N OVEMBER/DEC E M BE R 2 0 0 6 O R A C L E.

C O M / O R A C LEMA GA ZI NE

JEAN CHAVINIER ADRIANA FERREIRA KEVIN HORNER YOSHIKAZU AMANO

PERNOD RICARD CVRD ALCOA TOYOTA MOTOR

OUR CIOs OF THE YEAR

FIVE YEARS OF EDITORS‘ CHOICE AWARDS

HONORING LEADERS AND INNOVATORS OF 2006

11

0 74470 86614 5

IN THIS ISSUE: ORACLE WAREHOUSE BUILDER 10g R2 • ORACLE TIMESTEN • RESTORE POINTS • WORKING WITH COLLECTIONS
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© 2006 Embarcadero Technologies, Inc. All rights reserved.

'
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 CONTENTS VOLU M E XX, I SSUE 6

F EATUR E

EDITORS’ CHOICE AWARDS 2006

Honoring Leaders
and Innovators
The editors of Oracle Magazine are proud to

announce the recipients of our fifth annual

Editors’ Choice Awards. It takes vision and

commitment to build and manage enterprise

technologies, and these winners most certainly

demonstrate these qualities. From language

development and applications adoption to

systems architecture and enterprise planning,

see how these remarkable people use

technology to build their businesses today

and prepare for tomorrow.

—David A. Kelly
—David A. Kelly
/29
BOB ADLER

Cover: CIO photographs by Ton Hendriks, Paulo Fridman,

Mark Bolster, and Yasu Nakaoka.

DE PAR T M E NTS

From Our Readers / 9

Readers tell us what they think.
From the Editor / 11
12 AT OR AC LE
Events / 12 OTN Bulletin / 18
Recognizing winners Learn what’s happening with Oracle’s most
Find out about upcoming
—Tom Haunert dynamic online community.
conferences and training.
Oracle Resources / 17 Oracle News Briefs / 21
Here’s your guide to Oracle’s
broadband, education, and
online offerings, plus what’s
new at Oracle.

ORACLE MAGAZINE NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 20 06 3

 61 TEC HNOLOGY
R EC OV ERY
Restore to the Point / 61
Use named points in time to roll your database back by
using flashback query. —Arup Nanda

24 CH A NNEL S
Partner News / 24
EMBEDDED
When Microseconds Count / 65
The Oracle TimesTen in-memory database is always ready.
Capgemini, EDS, Inter Access, HP, IBM, —Jonathan Gennick
Nextance, TEMENOS, EnergySys/
Digital Steps, Accenture, LogicaCMG, DATA WAR EHOUS ING
NewFrontiers Consultancy, Tata Consultancy Managing Data Quality / 69
Services, TUSC Oracle Warehouse Builder 10g handles the truth.
Book Beat / 24 —Ron Hardman
Peer-to-Peer / 27
Avi Abrami, Syed Jaffar Hussain, Chris Foot AS K TOM
On Rescue Analytics and Popularity / 73
Our technologist explains the saving power of analytics and
shares popularity. —Tom Kyte

INS IDE OC P

55
Testing Database Security / 77
Questions and answers on securing your Oracle database by
D EVEL O PER using FGA and VPD —Aradhana Puri

80
F RA MEWO RKS
Jump-Start J2EE Development / 55
Finish development faster with Oracle JHeadstart. R ES OUR C ES
—Steve Muench Oracle Certified Advantage
Partner Index / 80
B RO WSER-B A SED Advertisers’ Index / 82

83
Taking Up Collections / 57
Use collections to manage session state in Oracle
Application Express. —Mike Hichwa C OMMENT

PL / SQ L PRA CTI CES IN THE FIELD

On Object Types in Collections / 59 Asking the Right Questions / 83
Best practices for retrieving objects and object attributes Data provides dry information on its own, but
from objects —Steven Feuerstein business analytics can pry the meaning loose.
—Ari Kaplan

ANALY S T’ S C OR NER
Finding Information on Demand / 84
Ease of use and risk management drive
companies to enterprise search.
—David Baum

4 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 20 06 ORACLE.COM/ORACLEMAGAZINE
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 ED ITORIA L

