
Ask.com enable people to access the
internet by using a Web crawler to
discover content, index it, and make it
available through simple search screens.
The crawler can go through most of the
datasources mentioned above. With a
single interface, everyone can find what
they needalmost.
There are a couple of problems
with the crawler solution. The first is
that access to some data is restricted.
This means that certain intranet sites,
document repositories, databases, and
applications require authentication and
restrict access based on assigned respon-
sibility. You wouldnt want everyone in
the organization to have access to all
of your HR records, for example. The
second problem is that not all data-
sources can be crawled. Some applica-
tions have closed datasources, and the
only way to access their data is through
their own search interfaces.
ORACLE MAGAZINE
BY RON HARDMAN
To address these issues, Oracle has
introduced a product called Oracle
Secure Enterprise Search, and this
article provides a feature overview of the
product, discusses its architecture, and
walks through the process of crawling
and indexing a datasource.
ALL ABOUT SEARCH
Oracle Secure Enterprise
Search can index all of the
datasources discussed and
more than 100 document
formats, including PDF,
Microsoft Word, Excel,
HTML, and XML. It sup-
ports indexing and search-
ing in all major languages
and all through the same
search interface.
Oracle Secure Enterprise
Search supports administra-
tion through a Web page
created during installation.
From it you can create data-
sources, set crawler preferences (such
as the number of crawler agents to run
and the maximum size for documents),
modify the types of documents supported
in each datasource, set the crawling
schedule, and modify security settings.
As soon as you create a datasource, a
schedule is automatically created for one
or more Java crawlers to discover new
documents or pages. When the indexing
is complete, users can search through
all of the datasources simultaneously
or individually through the user search
page. The search page is also created
during installation. The easy-to-use inter-
face requires no customization, and it is
also possible to use query APIs to embed
search results in your own custom appli-
cation. The default search page includes
basic and advanced interfaces, with the
advanced search allowing for attribute-
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 20 06 87
SEARCH
Figure 1: Datasources
specific and source-specific searches.
Synchronization can be scheduled
at any interval to ensure that current
information is presented to users. For
example, if a crawler is scheduled to run
on a particular datasource every night
at 11 p.m., the crawler will examine the
source files at that time to see which
changes, if any, have been made since
the last crawl. Any new or modified
pages or documents are indexed.
Other major features include the
following:
Connections to secure datasources.
Oracle provides secure source types,
or connectors, to several known data-
sources and also supports the develop-
ment of custom connectors to additional
datasources. Figure 1 shows a list of
available connectors.
More connectors are in development,
so refer to the online documentation
(oracle.com/technology/documentation/
ses1016.html) for the most recent con-
nector list.
Authentication. Oracle Secure Enterprise
Search supports LDAP and synchroni-
zation with ActiveDirectory, so it aligns
with your existing user management
system. Employing existing user per-
missions/roles, it can restrict access to
datasources according to your existing
security policies.
Federated search. Some datasources
may already have their own indexing
mechanism. Instead of reindexing them,
you can use a federated search to pass
terms from Oracle Secure Enterprise
Search to the other repository and then
get the results back from it for display.
The search user does not know that the
search was executed elsewhere.
Java API. Oracle Secure Enterprise
88 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 20 06 ORACLE.COM/ORACLEMAGAZINE
Search supplies the following APIs:
O
Web services: Build custom applica-
tions that search indexes.
O
Crawler plug-in: Use your own custom
crawler.
O
Query-time authorization: Determine
whether users should have access to
search results at query time.
O
URL rewriter: Filter links extracted
by the crawler prior to placement in
the queue.
Analytics. The administration interface
includes reports showing common search
terms, common misspellings, click-
through rates, and other statistics that can
be used to improve the user experience.
Google Desktop Enterprise Integration. You
can integrate Oracle Secure Enterprise
Search with Google Desktop Enterprise.
Users can then search their desktops in
the interface in which they search other
file servers.
ARCHITECTURE
Oracle Secure Enterprise Search includes
Oracle Database 10g Enterprise Edition
(Release 10.1.0.5.0) and installs with
the Oracle Text option, Oracles full-text
retrieval technology, which it uses for
indexing and search operations. It does
not require execution of SQL scripts
for index creation or maintenance. All
administration is handled through the
administration user interface, which exe-
cutes in an Oracle Containers for J2EE
(OC4J) runtime environment.
In addition to the database and the
administration interface, Oracle Secure
Enterprise Search includes a multi-
threaded Java crawler. The crawler is
governed by settings in the administra-
tion interface, including its scheduled
execution time and frequency, number
of threads to run, crawler time-out,
maximum document size, and the depth
of the crawl (the number of nested
links to follow beyond the defined
datasource). It also allows you or your
administrator to set exclusion rules. For
example, if an intranet site references
sites on the internet that you do not
want to include, you can add the sites as
exclusions. These links are not indexed
and not included in searches.
Oracle Secure Enterprise Search also
includes a Web services API that allows
you to connect custom interfaces. If the
default administration or query applica-
tions cannot be used in your applica-
tion, the Web services API will provide
full administration, basic query, and
advanced query capabilities to your
custom code.
All components are bundled in a
single install disk or download file, and
no additional software configuration is
required to get up and running. It took
me less than 20 minutes to download
Oracle Secure Enterprise Search to my
laptop and install it, and only another 10
to define my first datasource, complete
the crawl, and perform my first search.
Enterprise searches with advanced
security requirements and multiple data-
source configurations obviously take more
time. Any extra configuration time will be
a product of corporate security require-
ments and the number of datasources to
be configured. Keep in mind that Oracle
Secure Enterprise Search can be up and
running for a portion of your datasources
while others are still being added.
TRY IT OUT
To get started, download the software
from OTN (oracle.com/technology/
software/products/search) for your plat-
form, unzip the file, and run Setup.exe in
the top-level directory.
When the installation is finished, two
URLs are provided for the user search
page and administration login interface.
They should look similar to the following:
O
//localhost:7777/search/query/search
O
//localhost:7777/search/admin/control/
login.jsp
To try out Oracle Secure Enterprise
Search, configure the crawler to index a
URL and try the search. The following
steps guide you through this process:
1. Open the administration login page
in your browser, and enter the password
you created during installation.
2. The Information message on the
General page shows that no datasources
are defined. Click the Sources subtab
at the top of the screen, as shown in
Figure 2.
3. Select Web as the source type and
click Create, as shown in Figure 3.

