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June, 2007
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Implementing Database Development Best Practices for Oracle Industry experts estimate that software bugs cost the worldwide economy billions of dollars (according to the National Institute of Standards and Technology). These bugs pose tremendous financial burdens, due to the poor performance and logic errors they create. In addition, they decrease productivity, increase frustration, and make it difficult for companies to meet changing business requirements. In an age of outsourcing and multi-skilled developers - whose focus may not be on database development - there is an increasing need for a process to ensure the delivery of optimal code to production. Currently, organizations lack an automated process. Thus development teams, regardless of skill set, are inhibited from consistently producing the highest-quality code that also performs at optimal levels. Also, management has no way to effectively validate code before it’s deployed into production. By implementing development best practices, organizations can achieve these goals and ensure the quality of code produced by developers and development teams. Click here for the article.
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DB2 Security and PCI Compliance This paper describes a relatively overlooked situation, where you need to encrypt your database. Databases are far too critical to an organization to be left unsecured, or incorrectly secured. The database is indeed the last line of defense in an organization. This paper will review best practices to ensure that the last line of defense is not easily breached by external or internal attacks. For many years external security threats received more attention than internal ones, but the focus has changed. Worms, viruses and the external hacker were once perceived as the biggest threats to computer systems. What is often overlooked is the potential for a trusted individual with special privileges or access to steal or modify data. While viruses and worms are serious, attacks perpetrated by people with trusted insider status—employees, ex-employees, contractors and business partners—pose a far greater threat to organizations in terms of potential cost per occurrence and total potential cost than attacks mounted from outside. Well documented breaches have heightened the public’s – and regulatory agencies’ - concerns about how well companies are securing consumer-specific information captured at the point-of-acquisition. Extended partnerships lead to that more and more tasks will be performed outside the physical boundaries of company facilities which will add another level of due diligence we must take into account.
Click here
for the article.
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The Right Place for PL/SQL |
by Steven Feuerstein "I write packages and procedures in both Oracle Database and Oracle Developer applications (Oracle Forms). How should I decide where to put my code?" Another way to frame this question is to ask what the scope of your program should be. That is, from which programs in your application can it be called? Within just a single form? All forms? From within a single program on the server? From any schema that connects to your instance? I make my decision on these issues by following this principle: Implement the program as closely as possible to where it is used (called). Click here for the article.
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Monitoring File Sizes in SQL Server - Part 1 I understand how the Wicked Witch of the West felt when the house fell on her sister. One of my friends had the house fall on him when their server froze because of a space issue. He dutifully monitored the databases as required in the OZ SQL manual. But the server froze not because of a problem in the database but in a portion of the server which held web data. Temporary data filled the server waiting to be offloaded to another application. It occurred - they think - over a two week period. We check periodically to make sure there is enough server space and that mdf/ldf sizes are within expected growth level. Is this enough? The problem is that you probably are doing this manually. Maybe you have a whole bunch of servers and may or may not remember "size-to-freespace" relationships correctly. How can you tell whether a gig increase in an mdf file over a week is unique or part of the normal growth? Your user might be insisting on you expanding his space on the SAN because they feel you are going to run out of space for their data and you can't argue because you don't have any data to back you up. Follow me down the yellow brick road, I can't offer you an appointment with the Wizard, but I can provide several different tools that might give you the data you need to become proactive rather than reactive. Click here to see the article.
In A Nutshell
Interested in learning more tips and techniques for SQL Server? "In A Nutshell"
is what you are looking for. Kevin Kline,
author of O'Reilly's "SQL in a Nutshell" and "Transact-SQL Programming" and President of The Professional Association for SQL Server,
offers tips, techniques and much more. Updated numerous times a week,
there is always valuable material to be had!
Click
here
to see what Kevin is up to in the SQL Server world.
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| Understanding the Falcon Transaction Storage Engine – Part 3 In terms of storage, both tables and indexes are stored within the user datafiles that are automatically created by the Falcon engine when the first Falcon table is created in a database. Falcon supports standard heap tables along with all datatypes available within MySQL. Tables can house up to four billion rows in the alpha release (this limit will be removed in the GA version). To support the auto-increment feature of tables, Falcon implements a subset of the standard SQL sequence feature. A sequence is a mechanism for generating unique ascending values that are not transactional. When a sequence is incremented, it remains incremented even if the action that causes the increment fails or the transaction rolls back. Falcon generates new sequences for concurrent inserts without requiring them to wait for each other. For users of Oracle and DB2, please note: Falcon sequences are not separate objects that can be addressed and manipulated as sequences in those RDBMS’s. Click here to see this article.
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How many times have you heard about or been involved in a project that failed miserably? Or perhaps it just was not as successful as it needed to be. Did you ever spend time looking back to see what caused the project to go wrong? If you did, chances are that you will have said, "You know, we should have spent more time planning." Most projects have deadlines, and it seems they are getting shorter and shorter. Hitting aggressive deadlines puts pressure on the project manager to start the project as soon as possible. However, before the project work begins, you need to spend time in up-front planning to make sure that the work is properly understood and agreed to. This is not wasted time or 'overhead' time. This is the time the project manager spends ensuring that the project team and the client have common perceptions of what the project is going to deliver, when it will be complete, what it will cost, who will do the work and how the work will be done. Click here for more information on understanding the value of planning.
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| Webcasts
Introducing Toad Project Watson
Toad Project Watson is currently in Beta and seeking additional testers. To join the beta program, go to the link below: http://www.toadworld.com/DevTeam/ProjectWatson/tabid/147/Default.aspx Get a Toad t-shirt for reporting a verifiable bug and a 4GB Apple iPod® Nano for reporting the most bugs during the beta program!
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Interactive Crossword
Puzzle: "Office Items"
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