Editor in Chief Tom Haunert tom.haunert@oracle.com

Senior Managing Editor Caroline Kvitka caroline.kvitka@oracle.com
Features Editor Kay Keppler kay.keppler@oracle.com
Contributing Editor and Writer Blair Campbell
Editor in Chief, OTN Justin Kestelyn justin.kestelyn@oracle.com
Technology Advisors Tom Kyte, Christopher Beck
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D ES IGN
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Your corrections, your opinions, and your requests:
Here’s your forum for telling us what’s right and
wrong in each issue of Oracle Magazine, and for
letting us know what you want to read.
GETTING DIGITAL WITH IT
Thank you to all who wrote to us regard-
ing the new digital version of Oracle
Magazine. The digital Oracle Magazine is
a pilot program that offers a custom online
format with hyperlinks and a PDF format
for download and offline viewing.
Many of our readers have praised the
convenience of viewing Oracle Magazine
in this form; some have written about issues
encountered when trying to access the
digital magazine; and some have asked why
they are receiving the digital version.
The digital magazine is currently going
out to those who noted on their subscrip-
tion cards or forms that they would like to
receive Oracle Magazine in digital form.
If you wish to change this preference, com-
plete and send in the printed subscription
card with your new preference, or change
the preference in the online form at
www.submag.com/sub/oc?pk=orafaq.
—The Editors
THINK SMALL, THINK SAMPLE
As a regular reader, I like the articles
in Oracle Magazine, but it would be
helpful if you could include some
small articles that would be useful
for beginners in technology on topics
such as databases, the Web, JavaServer
Pages, and servlets. Articles should
include sample code.
Ranjith Kn
ranjithmenon2004@gmail.com
There are articles on aspects of Oracle
Database in every issue of Oracle
Magazine, and most technologies
described have at least one Web inter-
face. Please take a look at our technology
article index at oracle.com/technology/
f r o m o u r READERS
oramag/sitemap_techarticles.html for
more information.
A PLACE FOR SHARING
I am a regular reader of Oracle
Magazine, and I can assure you that
it is very helpful. I have a sugges-
tion, however: For all areas of Oracle
Magazine, please find a way for people
to share their experiences. For example,
create a Web site for all DBAs every-
where to share information and experi-
ence and somehow help each other.
Baddi Mbarek
mbarek.baddi@gmail.com
People share their Oracle Magazine expe-
riences by sending e-mail to opubedit_
us@oracle.com; many requests sent to that
address are published here. For sharing
Oracle technology experiences, the editors
highly recommend the Oracle Technology
Network (OTN) online community at
oracle.com/technology—and, specifically,
the OTN forums at forums.oracle.com.
Here Oracle technologists can share their
experiences in technology-specific forums.
MORE OFTEN
I always look forward to reading Oracle
Magazine; you guys are doing a great
job. I just wonder if the magazine could
be made monthly instead of publishing
every two months.
Oluyemi Ajiboso
oajiboso@hotmail.com
STRONG SUPPORT
I agree with the readers who wrote into
your From Our Readers section in the
July/August 2006 issue to say that there
ORACLE MAGAZINE
should be some articles and tutorials
specifically for young “babysitter” DBAs
and other beginners.
I strongly support and want you to
publish articles and columns on all types
of database backups, with their steps
explained in a manner that’s understand-
able to beginners.
Another thing I would like is noti-
fication, for candidates appearing for
Oracle Certified Professional [OCP]
exams, of the times available for taking
the exam, the number of questions
asked, and so on. Could you please
publish articles helpful for OCP
candidates?
Vinay Bhardwaj
vinaybhardwaj1087@yahoo.com
Inside OCP is a regular column in Oracle
Magazine and a source for information
about the content of the OCP exams. See
oracle.com/technology/oramag/oracle/ocp
for an index of Inside OCP articles. For
more-detailed information about a par-
ticular OCP exam, including duration and
number of questions, go to education.oracle
.com and click the Exam Details link (under
Certification). Click an exam number link
to see detailed exam information.
send mail to the EDITOR
Send your opinions about what you read in Oracle
Magazine, and suggestions for possible technical
articles, to opubedit_us@oracle.com.
Or click on the Write the Editors link on our Web
site, oracle.com/oraclemagazine.
Letters may be edited for length and clarity and
may be published in any medium. We consider
any communications we receive publishable.
NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 20 06 9
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 f r o m t h e EDITOR
Recognizing Winners
Innovators and leaders drive the content of Oracle Magazine.
ach issue of Oracle Magazine includes similar types
of content: Oracle product, partner, event, and com-
munity news; features about Oracle products and cus-
tomers; hands-on information on how to use Oracle
technology; and community commentary.
The specific content that becomes each issue, however,
travels a long road, through nomination, scrutiny, creation,
more scrutiny, revision, and, finally, print. Input for this
content comes via Oracle product managers, Oracle subject
matter experts, customers, initiatives, technology events,
authors, and more.
Most of the time, it’s what’s new, innovative, and leads
the market that drives our content. New technologies,
new Oracle technology and industry solutions, customers
succeeding with new Oracle solutions, new application
architectures, and new applications are what most of our
customers want to read about, so that’s what we want to
cover in Oracle Magazine.
IT’S GOOD TO HAVE OPTIONS
The July/August and September/October 2006 issues of Oracle
Magazine included articles about Oracle Real Application
Clusters, Oracle Enterprise Manager Management Packs,
Oracle Partitioning, Oracle Content Database, Oracle Records
Database, Oracle Database Vault, Oracle Advanced Security,
and Oracle Label Security. All of these offerings have some-
thing in common—they are Oracle Database options, powerful
extensions to Oracle Database. I highly recommend that you
follow the link in nextSTEPS to read more about them.
Now, we did not specifically plan to cover Oracle Database
options in these last two issues. We ran these articles because
the Oracle people behind the technologies, Oracle customers,
and our authors demonstrated the technical innovation of
these options and how these technologies lead the market.
And as much as technology innovation drives the content
of Oracle Magazine, we do not plan a magazine issue just a
READ more about
Oracle Database options
oracle.com/database/database-options.html
VIEW the Oracle Magazine editorial calendar
oracle.com/oramag/misc/orapub_calendar.html
few weeks before publication based on the newest technology.
We generally start work on an issue six months before the
issue date, and we don’t start an issue without a content plan.
We create an editorial calendar with issue content outlined
more than a year in advance. (We posted our 2007 calendar
in August 2006.) On this calendar we identify some content
areas, such as security, high availability, and content man-