Figure 2: General page
Figure 3: Select datasource
Figure 4: Source creation
4. Enter Code as the source name. The
starting URL can be virtually anything,
including your organizations internet
site. For this example, point to a code
repository for a PL/SQL programming
book, www.peakretrieval.com/plsql/
plsql_programming_index.html, as
shown in Figure 4.
5. Click Create. A schedule is created
automatically, and crawling starts
immediately.
6. To view the status of the crawl, click
the Schedules link at the top of the
page. The Code schedule is shown,
along with the status of the last (or
current) crawl. Click the link in the
Status column to view the log.
7. Click the Statistics link (the pencil
icon in the Statistics column) to
display what was indexed. The crawler
statistics for this datasource appear.
8. Click the Search link (not the Search
tab) at the top right of the Administration
page to open the search window. Figure
5 shows the default search interface.
9. Perform a search for CTXSYS
.CONTEXT (an Oracle Text index type).
The search is case-insensitive by default.
Figure 6 shows the search results.
10. Click any link to display the indexed
documenta script in this casefrom
its original source. Note that the key-
words are highlighted in the search
results and that the familiar Cached
and Links options are available for
each record returned. If users find that
the documents they were looking for
have been moved or deleted, they can
ORACLE MAGAZINE
still find what they need by clicking the
Cached link. The Links hyperlink shows
pages or documents that are referenced
(linked) by this page as well as pages or
documents that link to this page.
The result also shows how many doc-
ument matches there were for the search
terms. In this case, there are two results.
SECURE SEARCHING
The preceding Web source example
shows how you might index an inter-
net or corporate intranet site and make
it available for everyone to search. No
authentication is required, and there are
no restrictions regarding who has access
to the data. Of course, not all datasources
are meant to be open for public access.
Some datasources require authenti-
cation prior to allowing access. Oracle
Database is a great example of this. To
index a column in an HR database, for
example, the crawler must be able to get
access to that source, and this requires
authentication information.
To set up a sample CONTACTS
database for access from Oracle Secure
Enterprise Search, download the sample
data for this article at oracle.com/
technology/oramag/oracle/06-sep/
o56oses.zip, and follow these steps:
1. Log in to the Oracle Secure Enterprise
Search database as SYS or SYSTEM, and
run the Create_User.sql script.
2. Connect to the CONTACTS user (the
default password is oracle).
3. To create the MY_PRIVATE_
CONTACT_LIST table and insert the
seed data, run the Create_Table.sql script.
With the sample CONTACTS schema
in place on your local machine, create a
new datasource on the Administration
screen, as follows:
1. Click the Sources subtab, select Table
as the source type, and click Create.
2. Enter the following information to
define the source:
a. Source Name: Contacts
b. Database Host Name: localhost
c. TCP Port Number: 1521
d.SID: SES
e. User Name: CONTACTS
f. Password: ORACLE
g. Leave the Delete Passwords After
Crawl box unchecked.
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 20 06 89
SEARCH
Figure 5: Search interface
Figure 6: Search results
h. Schema: CONTACTS
i. Table Name: MY_PRIVATE_CONTACT_
LIST
j. Primary Key Column: CONTACT_ID
k.Content Column: NOTES
l. Content Type: Plain text
3. Click Create.
4. Click the Schedules subtab, and
click the link in the Status column for
the Contacts datasource.
5. Click the Statistics icon next to the
Contacts source and log filename.
6. Confirm that 10 documents are
indexed, and click Finish.
The crawler indexed the secure
datasource you just set up (Contacts)
because you provided the username
and password to the crawler.
Provided you also set up the Web
source example (named Code), there
are two datasources indexed now. With
the current configuration, clicking the
Search link at the top right side of the
Administration page brings up a single
search screen for both sources.
To separate the sources, click the
Search tab in the Administration
window and click the Source Groups
subtab. Perform the following steps to
create two source groups, starting with
the Code datasource created earlier:
1. Click Create.
90 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 20 06 ORACLE.COM/ORACLEMAGAZINE
2. Enter PL/SQL as the source group
name, and click Proceed to Step 2.
3. Choose Code from the list of avail-
able sources, and click the >> button.
4. Click Finish in the upper right corner.
To create the source group for the
Contacts datasource, do the following:
1. Click Create.
2. Enter Contacts as the source group
name, and click Proceed to Step 2.
3. Choose Table from the list, and
click Go.
4. Choose Contacts from the list of avail-
able sources, and click the >> button.
5. Click Finish in the upper right corner.
Click the Search link at the top right
side of the Administration page, and note
the datasources listed above the search
box. By default, the search is against
all source groups. To search only the
Contacts source group, click Contacts,
enter the search term diesel, and click
Search. Oracle Secure Enterprise Search
returns the matching record from the
Contacts datasource.
Note that the source group is dis-
played with the result set. Click the
source group name to browse the rest of
the contents in the source group.
The indexes created by Oracle
Secure Enterprise Search for all data-
sources are secured in the Oracle
Secure Enterprise Search database, so
unauthorized users will not be able to
misuse any indexes and gain access to
secure information. After setting up the
two datasources described in this article,
however, there is still no restriction
on who can search either datasource.
Oracle provides three ways to filter
search results according to individual or
group permissions, including a central-
ized scheme (such as Oracle Internet
Directory [OID], UNIX accounts, or
Microsoft Active Directory), access
control list, and query-time authoriza-
tion. For information on using these
security schemes, refer to the links in
the Next Steps box, below.
CONCLUSION
For many years, Oracle Database has
been the leader in the database market,
storing ever-increasing amounts of data.
Oracle Secure Enterprise Search now
extends data management beyond the
database to every archive, file server,
e-mail server, and desktop in the enter-
prise. It is not just about storing more
data but also about managing and
extracting relevant information when
users need it, and thats the need Oracle
Secure Enterprise Search fills. O
Ron Hardman works with Academy District 20
schools in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and is the
founder of 5-Mile Software, a software company
delivering assessment and back-office solutions for
K12 schools. He is coauthor of Oracle Database 10g
PL/SQL Programming and Expert PL/SQL, both from
Oracle Press, and is an Oracle ACE.
READ more about Oracle Secure
Enterprise Search
oracle.com/technology/products/oses
oracle.com/technology/documentation/ses1016.html
DOWNLOAD
Oracle Secure Enterprise Search
oracle.com/technology/software/products/search
sample data for this article
oracle.com/technology/oramag/oracle/06-sep/
o56oses.zip
DISCUSS Oracle Secure
Enterprise Search
forums.oracle.com/forums/forum.jspa?forumID=262
Accelerate Past the Competition
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 t e c h n o l o g y ASK TOM
On ROWNUM and Limiting Results
Our technologist explains how ROWNUM works and how to make it work for you.
his issues Ask Tom column is a little
different from the typical column. I
receive many questions about how to
perform top-N and pagination queries
in Oracle Database, so I decided to provide
an excerpt from the book Effective Oracle
by Design (Oracle Press, 2003) in hopes of
answering a lot of these questions with this
one column. Note that the content here has
been modified from the original to fit the
space and format.
LIMITING RESULT SETS
ROWNUM is a magic column in Oracle
Database that gets many people into
trouble. When you learn what it is and
how it works, however, it can be very
useful. I use it for two main things:
O

To perform top-N processing. This is
similar to using the LIMIT clause, avail-
able in some other databases.
O

