June, 2004  

  In This Issue

All articles have been reprinted with the written consent of their respective authors.

Free Utilities

Freeware - DB2 OS/390 System Catalog

Quest Software presents DB2 OS/390 System Catalog, a freeware reference tool for viewing information on DB2's OS/390 System Catalog. The definitions and column information for each catalog table are provided from DB2 documentation.

Click here for more information and to download DB2 OS/390 System Catalog.
 
Oracle Administration

Fine-Grained Auditing for Real-World Problems, Part 2
By Arup Nanda

In the Part 1 of this series, I described how to build a Fine-Grained Auditing (FGA) system to audit select statements, capturing the statements depending on certain conditions—a task impossible in regular auditing or though the use of DML triggers and the Log Miner tool. In addition to creating an audit trail, we also saw how we can make it execute a user-defined procedure when the conditions for audit are met.

In this installment, we will explore advanced FGA concepts such as application user models and the reconstruction of data viewed by the user.

Click Here for the article.

Note: This article was previously published on OTN .
 

Transparent Clustered Database Failover Using JAVA
By Sudhir Movva & Murali Vallath

The best failover is the one that no one notices. Unfortunately, even though Oracle has been architected to recover very quickly, failures can severely disrupt users by dropping connections to the database.  There various kinds of user operations against the database, INSERT, UPDATES, DELETS and SELECTS.  Off these various types of operations, by implementing TAF with out making any application changes, only SELECT statements are failed over.  Well this is good for a data warehouse operations, were most of the operations are SELECT queries.  However in the real world, operations against the database are not limited to just SELECT queries, DML operations (INSERT, UPDATE and DELETE) are critical and failover without moving such operations transparently does not provide a true user friendly environment.

Click Here for the article.
  

DB2

Basic DB2 UDB Performance Tuning, Part 3
By Roger Sanders, NetApp

In my previous columns, I showed how certain registry variables and configuration parameters influence the performance of DB2 Universal Database (UDB) for Linux, Unix, and Windows. In this column, I'll tackle another factor that can have a significant impact on database performance: database design. A DB2 UDB database is comprised of several objects and, as you might imagine, how those objects are created and how well they work together can have a significant impact on how well (or how poorly) a database performs. The objects that the most significant impact on performance are buffer pools, tablespaces, and indexes; I'll walk you through the considerations for each.

Click Here for the article.  
Oracle Development

Transaction, Heal Thyself!  Part 5
By Darryl Hurley

Oracle 9i introduces a long awaited feature that suspends certain transactions instead of failing them straight away. In this series of articles Darryl presents a methodology to take advantage of resumable transactions to support sophisticated transaction processing requirements. Part V delivers his custom built solution for handling the most literal of space errors, NO MORE SPACE. Also in this final article in the series he concludes with general error handling and a look to the future including Oracle 10G.

This article was originally published in the January, 2004 issue of Oracle Professional.

Click Here for the paper.  

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Microsoft SQL Server

Auditing Through Triggers
By Robert Marda, bigdough.com

In this article I will give code examples for a few triggers. One of the simplest ways to design a trigger is one that fires whenever any column in a table is updated or whenever a row is inserted.

Click here for the article.  

Freeware: Toad for SQL Server & Toad for MySQL

Quest now offers freeware tools for MySQL and SQL Server developers and database administrators. With the knowledge and success gained from our past experience with TOAD® for Oracle, we’ve created Toad® for MySQL – Preview Release and Toad® for SQL Server.

Developers and database administrators alike can use a familiar tool that improves productivity by providing an easy-to-use development environment to manage MySQL and SQL Server databases. As with TOAD, Quest equips you with the ability to create and execute queries, automate database object management and create both SQL Code and T-SQL code more efficiently with an intuitive graphical interface.
 

Project Management Tips & Techniques
Estimating Thresholds for Effort and Duration
Tom Mochal, www.tenstep.com 
Each month, Tom Mochal presents a set of project management tips and techniques for handling various aspects of planning and managing a project. Tom has over 23 years of IT experience. He has developed a comprehensive, scalable project management process called TenStep (www.TenStep.com). He has also developed PMOStep (www.PMOStep.com), which is focused on building, implementing and supporting project management methodology through a Project Management Office. Tom also has a comprehensive application support methodology called

The process of creating a work breakdown structure requires a repetitive process of breaking larger chunks of work into a series of smaller and smaller pieces. An appropriate question to ask is how small the activities should be before they do not need to be broken down further. This is the estimating threshold, under which it makes no sense to break down the work any further. There is no hard and fast rule for the threshold, but there are some general guidelines and then some caveats where different rules might apply.

Click here for more information on estimating thresholds.
 

News & Events

Free Webcasts
For detailed information on these free webcasts, please visit our News and Events page.

Tips of the Month
Oracle DBA Tip of the Month:  How to Obtain Oracle Dumps
PL/SQL Tip of the Month:  PL/SQL Upsert
DB2 Tip of the Month:  DB2 Replication Pruning
SQL Server Tip of the Month: Alternative Way to Get a Table's Row Count
MySQL Tip of the Month: Remove Duplicate Entries
Puzzle

Interactive Crossword Puzzle: "Word Jumble - Synonyms"
 

 
1 Down - Oracle, for Example		 Test your knowledge with the Pipeline Newsletter's Monthly Crossword Puzzle. 

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Regular Features

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