agement, as well as some specific products, such as Oracle
Enterprise Manager Grid Control. We revise the editorial
calendar continuously, sometimes moving articles to accom-
modate product release schedules and sometimes switching
from a content area to a specific product (or vice versa).
With some of the newer Oracle Database options that
we’ve recently covered—specifically Oracle Content Database,
Oracle Records Database, and Oracle Database Vault—we were
planning articles on content management and security many
months before these options were in production. Their intro-
duction, as well customers’ success with beta versions, put
these new options on our revised editorial calendar.
And as much as we are involved in deciding on the article
topics and producing the finished articles, I don’t think we
actually dictate the technologies that we cover in each issue.
To me, compelling Oracle technology solutions nominate
themselves for coverage in Oracle Magazine and vote for them-
selves with their features and competitive qualities. We editors
simply recognize the innovation in the winners.
PEOPLE WIN
In the same way that we recognize the strongest Oracle tech-
nology solutions with articles in Oracle Magazine, we recognize
the people who bring these solutions to life in the enterprise
with the Oracle Magazine Editors’ Choice Awards.
The Editors’ Choice award candidates do not nominate
themselves; rather, Oracle and Oracle partner representatives
nominate them. The representatives complete a lengthy form
with information about a candidate’s leadership and innova-
tion, and these completed nomination forms are exercises in
passion that demonstrate each candidate’s successes.
To choose the winners, all the editors need to do is recog-
nize the leadership and innovation in the candidates. All the
candidates are leaders and innovators, but even amid elite
company, the winners stand out. And we’re proud to recognize
them one more time.
Tom Haunert, Editor in Chief
tom.haunert@oracle.com
ORACLE MAGAZINE NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 20 06 11
 a t O r a c l e EVENTS
Technology Events
Conferences and sessions to help you stay on the cutting edge
ProcureCon 2006
November 6–9, Brussels, Belgium
This pan-European procurement event pro-
vides an environment for attendees to learn
from procurement leaders, get practical advice
on operational issues, and participate in inter-
active discussions. Register at www
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SANS Amsterdam 2006
November 6–11, Amsterdam,
the Netherlands
This annual training event includes a full-week
class, “Securing Oracle,” that provides a com-
prehensive introduction to planning, auditing,
and securing an Oracle database. Learn more
at www.sans.org/amsterdam06.
Single Euro Payment Area
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November 8–10, London
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Sign up at www.iir-events.com/IIR-conf/
Finance/EventView.aspx?EventID=708.
German Oracle User Group
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This two-day conference includes hands-on
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GROUPS
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1,000 user-centric events that Oracle has November 8–9, Perth
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Unlimited and the evolutionary path to
India OAUG Conference
Oracle Fusion Applications. Find a local
November 14, Mumbai
event at oracle.com/events/worldtour.
www.india.oaug.org
Ohio PeopleSoft/JD Edwards Regional
User Group
sessions and networking opportunities. It is November 16, Columbus, Ohio
preceded by a one-day user group event and www.ohiorug.blogspot.com
followed by a training day. Register at www
Caribbean Regional Users’ Group (CRUG)
.doag.org/konferenz/doag/2006. Annual Conference
November 17–18, Port of Spain,
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Conference and Exhibition 2006 64.28.139.231/psoftcarib
November 14–17, Birmingham, U.K. Rocky Mountain Oracle Users Group
With increased exhibition space and an exten- Quarterly Educational Workshop
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sive conference agenda covering Oracle and www.rmoug.org
Oracle’s PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, and Siebel,
this annual conference is among the largest Swiss Oracle User Group Oracle Data
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www.ukoug.co.uk/2006. Switzerland
www.soug.ch
Business Process Management Central Florida Oracle User Group
and Integration Symposium Meeting
November 22–23, London December 4, Orlando, Florida
www.cfoug.org
Sponsored by Butler Group, this event includes
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through SOA, managing an SOA environment,
December 14, New York
and real-time process management. Sessions www.nyoug.org
focus on the needs of both IT and business
Indiana PeopleSoft/JD Edwards
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www.butlergroup.com/events/BPMI. December 14, Indianapolis, Indiana
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XML2006
December 4–7, Boston
The largest annual XML get-together boasts eventsLOCATOR
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Documents and Publishing, and Hands-on oracle.com/technology/collaboration/user_group
XML. Register at 2006.xmlconference.org.
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 a t O r a c l e RESOURCES
What’s New at Oracle
The latest courses, online articles, offers, and more
ORACLE WEBCASTS
Oracle OpenWorld
oracle.com/openworld
Watch all the keynotes from this year’s
conference, including those of Larry Ellison,
Charles Phillips, and many other speakers.
Oracle Real Application Clusters (Oracle RAC)
for SAP Customers
oracle.com/pls/ebn/live_viewer.main?p_
direct=yes&p_shows_id=4907190
Hear why so many SAP customers run their
applications on Oracle RAC.
Automating Security Testing
oracle.com/pls/ebn/live_viewer.main?p_
direct=yes&p_shows_id=4879727
Hear about Oracle’s industry-leading best
practices that make up the company’s
secure development process, and learn
how you can automate security testing as
part of your development process.
Managing Content in the Enterprise Database
oracle.com/pls/ebn/live_viewer.main?p_
direct=yes&p_shows_id=4855741
Find out how to leverage your Oracle
Database investment and skill set to
manage unstructured content transparently
in business processes and applications
throughout the enterprise.
NEW PODCASTS
“Focus on Identity Management:
Fine-Grained Authorization”
oracle.com/techcasts
Frank Villavicencio, product manager for
Oracle Identity Management, explains the
new requirements that drive the need for
fine-grained authorization in the middle tier
as well as the standards shaping its future.
“Crawls and Keywords: Deploying Oracle
Secure Enterprise Search on Oracle.com”
oracle.com/techcasts
Mark Clark, Oracle director of IT and a key
player in Oracle.com’s deployment of Oracle
Secure Enterprise Search, shares best
practices for installing, configuring, custom-
izing, and optimizing the product.
“The Benefits of Oracle’s Strategy of
Applications Unlimited”
oracle.com/appcasts
Jesper Andersen, Oracle’s senior vice
president of applications strategy, discusses
Applications Unlimited, Oracle’s plan to
continue providing ongoing enhancements
to current Oracle Applications beyond the
delivery of Oracle Fusion Applications.