To paginate through a query, typi-
cally in a stateless environment such
as the Web. I use this technique on the
asktom.oracle.com Web site.
Ill take a look at each of these uses
after I review how ROWNUM works.
HOW ROWNUM WORKS
ROWNUM is a pseudocolumn (not a
real column) that is available in a query.
ROWNUM will be assigned the numbers
1, 2, 3, 4, N, where N is the number
of rows in the set ROWNUM is used
with. A ROWNUM value is not assigned
permanently to a row (this is a common
misconception). A row in a table does not
have a number; you cannot ask for row 5
from a tablethere is no such thing.
Also confusing to many people
is when a ROWNUM value is actu-
ally assigned. A ROWNUM value is
assigned to a row after it passes the
predicate phase of the query but before
the query does any sorting or aggrega-
tion. Also, a ROWNUM value is incre-
mented only after it is assigned, which
is why the following query will never
return a row:
select *
from t
where ROWNUM > 1;
Because ROWNUM > 1 is not true
for the first row, ROWNUM does not
advance to 2. Hence, no ROWNUM
value ever gets to be greater than 1.
Consider a query with this structure:
select , ROWNUM
from t
where <where clause>
group by <columns>
having <having clause>
order by <columns>;
Think of it as being processed in this
order:
1. The FROM/WHERE clause goes first.
2. ROWNUM is assigned and incre-
mented to each output row from the
FROM/WHERE clause.
3. SELECT is applied.
4. GROUP BY is applied.
5. HAVING is applied.
6. ORDER BY is applied.
That is why a query in the following
form is almost certainly an error:
select *
from emp
where ROWNUM <= 5
order by sal desc;
The intention was most likely to get
the five highest-paid peoplea top-N
query. What the query will return is five
random records (the first five the query
happens to hit), sorted by salary. The
procedural pseudocode for this query is
as follows:
ORACLE MAGAZINE
BY TO M KYTE
ROWNUM = 1
for x in
( select * from emp )
loop
exit when NOT(ROWNUM <= 5)
OUTPUT record to temp
ROWNUM = ROWNUM+1
end loop
SORT TEMP
It gets the first five records and
then sorts them. A query with WHERE
ROWNUM = 5 or WHERE ROWNUM
> 5 doesnt make sense. This is because
a ROWNUM value is assigned to a row
during the predicate evaluation and gets
incremented only after a row passes the
WHERE clause.
Here is the correct version of this
query:
select *
from
( select *
from emp
order by sal desc )
where ROWNUM <= 5;
This version will sort EMP by salary
descending and then return the first
five records it encounters (the top-five
records). As youll see in the top-N
discussion coming up shortly, Oracle
Database doesnt really sort the entire
result setit is smarter than thatbut
conceptually that is what takes place.
TOP-N QUERY PROCESSING WITH ROWNUM
In a top-N query, you are generally
interested in taking some complex
query, sorting it, and then retrieving
just the first N rows (the top N rows).
ROWNUM has a top-N optimization
that facilitates this type of query. You
can use ROWNUM to avoid a massive
sort of large sets. Ill discuss how it
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 20 06 93
ASK TOM

does this conceptually and then look at codeLISTING 1: Top-N query using ROWNUM
an example.
select *
Suppose you have a query in this from
form: (select *
from t
order by id)
select where rownum <= 10
from
call count cpu elapsed disk query current rows
where
-------- ------------- ----------- ------------------ --------------- ---------------- ---------------- ----------
order by columns; Parse 1 0.00 0.00 0 0 0 0
Execute 1 0.00 0.00 0 0 0 0
Fetch 2 0.04 0.04 0 949 0 10
Assume that this query returns a lot
-------- ------------- ----------- ------------------ --------------- ---------------- ---------------- ----------
of data: thousands, hundreds of thou- total 4 0.04 0.04 0 949 0 10
sands, or more rows. However, you are
Rows Row Source Operation
interested only in the top Nsay the
----------------- ---------------------------------------------------
top 10 or top 100. There are two ways 10 COUNT STOPKEY (cr=949 pr=0 pw=0 time=46997 us)
to approach this: 10 VIEW (cr=949 pr=0 pw=0 time=46979 us)
10 SORT ORDER BY STOPKEY (cr=949 pr=0 pw=0 time=46961 us)
O

Have the client application run that
100000 TABLE ACCESS FULL T (cr=949 pr=0 pw=0 time=400066 us)
query and fetch just the first N rows.
O

Use that query as an inline view, and

use ROWNUM to limit the results, as codeLISTING 2: Do-it-yourself query without ROWNUM
in SELECT * FROM (your_query_here)
SELECT * FROM T ORDER BY ID
WHERE ROWNUM <= N. call count cpu elapsed disk query current rows
The second approach is by far -------- ------------- ----------- ------------------ --------------- ---------------- ---------------- ----------
superior to the first, for two reasons. Parse 1 0.00 0.00 0 0 0 0
Execute 2 0.00 0.00 0 0 0 0
The lesser of the two reasons is that it Fetch 10 0.35 0.40 155 949 6 10
requires less work by the client, because -------- ------------- ----------- ------------------ --------------- ---------------- ---------------- ----------
the database takes care of limiting the total 13 0.36 0.40 155 949 6 10

result set. The more important reason Rows Row Source Operation
is the special processing the database ----------------- ---------------------------------------------------
can do to give you just the top N rows. 10 SORT ORDER BY (cr=949 pr=155 pw=891 time=401610 us)
100000 TABLE ACCESS FULL T (cr=949 pr=0 pw=0 time=400060 us)
Using the top-N query means that you
have given the database extra informa- Elapsed times include waiting for the following events:
tion. You have told it, Im interested
Event waited on Times
only in getting N rows; Ill never con- --------------------------------------------------- ------------
sider the rest. Now, that doesnt sound direct path write temp 33
too earth-shattering until you think direct path read temp 5

about sortinghow sorts work and

what the server would need to do. Lets
walk through the two approaches with a
sample query:
select *
from t
order by unindexed_column;
Now, assume that T is a big table,
with more than one million records, and
each record is fatsay, 100 or more
bytes. Also assume that UNINDEXED_
COLUMN is, as its name implies, a
column that is not indexed. And assume
that you are interested in getting just the
first 10 rows. Oracle Database would do
the following:
1. Run a full-table scan on T.
2. Sort T by UNINDEXED_COLUMN. select *
This is a full sort. from
3. Presumably run out of sort area (select *
memory and need to swap temporary from t
extents to disk. order by unindexed_column)
4. Merge the temporary extents back to where ROWNUM < :N;
get the first 10 records when they are
requested. In this case, Oracle Database will
5. Clean up (release) the temporary take these steps:
extents as you are finished with them. 1. Run a full-table scan on T, as before
Now, that is a lot of I/O. Oracle (you cannot avoid this step).
Database has most likely copied the 2. In an array of :N elements (presum-
entire table into TEMP and written it ably in memory this time), sort only
out, just to get the first 10 rows. :N rows.
Next, lets look at what Oracle The first N rows will populate this
Database can do conceptually with a array of rows in sorted order. When
top-N query: the N +1 row is fetched, it will be