“The Benefits of Oracle’s Reporting Tool,
XML Publisher”
oracle.com/appcasts
Learn about Oracle XML Publisher with
Mike Tobin, IT manager, Oracle Applications
Development and Architecture for
Qualcomm, and Tim Dexter, Oracle XML
Publisher group product manager.
ORACLE UNIVERSITY
11i Extend Oracle Applications: Customizing
OA Framework Applications
oracle.com/education
(Search keywords: 11i Extend Oracle
Applications)
This four-day course focuses on the skills
needed by developers and consultants who
want to make changes to existing Oracle
Applications Framework pages. Because
Oracle Applications Framework supports
several types of development, this course
focuses on changes to existing pages along
with the deployment skills needed to deploy
any sort of Oracle Application Framework
page or application.
Oracle Database 10g : RAC for Administrators
oracle.com/education
(Search keywords: Oracle Database 10g RAC)
This five-day course offers students an
introduction to Oracle Database 10g Release
2 for Oracle Real Application Clusters
(Oracle RAC). Students learn how to con-
figure and administer a database for use
with Oracle RAC. The course also explains
how to set up and use Automatic Storage
Management in an Oracle RAC environ-
ment. Lectures are reinforced by hands-on
ORACLE MAGAZINE
practice designed to walk students through
Oracle RAC administration.
ORACLE ON DEMAND
Austin Data Center
oracle.com/broadband/showondemand
.html?4819402
Take a video tour of Oracle’s award-winning
Austin Data Center, where information
technology uses a utility model to help cus-
tomers achieve better business results.
Customers Find Business Value and ROI with
Oracle On Demand
oracle.com/pls/ebn/live_viewer.main?p_
direct=yes&p_shows_id=4852551
An IDC analyst and Oracle On Demand
customers discuss the benefits of software
as a service.
NEW RESOURCE CENTERS
Welcome Center
oracle.com/welcome
New to Oracle? The Welcome Center helps
new Oracle customers get started in the
right direction, with links to contacts and
information on support, training, partners,
customer programs, user groups, and more.
Oracle Identity Management Resource Library
oracle.com/products/middleware/identity-
management/resource-library.html
Implementing Oracle Identity Management?
Find business white papers, technical white
papers, analyst reports, internet seminars,
and much more.
KNOW YOUR OPTIONS
oracle.com/database/
database-options.html
Did you know that Oracle offers a wide
range of options—such as Oracle Content
Database and Oracle Spatial—to extend the
power of Oracle Database 10g Enterprise
Edition? These options allow you to meet
specific requirements in the areas of perfor-
mance and availability, security and compli-
ance, data warehousing, and manageability.
NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 20 06 17
 a t O r a c l e OTN BULLETIN
The Semantic Web Runs on Oracle
Oracle.com’s new virtual press room makes Web 2.0 look quaint.
racle has deployed a radically
new version of its virtual press
room. Now this may not seem
like particularly interesting
news for Oracle Magazine readers in
and of itself. But once you become
aware of the technology running under
the covers, I fully expect a change in
your outlook.
Developed in conjunction with
Siderean Software, the revamped press
room runs on a Semantic Web engine
integrated with Oracle Database. For
those unfamiliar with the term, the
Semantic Web, to describe it simplisti-
cally, is an information processing
model in which computers—via a
set of World Wide Web Consortium
(W3C) data modeling specifications
called Resource Description Framework
(RDF) and other technologies—can
parse deep relationships between data
that otherwise would need to be explic-
itly created by humans. For example,
in the un-Semantic Web, a computer
has no intuitive understanding that
Larry Ellison is the founder and CEO
of Oracle, only that Larry, Ellison,
Oracle, CEO, and founder may all be
present in a given document. (This
limited understanding, of course, is
the basis of traditional search and Web
2.0 architecture.) In contrast, in the
Semantic Web, an information-
gathering computer can deduce that
relationship, making the information
discovery experience much more intui-
tive for users. Think of it as interactive
search: Any given keyword will lead
you to new keywords you may never
have considered in the context of the
search at hand.
This concept is manifest in the
new Oracle virtual press room, which
permits you to make new connections
through the data—you can navigate
18 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 20 06 ORACLE.COM/ORACLEMAGAZINE
across content relationships whose
existence you may otherwise not know
about. In our virtual press room model,
Oracle Secure Enterprise Search serves
as the eyes and ears of the Seamark
Navigator Semantic Web engine by
crawling the available content and
metadata, and the Oracle RDF Store
(which is fully integrated with Oracle
Database out of the box) serves as its
memory by storing RDF data.
Explore the advanced virtual press
room at oracle.com/corporate/pressroom.
ORACLE TECHCASTS STILL LOUD AND CLEAR
We’re well past the first birthday of the
Oracle TechCast podcast program: The
first show, in which Oracle TopLink
Product Manager Shaun Smith dis-
cussed Enterprise JavaBeans 3.0, was
published May 17, 2005. Since then,
as of this writing, TechCast shows have
been downloaded or clicked more than
125,000 times. (There are some good
AppCasts out there too, by the way.)
With the help of a top-notch produc-
tion team, we have accelerated the rate
of publication in the last few months.
This acceleration is a reflection of our
continuing commitment to this format
and of the interesting goings-on at
Oracle in 2006—such as Oracle Secure
Enterprise Search and its deployment
across customer-facing Oracle Web
sites, and new database options such
as Oracle Database Vault and Oracle
Content Database.
Clearly iTunes support for podcast-
ing was a major success factor. We
were lucky in that the Oracle TechCast
program launched just before this
support became available, and we
managed to attract some media atten-
tion in the process. And unless I’m
mistaken, Oracle was the first major
company to publish podcasts from the
BY JU STIN KESTELYN
floor of an event (Oracle OpenWorld
2005). So you could say that podcasting
is in our DNA.
Subscribe to the Oracle TechCast
RSS feed, or listen to TechCast MP3s in
hosted mode, at oracle.com/techcasts.
GUIDE TO LINUX COMMAND MASTERY,
EXPERT EDITION
Oracle ACE Arup Nanda has followed
up on Sheryl Calish’s popular OTN
article “Guide to Linux File Command
Mastery” with a four-part series on
the use of advanced Linux commands
as well as of more-routine commands
for purposes you may not have thought
of. He has also included helpful
Oracle-specific tips of particular inter-
est to Oracle DBAs and sysadmins. You
can find Nanda’s “Guide to Advanced
Linux Command Mastery” at oracle
.com/technology/pub/articles/advanced-
linux-commands/part1.html. O
Justin Kestelyn (justin.kestelyn@oracle.com) is the
editor in chief of Oracle Technology Network.
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
Technical articles
oracle.com/technology/pub/articles
Blogs
blogs.oracle.com
Discussion forums
forums.oracle.com
i Demand More...
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Altova® DatabaseSpy ™ 2007 – The unique multi-database query and design tool.

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D I D Y O U KNOW
? a t O r a c l e BRIEFS
AJAX, REST ON THE MOVE
Web services with Web 2.0 interfaces
are coming on strong. Close to half of 400
developers surveyed in spring 2006 are
working with Asynchronous JavaScript and
XML (Ajax) or plan to do so in the coming
year; the same survey found a 37 percent
increase in respondents implementing or
considering Representational State Transfer
(REST), with 25 percent of those surveyed
saying they are considering REST-based Web
services instead of SOAP-based services.
Thirty percent of survey respondents say the
ability to reuse a service is the greatest cost
advantage provided by Web services.
Source: Evans Data Corporation
www.evansdata.com/n2/pr/releases/Web%20Servcies
%207_25_06.shtml
PEERS ARE TRUSTED INFLUENCERS OF IT
PURCHASING DECISIONS
A survey of more than 2,300 IT and business
professionals in 2006 showed that 77.6
percent turn to experienced peers as a source
of information when conducting purchasing
research, followed by online information
sources at 77.4 percent. (Respondents could
choose more than one answer.) When it
comes to the information sources they trust
most, experienced peers ranked first, at 1.63
on a scale of 1 through 6 (with 1 being most
trusted), followed by online information sources
at 2.74. Other sources, in order of trust, were
paid research (3.29), trade magazines (3.91),
print-based catalogs and buyer’s guides (4.25),
and vendor salespeople (4.69).
Source: ITtoolbox 2006 IT Purchasing Cycle Survey
www.ittoolbox.com/help/presscenter.asp?i=106
AWAY FROM WORK, YET AVAILABLE
The majority of 278 respondents to an online
survey conducted in 2006 feel obligated to
remain available to their employers 24/7
through the use of portable electronic devices.
Fifteen percent said they’re absolutely
obligated to be available, 22 percent feel
obligated, and the largest group—44
percent—feels somewhat obligated. Most of
the survey respondents work in information
technology in the United States.
Source: Info-Tech Research Group
www.infotech.com/Press%20Releases/Employes
%20Obligated%2024,-s-,7.aspx
ORACLE WAREHOUSE BUILDER 10g
RELEASE 2 MANAGES DATA LIFECYCLE
O racle Warehouse Builder 10g Release
2 brings new data quality, integra-
tion, and administrative features to the
database design and extract, transform,
and load (ETL) tool that helps custom-
ers manage the lifecycle of data and
metadata from design to deployment
and maintenance. The easy-to-use tool
enables users to rapidly design, deploy,
and manage data integration projects
and business intelligence (BI) systems.
The new release includes enhance-
ments to name and address cleansing
and deduplication. It also includes the
ability to design relational and online
analytical processing (OLAP) database
structures, making it easy to store data
in a common Oracle Database reposi-
tory and offer users a choice of BI tools.
Other enhancements include support for
targeting non-Oracle databases, allowing
users to choose where their data is ulti-
mately stored.
The tool’s pricing model has also
been updated. The core database
design and ETL capabilities of Oracle
Warehouse Builder 10g Release 2 are
now included with Oracle Database 10g
Release 2 Enterprise Edition, Standard
Edition, and Standard Edition One at
no additional cost.
New options and connectors are
also available. The Oracle Warehouse
Builder Enterprise ETL Option supports
multienvironment deployments typical
of enterprise data warehouse projects
by enabling improved performance and
scalability of ETL processes. The Oracle
Warehouse Builder Data Quality Option
promotes a comprehensive and system-
atic approach to data quality by offering
data profiling, data rules, data cleansing/
autocorrection, and data auditing in
one tool. Oracle Warehouse Builder
connectors enable customers to extract
data quickly and easily, and in some
cases, target data to and from their core
customer relationship management and
enterprise resource planning applica-
tions, including Oracle E-Business Suite
ORACLE MAGAZINE
and Oracle’s PeopleSoft Enterprise.
“With the proliferation of data, and
a growing demand for better-quality
systems, organizations now more than
ever require tools that help them rapidly
design data structures and efficiently
integrate data from disparate reposito-
ries,” says Ray Roccaforte, vice president
of Oracle’s data warehousing and BI
platform. “Oracle Warehouse Builder
10g Release 2 represents a major invest-
ment by Oracle in data integration,
and by including core capabilities with
Oracle Database 10g at no extra cost,
organizations of all sizes can easily turn
raw data into quality information to help
meet their users’ requirements.”
NEW ORACLE DATA MINER RELEASE
INCLUDES CODE GENERATOR
O racle Data Miner Release 10.2.0.2,
a graphical user interface for Oracle
Data Mining Release 10.1 and above,
adds Oracle Data Miner PL/SQL Code
Generator. The code generator pro-
duces PL/SQL code that contains all
the steps in a mining activity, includ-
ing data preparation, data transforma-
tions, and modeling operations. Users
can generate PL/SQL code from one or
more mining activities with a wizard in
Oracle Data Miner or with an extension
to either Oracle JDeveloper or Oracle
SQL Developer.
Oracle Data Miner helps data ana-
lysts mine their Oracle data to find
patterns, relationships, and anomalous
activities and to discover valuable new
insights. Data analysts can mine data
with Oracle Data Miner’s easy-to-use
wizards that guide them through the
data preparation, data mining, model
evaluation, and model scoring process.
Oracle Data Miner PL/SQL Code
Generator then creates PL/SQL pack-
ages that can be integrated into auto-
mated business processes.
ORACLE DELIVERS COMPREHENSIVE
COMPLIANCE MANAGEMENT FRAMEWORK
O
racle is bundling, at no additional
cost, the Control Objectives for
NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 20 06 21
BRIEFS
Information and Related Technology
(COBIT) 4.0 framework with Oracle
Internal Controls Manager, a compliance
management tool used to document,
test, and certify internal controls and
monitor ongoing compliance. COBIT
is the IT governance public domain
framework and the most widely adopted
standard for IT controls and audit-
ability under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.
This bundle provides customers with a
single application that manages compli-
ance control requirements for IT.
Previously, companies had to create
separate connections between the
control frameworks in IT and finance.
COBIT gives users a single connection
and allows them to implement best
practices in application and general
IT controls while enabling them to
meet the Committee of Sponsoring
Organizations of the Treadway
Commission framework control
objectives. By partnering with the
Information Systems Audit and Control
Association and members of the global
IT audit industry to embed COBIT 4.0
in Oracle Internal Controls Manager,
Oracle is able to offer users direct
access to the premier comprehensive
risk and audit control framework for IT
processes. COBIT emphasizes regula-
tory compliance, helping organizations
increase the value attained from IT
and simplifying the implementation of
the COBIT framework. Additionally, it
presents activities in a streamlined and
practical manner that facilitates contin-
uous improvement in IT governance.
“Companies need to align best
practices in IT management with the
business to achieve more-efficient oper-
ations,” says Chris Leone, Oracle group
vice president of application strategy.
“We continue to recommend that enter-
prises use COBIT to bolster their IT
governance procedures and to improve
the controls they have in place.”
ORACLE SQL DEVELOPER 1.1 ENHANCES
DATABASE DEVELOPMENT PRODUCTIVITY
O racle SQL Developer 1.1 provides
users with the ability to create
master/detail reports, add charts,
manage snippets, and set additional user
22 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 20 06 ORACLE.COM/ORACLEMAGAZINE
preferences for customizing the envi-
ronment. This latest release of Oracle
SQL Developer, a free graphical tool
for database development, also features
a redesigned object browser with new
filtering capabilities and updates to the
SQL Worksheet and data grid.
Oracle SQL Developer enhances pro-
ductivity and simplifies database devel-
opment tasks by providing a graphical
interface for browsing, creating, and
updating database objects, and running
SQL statements and scripts. The tool
has been widely embraced by the user
community, with the first release hitting
the 100,000-download mark within
two months of production. This second
release includes many enhancements
requested by the user community.
Oracle recently launched the Oracle
SQL Developer Exchange, where users
can share code, from small snippets to
more-complex reports. The exchange
also provides an environment for cus-
tomers to enter feature requests and to
rate requests placed by others.
NEW ORACLE APPLICATION EXPRESS
RELEASE EASES APPLICATION DEPLOYMENT
O racle Application Express Release
2.2. supports the reuse of Web
applications, enabling users to package
applications and dependent objects such
as table, seed data, and images into a
single file and install the application into
other Oracle Databases running Oracle
Application Express.
Oracle Application Express, a free
tool that enables users to build, deploy,
and manage secure Web applications
using a Web browser, also includes
component-level export; an item finder
that allows users to search within appli-
cations; and an Access Control Wizard
to control access to applications, indi-
vidual pages, and page components.
The Web-based tool is integrated
with all editions of Oracle Database
10g and Oracle9i Database Release 2.
The tool enables users with limited
programming experience to rapidly
develop scalable Web applications that
can be deployed to tens, hundreds, or
thousands of users.
“Thousands of users have turned
to Oracle Application Express to build
secure Web applications that can take
advantage of the performance, reliabil-
ity, and scalability of Oracle Database,”
comments Michael Hichwa, vice presi-
dent of software development at Oracle.
“We’re committed to providing users
with an easy-to-use tool featuring a
broad range of capabilities that enable
users to develop and deploy Web appli-
cations efficiently.”
ORACLE ACQUIRES INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
ASSETS OF SIGMA DYNAMICS
O racle has acquired the intellectual
property assets of Sigma Dynamics,
a provider of real-time predictive analyt-
ics technology, in order to enhance its
Oracle Business Intelligence Suite and
Oracle Fusion Middleware offerings.
Sigma Dynamics’ Real-Time Decision
software combines customer insight
and business requirements to make the
best recommendation in each customer
interaction and operational decision by
intelligently adapting to continuously
changing information. Key decision
applications include real-time offer man-
agement, field service optimization, pre-
dictive call routing, and fraud detection.
This technology, combined with Oracle
Business Intelligence Suite and Oracle
Fusion Middleware, will allow busi-
nesses to leverage the insight contained
in both historical and real-time data
sources to drive better decisions. O
Oracle Warehouse Builder 10g
Release 2
oracle.com/technology/products/warehouse
Oracle Data Miner 10.2.0.2
oracle.com/technology/products/bi/odm/
odminer.html
Oracle Internal Controls Manager
oracle.com/applications/financials/
internal_controls_mgr.html
Oracle SQL Developer 1.1
oracle.com/technology/products/database/
sql_developer
Oracle SQL Developer Exchange
sqldeveloper.oracle.com
Oracle Application Express 2.2
oracle.com/technology/apex
Oracle and Sigma Dynamics
oracle.com/sigma-dynamics