94 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 20 06 ORACLE.COM/ORACLEMAGAZINE
compared to the last row in the array.
If it would go into slot N +1 in the
array, it gets thrown out. Otherwise, it
is added to this array and sorted and
one of the existing rows is discarded.
Your sort area holds N rows maximum,
so instead of sorting one million rows,
you sort N rows.
This seemingly small detail of using
an array concept and sorting just N rows
can lead to huge gains in performance
and resource usage. It takes a lot less
RAM to sort 10 rows than it does to sort
one million rows (not to mention TEMP
space usage).
Using the following table T, you can
see that although both approaches get
the same results, they use radically dif-
ferent amounts of resources:
create table t
as
select dbms_random.value(1,1000000)
id,
rpad(*,40,* ) data to just 10 rows. Note the final Row
from dual
connect by level <= 100000;
begin
dbms_stats.gather_table_stats
( user, T);
end;
/ As you can see, this result is very dif-
Now enable tracing, via
exec
dbms_monitor.session_trace_enable
(waits=>true);
And then run your top-N query with
ROWNUM:
select *
from
(select *
from t
order by id)
where rownum <= 10;
And finally run a do-it-yourself query
that fetches just the first 10 records:
declare
cursor c is
select *
from t
order by id;
l_rec c%rowtype;
begin
open c;
for i in 1 .. 10
loop
fetch c into l_rec;
exit when c%notfound;
end loop;
close c;
end;
/ wanted rows 50 to 60 of the result set,
After executing this query, you can
use TKPROF to format the resulting
trace file and review what happened.
First examine the top- N query, as shown
in Listing 1.
The query read the entire table
(because it had to), but by using the
SORT ORDER BY STOPKEY step, it was
able to limit its use of temporary space
and so on) as fast as possible. If you
Source Operation lineit shows that
the query did 949 logical I/Os in total
(cr=949), performed no physical reads
or writes (pr=0 and pw=0), and took
400066 millionths of a second (0.04
seconds). Compare that with the do-it-
yourself approach shown in Listing 2.
ferent. Notably, the elapsed/CPU times
are significantly higher, and the final
Row Source Operation lines provide
insight into why this is. You had to
perform a sort to disk, which you can
see with the pw=891 (physical writes).
Your query performed some direct path
reads and writesthe sort of 100,000
records (instead of just the 10 we are
ultimately interested in) took place
on diskadding considerably to the
runtime/resource usage of your query.
PAGINATION WITH ROWNUM
My all-time-favorite use of ROWNUM is
pagination. In this case, I use ROWNUM
to get rows N through M of a result set.
The general form is as follows:
select *
from ( select /*+ FIRST_ROWS(n) */
a.*, ROWNUM rnum
ORACLE MAGAZINE
from ( your_query_goes_here,
with order by ) a
where ROWNUM <=
:MAX_ROW_TO_FETCH )
where rnum >= :MIN_ROW_TO_FETCH;
where
O

FIRST_ROWS(N) tells the optimizer,
Hey, Im interested in getting the first
rows, and Ill get N of them as fast as
possible.
O

:MAX_ROW_TO_FETCH is set to the
last row of the result set to fetchif you
you would set this to 60.
O

:MIN_ROW_TO_FETCH is set to the
first row of the result set to fetch, so to
get rows 50 to 60, you would set this
to 50.
The concept behind this scenario is
that an end user with a Web browser
has done a search and is waiting for
the results. It is imperative to return
the first result page (and second page,
look at that query closely, youll notice
that it incorporates a top-N query (get
the first :MAX_ROW_TO_FETCH rows
from your query) and hence benefits
from the top-N query optimization I
just described. Further, it returns over
the network to the client only the spe-
cific rows of interestit removes any
leading rows from the result set that are
not of interest.
One important thing about using this
pagination query is that the ORDER BY
statement should order by something
unique. If what you are ordering by is
not unique, you should add something
to the end of the ORDER BY to make it
so. If you sort 100 records by SALARY,
for example, and they all have the same
SALARY value, then specifying rows 20
to 25 does not really have any meaning.
In order to see this, use a small table
with lots of duplicated ID values:
SQL> create table t
2 as
3 select mod(level,5) id,
trunc(dbms_random.value(1,100)) data
4 from dual
5 connect by level <= 10000;
Table created.
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 20 06 95
ASK TOM

And then query rows 148 to 150 and SQL> select * formed by your query, so that top-N
151 after sorting by the ID column: 2 from queries that once consumed a lot of
3 (select a.*, rownum rnum TEMP space now use none and return
SQL> select * 4 from results much faster.
2 from 5 (select id, data
3 (select a.*, rownum rnum 6 from t ORACLE OPENWORLD PLANS
4 from 7 order by id, rowid) a This is the Oracle OpenWorld issue
5 (select id, data 8 where rownum <= 150 of Oracle Magazine. I really enjoy the
6 from t 9 ) weeklong conferenceI get to meet
7 order by id) a 10 where rnum >= 148; a lot of people face-to-face that Ive
8 where rownum <= 150 only met electronically. So if youre
9 ) ID DATA RNUM at the conference, I hope to see you
10 where rnum >= 148; ------------------ -------------------- -------------------- at the talk Ill be giving there. (If you
0 45 148 havent already guessed, my talk will be
ID DATA RNUM 0 99 149 about the database and development.)
------------------ -------------------- ------------------- 0 41 150 In addition, I plan to be at a Meet the
0 38 148 Experts event hosted by OTNthe
0 64 149 SQL> Oracle Technology Network. Ive done
0 53 150 SQL> select * this event in years past, and its always
2 from been a great forum for one-on-one dis-
SQL> 3 (select a.*, rownum rnum cussions as well as group talks. Check
SQL> select * 4 from your program schedule for the dates and
2 from 5 (select id, data times of my talk and OTN events.
3 (select a.*, rownum rnum 6 from t In addition, Ill of course be blog-
4 from 7 order by id, rowid) a ging at tkyte.blogspot.comwith pic-
5 (select id, data 8 where rownum <= 151 turesabout what is going on at the
6 from t 9 ) conference. In addition to my blog,
7 order by id) a 10 where rnum >= 148; be sure to check out OTN (at oracle
8 where rownum <= 151 .com/technology), which will be full of
9 ) ID DATA RNUM downloadable show content including
10 where rnum >= 148; ------------------ -------------------- --------------------- podcasts, video streams, and presenta-
0 45 148 tion material. O
ID DATA RNUM 0 99 149
------------------ -------------------- -------------------- 0 41 150 Tom Kyte has worked for Oracle since 1993. He is a
0 59 148 0 45 151 vice president in the Oracle Public Sector group and
0 38 149 the author of Expert Oracle Database Architecture:
0 64 150 Now the query is very deterministic. 9i and 10g Programming Techniques and Solutions
0 53 151 ROWID is unique within a table, so if (Apress, 2005) and Effective Oracle by Design (Oracle
you use ORDER BY ID and then within Press, 2003), among other books.
Note in this case that one time for ID you use ORDER BY ROWID, the rows
row 148, the result returned DATA=38, will have a definite, deterministic order
and that the next time, the result and the pagination query will determinis-
ASK Tom
returned DATA=59. Both queries are tically return the rows as expected. Oracle Vice President Tom Kyte answers your most
returning exactly the right answer, difficult technology questions. Highlights from that forum
appear in this column.
given what youve requested: Sort the ROWNUM WRAP-UP asktom.oracle.com
data by ID, throw out the first 147 Ill hazard a guess that you and many
rows, and return the next 3 or 4 rows. other readers now have a newfound READ more Tom
Expert Oracle Database Architecture: 9i and 10g
Both of them do that, but because respect for ROWNUM and understand Programming Techniques and Solutions
amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1590595300
ID has so many duplicate values, these aspects:
the query cannot do it deterministi- O

How ROWNUM is assigned, so you Effective Oracle By Design
amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0072230657
callythe same sort order is not assured can write bug-free queries that use it
from run to run of the query. In order O

How it affects the processing of your DOWNLOAD
to correct this, you need to add some- query, so you can use it to paginate a Oracle Database 10g Express Edition
thing unique to the ORDER BY. In this query on the Web (Oracle Database XE)
oracle.com/technology/xe
case, just use ROWID: O