 


  



 


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b o o k BEAT
Oracle JDeveloper
for Forms & PL/SQL
Developers: A Guide
to Web Development
with Oracle ADF
By Peter Koletzke and
Duncan Mills
Oracle Press
www.oraclepress.com
ISBN 0-07-225960-4
Looking for an efficient way to learn Java
Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE)
programming techniques? Peter Koletzke,
Oracle Certified Master, and Duncan Mills,
senior principal product manager of application
development tools at Oracle, demonstrate
techniques for working within Java EE and Oracle
JDeveloper for the thousands of developers
currently using Oracle Forms and PL/SQL.
Throughout the book, high- and low-level Oracle
Forms concepts are related to Java concepts to
help readers become more comfortable with the
new terminology, and special mentions in the
text describe how Oracle JDeveloper techniques
translate to PL/SQL or Oracle Forms.
The book delves into new components
required when developing and deploying a Java
EE application and covers Oracle Application
Development Framework (Oracle ADF), Oracle ADF
Faces, and Oracle JDeveloper Release 10.1.3.
Oracle Performance
Tuning for 10 g R2,
Second Edition
By Gavin Powell
Elsevier
www.Books.elsevier.com
ISBN: 1-55-558345-8
Oracle Certified Professional Gavin Powell delves
into four central themes of Oracle9i Database
and Oracle Database 10g Release 2 performance
tuning. These include: denormalizing data models
to fit applications; tuning SQL code according
to both the data model and the application in
relation to scalability; creating a well-proportioned
physical architecture at the time of initial Oracle
installation; and, most important, mixing skill sets
to obtain the best results.
The book includes all three aspects of Oracle
database tuning: data model tuning, SQL and
PL/SQL code tuning, and physical and
configuration tuning. It contains real-world
examples using large data sets and emphasizes
a development perspective as opposed to an
operating system perspective.
Powell also discusses how building an
appropriate data model and writing properly
performing SQL code can give 100 percent
performance improvement.
Browse for Oracle books at oracle.com/
technology/books/10g_books.html.
24 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 20 06
c h a n n e l s PARTNER NEWS
OSOA, ORACLE PARTNERS REPORT
SOA SUCCESSES
O racle is one of 17 technology
vendors in the Open Service
Oriented Architecture (OSOA) initiative,
which is developing service component
architecture (SCA) and service data
objects (SDO) specifications. The group
has developed draft SCA specifications
for a declarative policy framework;
improved description of connectivity
with bindings specifications for JMS,
JCA, and Web services; and created new
BPEL and PHP authoring models. Draft
specifications for SDO and for Service
Assembly, Java, and C++ service author-
ing have been updated. These new spec-
ifications can help organizations create
reusable services to meet changing busi-
ness requirements.
Many Oracle system integrator
partners have deployed successful
service-oriented environments (SOAs)
using Oracle Grid Technology. Certified
Advantage Partner Capgemini has
delivered five large SOA projects with
Oracle 10g and determined that the
Oracle Grid platform enables access to
SOA functionality across large organiza-
tions. Certified Advantage Partner EDS
is delivering the EDS Agile Enterprise
Platform based on Oracle 10g and other
technologies; being grid-enabled allows
EDS customers to reduce total cost of
ownership by up to 50 percent through
reduced hardware requirements and
related maintenance and staffing costs.
And Certified Advantage Partner Inter
Access runs an Oracle Grid–based
Linux data center with 10 live SOA cus-
tomers. Inter Access says its SOA-related
revenue has increased by hundreds of
percentage points year over year.
ORACLE-HP REFERENCE CONFIGURATIONS
EASE DATA WAREHOUSE PLANNING
O
racle and HP have developed refer-
ence configurations that can acceler-
ate implementation of Oracle Database
10g–based data warehouses on HP
servers and storage. Choosing a refer-
ence configuration, rather than design-
ORACLE.COM/ORACLEMAGAZINE
ing and building a custom configuration,
can cut weeks from the buying cycle and
speed implementation.
The reference configurations range
from single HP ProLiant servers running
Linux to HP Integrity Superdome
servers running HP-UX 11i. Using refer-
ence configurations enables IT planners
and architects to start from a proven
platform—based on the customer’s raw
data size, database, operating system,
processor, and infrastructure architecture
preference—when building or upgrad-
ing a data warehouse. The Oracle-HP
reference configurations can then be
customized for specific workloads and
requirements. Each reference configura-
tion balances processing power, storage,
and throughput.
IBM OFFERS SYSTEM I FOR ORACLE’S
JD EDWARDS ENTERPRISEONE
I BM is offering a System i 520 Solution
Edition specially configured for
Oracle’s JD Edwards EnterpriseOne
and designed for small and medium
businesses. Available at a cost that is
competitive with comparably configured
Windows-based solutions, the new IBM
offering combines hardware and soft-
ware integration with open standards,
and features built-in security, virus resis-
tance, and simplified management of
database, storage, and system software.
PARTNERS USE ORACLE XML DB TO
POWER SOLUTIONS
O
racle has incorporated XML support
into its products since Oracle8i, and
this leadership continues with important
contributions from Oracle partners.
Oracle Partner Nextance creates
contract management solutions that help
Oracle customers to increase the strate-
gic value of—and realize the full finan-
cial return on—contractual relationships
with suppliers, customers, and distribu-
tors. Nextance supports Oracle XML DB/
XQuery, providing visibility into both
unstructured and structured data.
Using Oracle XML DB, Certified
Advantage Partner TEMENOS supports a
 PARTNER SPOTLIGHT Accenture Opens Innovation Center for Oracle