How it can reduce the work per-

96 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 20 06 ORACLE.COM/ORACLEMAGAZINE
 t e c h n o l o g y OCP
Become a Master
Step up from Oracle Certified Professional to Oracle Certified Master.
he Oracle Certification program
offers three distinct certification
levels for Oracle Database 10g
Associate, Professional, and Master
shown in Figure 1. The three levels
are organized to suit the needs of entry-
level, professional, and senior-level IT
professionals, respectively. The highest
level of certification an Oracle Certified
Professional (OCP) can achieve is Oracle
Database 10g Administrator Certified
Master (Oracle Certified Master).
ABOUT THE MASTER EXAM
The Oracle Certified Master exam tests
candidates on their ability to perform
in a real-world, live database environ-
ment, and it is a test of both knowledge
and experience. In addition to having
practical experience, a candidate taking
the exam is required to have expertise in
complex DBA tasks. The prerequisites for
this rigorous performance-based certifica-
tion are that candidates must first earn
an Oracle Database 10g OCP credential
and complete two advanced-level courses
through Oracle University.
The Oracle Certified Master certifica-
tion consists of a two-day onsite practi-
cal exam that is conducted in an Oracle
University classroom. The test is available
at more than 150 locations worldwide.
Also, Oracle Certified Master upgrade
certification will be available soon for
Oracle9i Oracle Certified Masters, who
will be able to take a one-day practical
exam to upgrade their credentials to
Oracle Database 10g.
PRACTICUM CONTENT
The Oracle Certified Master practicum
content focuses on eight primary areas:
1. Server configuration
2. Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g
Grid Control
3. Managing database availability
Specialized Skills:
T
Master
Advanced Skills:
T
Professional
Fundamentals:
T
Associate
Figure 1: Oracle certification levels
4. Data management
5. Data warehouse management
6. Performance management
7. Oracle Real Application Clusters
8. Oracle Data Guard
Each Oracle Certified Master candi-
date is provided with a dedicated server
that has both Oracle Database 10g and
Red Hat Linux installed. A complete
Oracle 10g documentation set is available
on the server. Over the course of two
days, candidates are given scenarios in
which they are asked to perform complex
technical tasks that require setup, diag-
nostics, troubleshooting, and problem
resolution. There are no multiple-choice
or fill-in-the-blank questions on the exam.
STRATEGIES FOR ACHIEVING A HIGH SCORE
The following are recommended strate-
gies for meeting the exam objectives and
achieving a high score on the Oracle
Certified Master practicum:
O

While preparing for the exam, you
must perform tasks associated with
each of the exam objectives. Limiting
preparation only to book study will not
adequately prepare you for two days of
rigorous hands-on testing.
ORACLE MAGAZINE
BY A R A D H A N A P U R I
O

Basic understanding of operating
system commands is necessary. A can-
didate must know how to copy, move,
and delete a file; navigate between direc-
tories; and execute programs from the
command-line prompt.
O

Although Oracle documentation is
available for reference during the exam,
looking up simple commands in the
documentation will cost time. Therefore,
candidates should not rely too much on
the availability of reference documenta-
tion during the exam.
O

Scenarios in the exam must be com-
pleted within a specific time. Therefore,
time management is critical. Moreover,
some scenarios are built on each other;
failure to meet a set of objectives in one
scenario may have a negative impact on
later scenario objectives.
O

Be prepared to restore and recover your
data. Candidates must back up their data
during the exam and restore and recover
the data if necessary.
CONCLUSION
With Oracle Certified Master, Oracle
provides the only hands-on certifica-
tion and the first master-level database
certification in the industry. Achieving
this rigorous certification puts an Oracle
technologist in the most elite group of
database professionals in the world. O

Aradhana Puri (ocpexam_ww@oracle.com) is a
principal Oracle Certification Exam developer at Oracle.
She has been with the company since 2000.
LEARN more about the Oracle
Certification Program, and download
a free exam guide
oracle.com/education/certification
READ Inside OCP columns
oracle.com/technology/oramag/oracle/ocp
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 20 06 97
Certified Advantage Partner Index
The partners featured in this index have recently reached or renewed their status of Certified Advantage Partner in the Oracle PartnerNetwork.
COMPANY NAME URL COMPANY NAME URL

Global Shen Yang Neusoft Co., Ltd. www.neusoft.com

Accenture www.accenture.com Sierra Atlantic www.sierraatlantic.com
Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. www.amd.com SVOA Public Company Limited www.svoa.co.th
Apple www.apple.com Sysage Technology Co., Ltd. www.sysage.com.tw
Avnet, Inc. www.hallmark.avnet.com System Access Pte Limited www.systemaccess.com
BearingPoint www.bearingpoint.com Sysware Corporation www.sysware.com.tw
Business Objects www.businessobjects.com Systex Information (H.K.) Ltd. www.systex.com.hk
Capgemini www.capgemini.com Taiji Computer Corporation www.taiji.com.cn
CGI Group, Inc. www.cgi.com Tata Infotech Ltd www.TataInfotech.com
Computer Sciences Corporation www.csc.com Teksen Horizon Systems (Guangzhou) Limited www.teksen.com
Convergys www.convergys.com Wezoomtek Corporation www.wezoomtek.com
CSG Systems www.csgsystems.com Canada
Dell www.dell.com MTS Allstream Inc. www.allstream.com
Deloitte www.deloitte.com Oto Global Solutions Inc. www.oto.com
EDS www.eds.com Europe
EMC www.emc.com Actebis Peacock GmbH www.actebispeacock.de
Fidelity Information Services www.fidelityinfoservices.com/FNFIS/ ACURE A/S www.acure.dk
Fujitsu Group www.fujitsu.com Afina Sistemas Informaticos www.afina.es
Hitachi www.hitachi.com Alcatel www.alcatel.com
HP www.hp.com Alcatel CIT www.alcatel.fr
IBM / IBM Business Consulting Services www.ibm.com Anelia SAS www.anelia.fr
i-flex www.iflexsolutions.com Ares www.ares.fr
Infosys www.infosys.com Arinso Nederland BV www.arinso.com
Ingram Micro www.ingrammicro.com Asseco Poland S.A. www.asseco.pl
Intec www.intecbilling.com Atos Origin IT Services UK www.atosorigin.com
Intel www.intel.com Atos Origin Nederland BV www.atosorigin.com
Mercury Interactive www.mercury.com Basilica Computing Limited www.basilica.co.uk
Microsoft www.microsoft.com Bechtle Logistik & Service GmbH www.bechtle.com
NEC www.nec.com Borlas IBC www.borlas.ru
Network Appliance, Inc. www.netapp.com CapGemini Telecom Media und Networks GmbH www.de.cgey.com
Novell www.novell.com CBOSS www.cboss.ru
PegaSystems www.pegasystems.com Cedar Consulting Ltd www.cedarconsulting.co.uk
Portal www.portal.com CIBER UK www.ciber.com
Red Hat www.redhat.com ComArch S.A www.comarch.pl
Satyam www.satyam.com Compelsysao www.compelsysao.co.uk
Sun Microsystems www.sun.com CompIT Technologies www.compit-t.com.by
Tata Consultancy Services www.tcs.com Computacenter AG & Co. OHG www.computacenter.de
TechData www.techdata.com ComputerLand S.A. www.computerland.pl
Temenos www.temenos.com Consit A/S www.consit.dk
Unisys www.unisys.com CROC Incorporated www.croc.ru
Wipro www.wipro.com Cronos NV www.cronos.be
Africa Cronos Ibrica, SA www.cronosiberica.es
2Cana Solutions (Pty) Ltd. www.2cana.co.za CSC Portugal www.csc.pt
EOH KPMG Consulting www.eoh.co.za Deutsche Post ITSolutions GmbH www.dp-itsolutions.de
Implementation Factory (Pty) Ltd. www.ifactory.co.za Developing World Systems Ltd. www.dwsonline.co.uk
Integrated Tertiary Software (Pty) Ltd. www.its.co.za DIGORA www.digora.com
New Dawn Technologies www.ndt.co.za Distrilogie Belgium BVBA www.abcomp.be
Xpedia www.xpedia.co.za DBConcepts Daten-und Informationsverarbeitungsges.m.b.H. www.dbconcepts.at
Asia Pacific DNS Hungary Ltd. www.dns-hungary.hu
ASG (Asia Pacific) Pty Ltd www.asggroup.com.au Engineering Ingegneria Informatica S.p.A. www.eng.it
Application Hosting Services Co., Ltd. www.a-host.co.th Explorer (UK) Limited www.explorer.uk.com
Attain IT Pty Ltd. www.attainit.com.au FORS Development Center www.fdc.ru
Automated Systems (HK) Ltd. www.asl.com.hk Fujitsu Services Limited www.uk.fujitsu.com
Beijing Futong Dong Fang Technology Co. Ltd. www.futong.com.cn Getronics PinkRoccade www.getronicspinkroccade.nl
DataHeaven Co., Ltd. www.dataheaven.co.kr Global Services Aarhus & Copenhagen A/S www.maerskdata.dk
Daesang Information Technology Co., Ltd. www.daesangit.com Groupe LGS France www.lgsrecrut.com
Digital China (China) Limited www.digtalchina.com.cn GWI Unternehmensgruppe www.gwi-ag.com
DMS Software Technologies (Pvt.) Ltd. www.dmsswt.com Hunkler GmbH & Co. KG www.hunkler.biz
ECS International Trading (Shanghai) Co., LTD. www.pci.com.cn I-Teco www.i-teco.ru
FPT Information System www.fis.com.vn Inatech Solutions Ltd www.inatech.com
FPT Software Solutions www.fss.com.vn Industrial and Financial Systems, IFS AB www.ifsworld.com
Fusion5 Limited www.fusion5.co.nz Ineum Consulting www.ineum.fr
GTL Limited www.gtllimited.com Infor Global Solutions GmbH www.infor.de
FPT Corporation www.fpt.com.vn Informacines Technologijos www.it.lt
HAND Enterprise Solutions Co., Ltd. www.hand-china.com Informatica El Cortes Ingles www.ieci.es
Huadi Computer Co., Ltd. www.huadi.com.cn Information Technologies Company www.it.ru
Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. www.huawei.com/cn Inter Access B.V. www.interaccess.nl
iCE Consulting Co Ltd. www.iceconsulting.co.th IT Alise www.it-alise.com
Jigsaw Services Pty Ltd. www.jigsawservices.com.au KNAPP Systemintegration GmbH www.knapp.com
LG CNS Co., Ltd. www.lgcns.com KPMG Consulting www.kpmg.be
IT&C Co., Ltd. www.itnc.co.kr Kurt Salmon Associates www.kurtsalmon.com
KPMG Consulting Co. Ltd. www.kpmg.com.tw LogicaCMG www.logicacmg.nl
Kolon Data Communication Co., Ltd. www.kdc.kolon.co.kr LOGIX www.logix.fr
NCS Pte. Ltd. www.ncs.com.sg Mdtvision www.mdtvision.com
Nucleus Software Exports Ltd. www.nucleussoftware.com Micros-Fidelio GmbH www.micros-fidelio.org
OED Technology Sdn Bhd www.patimas.com Montora www.montora.com
Propia Co., Ltd www.propia.co.kr Morse Group www.morse.com
Pythis www.pythis.com Msg Systems ag www.msg-systems.com
Red Rock Consulting www.redrock.net.au Network Centric Solutions Limited www.ncsltd.com
Samsung SDS www.sds.samsung.co.kr Nokia Corporation www.nokia.com

98 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 20 06 ORACLE.COM/ORACLEMAGAZINE
 CERTIFIEDadvantage partner index
COMPANY NAME URL COMPANY NAME URL