A ccenture has opened the Accenture Innovation Center

for Oracle, dedicated to the development of solutions
based on Oracle’s Server Technologies and Applications.
The Innovation Center, located at Oracle headquarters
in Redwood Shores, California, provides a direct link
between Oracle’s research and development teams and
Accenture’s global network of delivery centers and tech-
nology labs. Its efforts will initially focus on the devel-
opment of reference architectures for service-oriented
architecture (SOA) and reference applications based on
Oracle Fusion Middleware.
The center is the first of its kind to be located on the
Oracle campus, according to Jim Hayes, managing direc-
tor of Accenture’s global Oracle practice, who calls it “an
important step forward in our ongoing efforts to help
clients derive maximum value from their Oracle solutions.”
The center “conveys Accenture’s and Oracle’s commit-
ment to providing our joint customers with solutions
to take advantage of service-oriented architectures,”
says Thomas Kurian, senior vice president of Server
Technologies at Oracle. “With more than 31,000 global
customers using Oracle Fusion Middleware as the foun-
dation for their SOA infrastructures, it is critical that we
work with Accenture to help ensure that deployments are
quick and seamless.”
The center will enable Accenture and Oracle to develop
and deliver first-to-market, Oracle-based solutions using
Accenture processes, methodologies, and tools. It will also
serve to demonstrate new Accenture service offerings that
leverage Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle Applications,
and Oracle industry solutions.
The new Innovation Center, together with Accenture’s
recently opened Center of Excellence for Oracle in
Bangalore, India, will allow Accenture and Oracle to
develop a portfolio of products and services that will lead
to more-rapid and cost-effective Oracle-based implementa-
tions around the world.
Accenture has committed to invest US$450 million in
SOA and has already developed a first version of an SOA
reference architecture consisting of definitions, frame-
works, best practices, decision trees, and code—all based
on Oracle Fusion Middleware. Development of the second
version of the reference architecture is underway at the
new Innovation Center; it will become the foundation for
future joint Accenture-Oracle solution development and
customer engagements.

variety of incoming XML formats without
incurring the time and expense of pro-
gramming and custom code.
EnergySys, a subsidiary of Oracle
Partner Digital Steps, makes extensive
use of Oracle XML DB in its GAMMA
framework for hydrocarbon allocation
and commercial operations. By separat-
ing data access, business logic, and pre-
sentation, GAMMA supports constantly
ers a single interface to data quality,
extract, transform, and load (ETL), and
metadata management. NewFrontiers
Consultancy creates data warehous-
ing solutions for companies using SAP
transaction processing; with Oracle
Warehouse Builder, NewFrontiers can
extract data from SAP R/3 systems and
integrate it into an enterprise data ware-
house or business intelligence (BI) solu-
Open Service Oriented Architecture
(OSOA) initiative
www.osoa.org
SIs leverage Oracle Grid-SOA
offerings
oracle.com/partners/home/bi/global/grid/
unauth/systems-integrators.pdf
www.capgemini.com/collaboration/
alliancepartners/oracle
www.eds.com/services/alliances/agility
www.interaccess.nl

changing asset acquisition, asset dis-
posal, and company relationships.
GLOBAL PARTNERS SUPPORT WAREHOUSE
BUILDER 10g RELEASE 2
tion. Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Oracle-HP Reference Configurations
oracle.com/features/hp/data-warehousing.html
an IT consulting, services, and business
process outsourcing organization, uses IBM System i
www.ibm.com/systemi
its BIDS (Business Intelligence Decision
Support) methodology to create and Partners support XML
www.nextance.com

O racle Warehouse Builder 10g Release

2 is receiving wide industry support
through partnerships with leading tech-
execute BI programs, and maintains a
center of excellence dedicated to Oracle
BI and data warehouse technologies.
www.temenos.ch
www.digitalsteps.com

Accenture Innovation Center

nology vendors and systems integrators
who are helping their customers turn
data into tangible results.
LogicaCMG, an international consul-
tancy specializing in business consult-
ing, systems integration, and IT business
process outsourcing, is using Oracle
Warehouse Builder to offer its custom-
And TUSC, a midsize consultancy for Oracle
www.accenture.com/oracle
that helps Fortune 500 companies to
Partners support Oracle
implement, manage, and use Oracle Warehouse Builder
solutions, combines functional business oracle.com/technology/products/warehouse/
experience, expert knowledge of data www.logicacmg.com
www.newfrontiers.nl
warehouse architecture, and a proven www.tcs.com
approach to deliver BI solutions and www.tusc.com
enterprise-scale data warehouses. O

ORACLE MAGAZINE NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 20 06 25

Oracle Content Database

Structure Your
Unstructured Data
Images
Office
Documents

Spreadsheets Plans & Designs

Rich Media

Oracle Content Database—

Enterprise wide policies. Interface via desktop.
Secure search and backup.

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

Peers in the Blogosphere

Three ACEs love talking tech—in their blogs and in blog-like musings on OTN.
Avi Abrami
Tell us about the airport manage-
ment solutions (AIMS) produced
by your company. InterSystems
has an AIMS, a flight informa-
tion display system [FIDS],
and other related products.
While our main customers are
airports, our software is suit-
able for any place that displays
information on signs—in fact,
we’re vying to be a technology provider for the 2008 Beijing
Olympics. Oracle Database drives our FIDS system, and we
use OC4J [Oracle Containers for J2EE] as our Web server.
Features class in particular was a peerSPECS
huge help when I was preparing Company: Banque Saudi Fransi,
a full-service commercial bank and
for my Oracle Database 10g New financial services provider
Features for Administrators exam. Job Title/Description: Senior
The course material offered brief Oracle DBA, with responsibility for
critical bank databases—including
but comprehensive information that core banking, data warehousing,
really helped me understand the and local share trading databases
Location: Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
important terminology.
Oracle Credentials: Oracle-
If you were going to the Space Station certified DBA (Oracle8i, Oracle9i,
for six months, which Oracle reference Oracle Database 10g ), with more
than 8 years of experience using
books would you take? I recommend Oracle products
Cary Millsap’s Optimizing Oracle
Performance [O’Reilly Media, 2003], oracle.com/technology/community/
Tom Kyte’s Expert One-on-One oracle_ace