Oficina de Cooperacin Universitaria www.ocu.es Preteco SA www.preteco.com.ar

OpenPSL www.openpsl.com Procwork CRM www.procwork.com.br
Open Technologies www.ot.ru Recours Informatica Consultoria e Assessoria Ltda www.recours.com.br
Opitz Consulting GmbH www.opitz-consulting.de RedPartner, S.A. www.sistemas.com.ec
Patech Solutions Limited www.patech-solutions.com Snoop Consulting S.R.L. www.snoopconsulting.com
PC-Ware Information Technologies AG www.pc-ware.de Soft Bolivar S.A. www.softbolivar.com
PDV-Systeme Erfurt Gesellschaft fr Systemtechnik mbH www.pdv.de Solusoft de Panama www.solusoft.com
Peak Systems Support Ltd www.peaksystems.uk.com Solusoft de Puerto Rico www.solusoft.com
Prodatis Consulting AG www.prodatis.com Soluciones Casee SOCASEE, S.A. www.socasee.com
Professional Computer Services S.A. www.pcs.gr Sonda del Peru S.A. www.sonda.com
QAS Ltd www.qas.com SQL Technology S.A. www.sqltech.cl
Quantix Ltd. www.quantix-uk.com Sunrising Desenvolvimento de Sistemas www.sunrising.com.br
RDTEX www.rdtex.ru Sygnus S.A. www.sygnus.com.pe
RTC Real-Time Center AG www.rtc.ch Synos Consultoria e Informatica www.synos.com.br
S.C. RomSoft S.R.L. www.romsoft.info Sysdesign Consultoria Em Informatica Limitada www.sysdesign.com.br
SCC PLC www.scc.com Tilsor S.A. www.tilsor.com.uy
Sddc www.sddc.fr TSnet S.A. www.tsnetglobal.com
SIV AG www.siv.de Unimix Tecnologia Ltda www.unimix.com.br
Service & Systems Solutions www.northgate-is.com YKP Consultoria e Sistemas Ltda. www.ykp.com.br
Softman SA www.softman.pl Middle East
Software Design & Management AG www.sdm.de Bahwan Cybertek LLC www.bahwancybertek.com
Sogeti Espana www.sogeti.biz Computer and Communications Systems www.ccs.com.jo
Sopra Group www.sopragroup.com Computer Information Systems www.cis.com.lb
Sphinx CST www.sphinx.co.uk Computer and Engineering Bureau CEB www.ceb.com.jo
TEAM GmbH www.team-pb.de Districom www.cis.com.lb
Teamsolve www.teamsolve.co.uk Emirates Computers Est www.emiratescomputers.co.ae
Tech Data Midrange GmbH www.tdmidrange.de Global Technology Services LLC www.gtsuae.com
Technology Reply Srl www.reply.it Hyperlink www.hyperlink-me.com
Teta S.A www.teta.com.pl International Turnkey Systems (ITS) www.its.ws
TietoEnator Corporation www.tetioenator.com Intracom Jordan www.intracom.jo
TimeStamp - Sistema de Informao www.timestamp.pt Mannai Trading Company Limited www.mannaicorp.com
TopS Business Integrator www.topsbi.ru Mercator www.mercator.co.ae
T-Systems International GmbH www.t-systems.com Macro Software Systems LLC www.macro-soft.com
Up to Data, Professional Services GMBH www.uptodata.de Oracle Dedicated Competency Center www. mawarid-odcc.com
Version 1 Software www.version1.com Raya Gulf LLC www.rayaholding.com
Vertis BV www.vertis.nl Royah www.royah.com
Whitehouse Consultants Ltd www.whitehouse-consult.com Satyam Computer Services www.satyam.com
WM-data Danmark A/S www.wmdata.com United States
Latin America 170 Systems, Inc. www.170systems.com
ACT, S.A. www.act.cl Abaris, Inc. www.abaris-inc.com
Abaco Tecnologia de Informacao Ltda www.abaco.com.br Agilysys www.agilysys.com
Acao Informatica Brasil Ltda www.acao.com.br Apex IT, Inc. www.apexit.com
Advanced Database & IT Sistemas de Informao S.A. www.advancedit.com.br Applications Software Technology Corp. www.astcorporation.com
Asi Consultants www.asiconsutants.com BizTech www.biztech.com
Aporte Gestao Empresarial e Tecnologia da Informacao Ltda www.aporte.com BMC Software, Inc. www.bmc.com
Appteck S.A. de C.V. www.appteck.com.mx CedarCrestone www.cedarcrestone.com
Apply Solutions www.applysolutions.com.br CGI Group, Inc. www.cgi.com
Asistir Ltda. www.asistir.com CherryRoad Technologies www.cherryroad.com
B2BR Business to Business Informatica do Brasil www.b2br.com.br CIBER www.ciber.com/ces/oracle
Bertini Consultoria em informatica www.bertini.com.br CSS International www.cssus.com
BGH, S.A. www.bgh.com.ar DAZ Systems www.dazsi.com
BusinessMind S.A. www.businessmind.com.ec Dynamic Information Systems www.dynamic-info.com
Casa de Software S/A www.casasoft.com.br Hitachi Consulting, Inc. www.hitachiconsulting.com
Coasin Chile, S.A. www.coasin.com Hyperion Solutions www.hyperion.com
Commit Consultores de Empresas Ltda www.commitconsultores.com.br Impac www.impacservices.com
Datastar Argentina S.A. www.datastar.com.ar Intermec www.intermec.com
Datum, S.A. (Guatemala) www.datum.com.gt KBACE Technologies, Inc. www.kbace.com
Datum, S.A. de C.V. (El Salvador) www.datum.com.sv Kronos Inc. www.kronos.com
Discover Technology Informatica Ltda www.discover.com.br Lockheed Martin Systems Integration Owego www.owego.com
e-Builders & Consulting Group S. A. C. www.ebuilders.com.pe Lucidity Consulting Group LP www.luciditycg.com
E-Partner Comercial e Servios de Informtica Ltda www.epartnerbr.com.br MI Services Group, Inc. www.mi-services.com
EN-SOF Consultoria e Informtica Ltda. www.en-sof.com.br Navitaire Inc. www.navitaire.com
ERP Soluciones S.A. de C.V. www.erpsol.com.mx OSI Consulting, Inc www.osius.com
Excelsis S.A.C.I.G www.excelsis.com.py Princeton Softech www.princetonsoftech.com
Elucid Solutions S.A. www.elucid.com.br Protege Software Services, Inc. www.protege.com
Illuminat www.illuminatnm.com RCM Technologies www.rcmt.com
In Motion Servicios S.A. www.inmotion.cl Rapidigm, Inc. www.rapidigm.com
Ingenieria Condor S.A. DE C.V. www.i-condor.com Sogeti USA LLC www.sogeti.com
J Evans y Asociados S.A.C. www.jevansa.com.pe Solbourne Computer Inc. www.solbourne.com
JFM Informtica Ltda. www.jfm.com.br SYSTIME Computer Corporation www.systime.net
Kruger Corporation www.kruger.com.ec TITAN Technology Partners www.ttpartners.com
MOST S.A. www.grupomost.com TUSC www.tusc.com
MPL Corporate Software SA www.mpl.com.br Vertex Systems, Inc. www.vertexsystems.com
Netix Distribuidores de Tecnologia, C.A. www.netixcorp.com Waters Corporation www.waters.com
Nexsys de Colombia www.nexsysla.com Wave Consulting Group www.wavecg.com
Nexsys del Peru SAC www.nexsysla.com Whitbread Technology Partners, Inc. www.whitbreadtech.com
Officer Distribuidora www.officer.com.br Xcelicor, Inc. www.xcelicor.com

Partners able to demonstrate superior product knowledge, technical expertise, and a commitment to doing business with Oracle qualify for the Oracle PartnerNetwork Certified Advantage Partner level. These partners receive a
higher level of service, training, benefits, and resources from Oracle. For more information on partners, please visit the Oracle PartnerNetwork Solutions Catalog at solutions.oracle.com.

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 c o m m e n t IN THE FIELD
Storage Made Simpler
Storage virtualization can simplify database applications.
ome vendorsand even custom-
ersmight think that theres no
story in storage. You have hard
drives. You store data on them.
End of story.
Unless you have multiple operating
systems and servers trying to access the
same data. Or your company is strug-
gling to consolidate hardware or software
from a merger or an acquisition. Or you
need storage-based replication or disas-
ter recovery options. Or you want your
storage solutions to be easier to manage.
Then storage becomes a big story.
Storage virtualizationwhich uses
collections of disk drives, possibly in a
storage-area network (SAN) or a network-
attached storage (NAS) arrangement as a
unified pool of storagecan be a solution
to all these problems. However, drives in
that storage pool can use all kinds of pro-
tocols: Fibre Channel, iSCSI, NFS, and
others. And they can come from multiple
vendors and represent different classes of
storage. How can you get all these storage
systems to work together as one?
The answer is a virtualization solu-
tion such as a vfilera piece of hardware
attached to a network. The vfiler acts as
a metalayer between the physical drives
and software. This abstracts the storage
layer from its physical basis and makes it
available to the software.
The vfiler receives all requests for
storage, from applications and databases,
for example, and translates those requests
into the physical locations of the data.
The vfiler can address data on a file level
or block-storage level, and the data can
be local or remote. Thanks to the vfiler,
applications can find the data they need,
wherever it is. A vfiler solution also
enables companies to add and remove
storage behind the scenes without down-
time or major storage reconfiguration.
One of my clients, a financial services
company, used a storage virtualiza-
tion strategy and found how much it
simplified maintenance. These people
constantly move their storage devices
and other equipment around. In the
past, they had to call in expensive spe-
cialists to move, rewire, and configure
physical racks of storage as needed.
Now the companys virtualization solu-
tion automatically manages the storage
environment, and because adding to
or removing from the pool is easy and
entails no downtime, the company saves
time, money, and energy. What used to
take days now takes minutes.
Using storage virtualization to inter-
cept and carry out all the storage requests
entails almost no performance degrada-
tion, because applications must be steered
to needed data anyway. With storage vir-
tualization, they are just steered to a larger
multiprotocol unified pool of data.
Storage virtualization also allows
companies to use their storage space
more efficiently. In the usual setup, each
database for each application allocates its
own island of storage, reserved exclusively
for its own use to support that applica-
tion. Thus lots of storage space is wasted,
because the applications dont use the
maximum allocated space. However, if
the applications can share a single pool of
storage, the amount of preallocated space
can be reduced. Less physical space is
needed, which cuts costs. In my experi-
ence, companies recover their investment
in storage virtualization in less than a year.
Beyond using space more efficiently,
another benefit of storage virtualization is
abstraction, such as accessing data across
operating systems and storage devices
from different manufacturers. I once
worked with a high-end cosmetics retailer
that needed assistance with its integration
efforts. The company ran applications on
both UNIX and Windows machines, but
ORACLE MAGAZINE
BY ARI KAPLAN
data management issues frustrated man-
agers: UNIX applications couldnt handle
Microsoft Word documents, for instance.
But by using storage abstraction tech-
niques, the applications could see and
manipulate files as necessary, all behind
the scenes and invisible to the users.
Oracles Automatic Storage Manage-
ment (ASM) complements storage vir-
tualization. ASM keeps track of RAID
(redundant array of inexpensive disks)
striping and mirroring, so separate storage
administration isnt necessary. Because
ASM automatically manages much of the
storage layer from within the database,
allocating storage as needed, applications
dont halt when space runs out. The
combination of ASM with storage virtual-
ization makes sense for many shops.
Standards for storage virtualization
are evolving. Network Appliances seems
to be taking the lead, supporting four
popular protocolsCIFS, Fibre Channel,
iSCSI, and NFSas well as NAS, SAN,
and Oracle-specific management solu-
tions. The adoption of standards should
make storage virtualization techniques
more valuable, and the companies that
implement some sort of virtualization can
expect to simplify their operations and
save money. And thats a good story. O
Ari Kaplan (ari_kaplan@ioug.org) is president of the
Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG) and senior
consultant at Datalink. He founded Expand Beyond
Corporation, a leader in mobile IT software. He has been
involved in Oracle technology since 1992.
READ about Automatic Storage
Management
oracle.com/technology/products/database/asm
DOWNLOAD the ASMLib
support library
oracle.com/technology/tech/linux/asmlib
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 20 06 103
 c o m m e n t ANALYSTS CORNER
Managing Information Overload
Enterprise content management improves compliance efforts and the bottom line.
im Murphy, a research director at
AMR Research covering content
management, portals, collabora-
tion, and search-and-retrieval
technology, talked to Oracle Magazine
about managing structured and unstruc-
tured information cohesively.
Oracle Magazine: Content management is a
perennial problem. Whats changed lately
to make it so much more challenging?
Murphy: Critical information can now
take many forms. Structured information
in relational tables is easy to identify and
track, but most organizations must also
deal with unstructured information in
spreadsheets, PDF files, e-mail systems,
and so forth. The situation has become
even more extreme with the haphazard
nature of e-mail and instant messag-
ing. Plus you need to be able to attach
hard-copy documents, like invoices
and purchase orders, to the data in ERP
[enterprise resource planning] systems.
These are all important aspects of a vast
landscape of information that must be
consistently managed and controlled.
Oracle Magazine: How do enterprise
content management systems simplify
compliance issues?
Murphy: Compliance has always been
an issue, but with Sarbanes-Oxley it
has reached the C level in a big way. As
executives pay closer attention to record
management, record retention, and
document management, companies need
a more pervasive strategy for managing
information over time and across dif-
ferent channels. Content management
systems add structure and integrity to
information-intensive processes so key
documents can be easily identified and
manipulated. For example, financial
documents must be checked in and
checked out of a repository, so that
when someone makes a change, it is
auditable after the fact.
104 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 20 06 ORACLE.COM/ORACLEMAGAZINE
Many companies are still trying to
figure out how to institute document
management practices that satisfy the
demands of lawyers and compliance
officers. Developing consistent retention
policies is the starting point. A content
management system helps you enforce
these policies across the business in a
consistent way.
Oracle Magazine: Where does the ROI
[return on investment] come from in
todays enterprise content management
initiatives?
Murphy: Software vendors commonly
claim that an enterprise content manage-
ment system will improve productivity.
In many cases thats true, but how do
you measure it? One good way is by
making tangible improvements to a par-
ticular business process. For example,
todays content management systems
allow you to create an image of an
invoice, so it can be saved electronically,
and apply optical character recognition
technology, so you can find and extract
specific information. This is especially
critical as we depend more heavily on
automated processes within our ERP
systems. For example, sometimes a pur-
chase order doesnt match an invoice
because theres been a change in pricing.
Some ERP systems will kick out these
exceptions for manual scrutiny, and that
can cause a big backlog. Some custom-
ers tell us that as much as 30 percent of
their purchasing process can be delayed
because of this issue. Fixing these prob-
lems is highly manualtypically, you
need to print copies of both documents
and send them to a purchasing manager
for approval. A content management
system can help you handle these excep-
tions as part of a standard workflow:
identify the problem, find the pertinent
info, then automatically escalate the
issue and e-mail it to the purchasing
BY DAVI D BAUM
manager, who can resolve discrepancies
with only a couple of clicks.
Many similar tactical issues can be
addressed by a content management
system, and thats where you can really
measure the savings. In marketing, it
means you get press releases out in a
timely manner, with more-consistent
branding. In product development, it
means supplying more-complete docu-
mentation to customers. In accounting,
it means providing accurate information
to regulatory bodies.
Oracle Magazine: Whats unique about
Oracles approach?
Murphy: Oracle has figured out how to
manage all types of documents within
the database, without pointers to an
external document repository. Of course,
content management entails more than
just storage, retention, and central man-
agement of information. It must also
accommodate the authoring, publishing,
capture, and syndication processes, and
so on. Oracle is looking to partners for a
lot of these specialized capabilities. Thats
a workable strategy and a good way to
approach a multifaceted problem. O
David Baum (david@dbaumcomm.com) is a freelance
business writer based in Santa Barbara, California.
Founded in 1986, AMR Research (www.amrresearch
.com) focuses on supply chain, enterprise applications,
and next-generation infrastructure.
READ about
Oracle Content Database
oracle.com/database/contentdb.html
LISTEN to Oracle President
Charles Phillips announce Oracles
content management strategy
oracle.com/broadband/showiseminar
.html?4848956
Oracle Retail

17 of the Top 20
Retailers in the World
Run Oracle Applications

Get Better Results

Retailers Running Oracle Are
32% More Profitable Than Those Who Dont.

oracle.com/industries/retail
or call 1.800.633.0544
Source: Top retailers are per Fortune Global 500 list. Protability metric reects the average performance of Oracle custom-
ers and non-Oracle customers within the industry group, and is based upon an analysis of nancial data for NYSE and
NASDAQ listed companies that has been validated by Mainstay Partners. Financial data provided by Stratascope Inc.

Copyright 2006. All rights reserved. Oracle, JD Edwards PeopleSoft and Siebel are registered trademarks of Oracle Corporation and/or its affiliates.
Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.
Its not your drawer.
Its your data center.

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Visit Booth 1614 at Oracle OpenWorld

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Join the thousands whove left their legacy environments behind.

See us at Oracle OpenWorld Booth 1614 or visit http://www.netapp.com/partners/oracle/
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2006 Network Appliance, Inc. All rights reserved. Specications subject to change without notice. NetApp and the Network Appliance logo are registered trademarks
and Network Appliance is a trademark of Network Appliance, Inc. in the U.S. and other countries. Oracle is a registered trademark of Oracle Corporation. All other brands
or products are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders and should be treated as such. Part # C14989-01