How do you use the internet on the job? I mainly use it to monitor [Apress, 2005], and Jonathan Lewis’
the Java-related forums on Oracle peerSPECS Cost-Based Oracle Fundamentals [Apress, 2005].
Technology Network (OTN). I don’t Company: InterSystems, a
have a blog, but in a way I use the provider of airport information
management solutions
Chris Foot
OTN forums as my blog—someone Job Title/Description: Senior How did you get started in IT? I was hurt in an on-the-job accident
always asks a question or posts a software engineer, responsible for while I was working for a construction company, and because
developing InterSystems’ AIMS
reply that allows me to provide a product I could no longer fulfill my responsibilities in my old profes-
code snippet or offer my opinion Location: Modi’in, Israel sion, I was eligible for a state-sponsored retraining program.
on something. Actually, my main (InterSystems is based in Denver, The program trained handicapped people for
Colorado)
blog-type message on the forums is, jobs in the computer industry,
Length of Time Using Oracle
“When all else fails, read the docu- Products: 17 years so I learned COBOL program-
mentation.” But I must admit I got ming. I was ultimately offered
that one from my boss. oracle.com/technology/community/ a job writing COBOL programs
oracle_ace
and later moved on to database
Syed Jaffar Hussain administration.
What kinds of topics do you discuss on your blog, at www.jaffardba Looking forward, what trends do
.blogspot.com? I’ve discussed a few of the tuning problems you see in database administration?
we’ve encountered at the bank where I work. For example, Automatic Database Diagnostic
we had a 1.7TB Oracle9i database on AIX, which we moved Monitor and the intelligent
to an HP Superdome. After a successful migration, one of our advisers may not currently be a
queries—which was supposed to run for just a few minutes— total replacement for DBA experi- peerSPECS
Company: Remote DBA Experts, a
was taking forever. I realized that ence and expertise, but sooner remote database services provider
the problem was the query_ or later, they will be. And no, we Job Title/Description:
rewrite_enabled parameter—it won’t all be out of jobs—we’ll Database operations manager,
responsible for coordinating the
was set to FALSE on the HP just be doing different things. support efforts of a large remote
database. So I blogged about The list of what Oracle Database DBA services staff
Location: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
the impact of various parameter 10g allows us to do just goes on
Oracle Credentials: Oracle-
settings on SQL performance. and on. It took me four blog certified instructor, with 20 years of
Tell us about your experiences with entries [see www.dbazine.com/ experience using Oracle products
Oracle University (OU). I’ve taken blogs/blog-cf/chrisfoot] to cover just
several five-day OU courses, and a subset of the new features in oracle.com/technology/community/
oracle_ace
the Oracle Database 10g New the latest release. O

ORACLE MAGAZINE NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 20 06 27

 Take even more control
of your database applications
with SQL Detective 3.4
T HE WORLD C LASS TOOL
1. The PL/SQL Debugger, integrated in the Stored Program
Editor, debugs procedures, functions, packages, object
types and triggers
2. The Code Explorer displays hierarchical information
about the package's components, such as variables and
parameters, their types and structures and allows efficient
navigation through stored programs
3. This tab displays watches - variables, including complex
data types such as records, indexed tables and cursors
4. Values of variables displayed as tooltips at the cursor
position
5. Indicates a Breakpoint/Marker where code execution
stops during debugging
6. Multiple objects (tabs) can be opened at the same time
SQLDetective 3.4 is ideal for developing database objects,
writing and debugging stored programs, executing, testing
and formatting SQL and PL/SQL statements, managing table
spaces and rollback segments.
Discover SQLDetective 3.4 - the world class tool for every-
body’s budget. Visit www.sqldetective.com to learn why 3.4
is one of the most powerful, advanced and easy2use Oracle
application development tools available.
FOR EVERYBODY’S BUDGET
1. The Storage Manager manages tablespaces, datafiles,
segments and quotes in the database instance. Operate
and manage multiple tablespaces at the same time
2. Customizes column visibility or their order using Dataset
Manager. Filters the list of tablespaces using pre-defined
or user-defined filters
3. Object Summary displays object quantity and size,
grouped by object owner and type for the selected
tablespaces. The grid displays all objects and detailed
information such as object size, blocks, extents, etc.
4. Relocate/Move objects (table, index, and partition)
between tablespaces. Relocate LOBs and index-organized
tables as well
5. Display/Modify segment attributes of the selected object
in the grid.
6. Displays used space for tablespaces graphically and as
a percentage
SQL Detective 3.4
www.sqldetective.com
Anthony Abbattista

Dennis Alley

Yoshikazu Amano
FIVE YEARS OF EDITORS’ CHOICE AWARDS
Øystein Amundsen

Rob Aneweer
HONORING LEADERS AND INNOVATORS OF 2006
Mark Arratoon

Eddie Awad
Each year the editors of Oracle Magazine present Editors’ Choice Awards to extremely
accomplished candidates—people that best reflect the highest achievements and vision in
Jean Chavinier
their areas of expertise. Nominated from all corners of the globe, these candidates
Albino Faustino Jr. represent the most advanced, forward-thinking, and experienced people working with
Adriana Ferreira Oracle technology today.
Selecting the winners from a pool of such candidates, all of whom are worthy of
Steven Feuerstein
recognition, is a difficult yet rewarding task. We’re pleased to announce the winners of our
Tim Hall fifth annual Oracle Magazine Editors’ Choice awards—together they represent a diverse,
Erin Hamm vital, and driving force bringing innovation and leadership to the workforce every day.
Ton Hardeman –THE EDITORS OF ORACLE MAGAZINE

Lisa Harris

Kevin Horner

Basheer Khan

Linda Leong

Jonathan Lewis

Kunal Malik

Brad Maue

Jim McDonald

Logan McLeod

Barak Moffitt

Gordon Mohr

Deb Morton

Chris Newcombe

Jay Parmar

Vasif Pasha

Rob Patton

Pratik Ray

Regent Roberge

John Scott

Michael Smith

Marc Staheli

John Stegeman

David Ufton
BY DAVID A. KELLY

Brian T. Wilkinson
ORACLE MAGAZINE NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 20 06 29
 Jean Chavinier
> CIO OF THE YEAR, EUROPE, MIDDLE EAST, AFRICA

CIO has strategy of local roots with a global reach.

You might not think that Irish whisky, French champagne, and Russian
vodka have a lot in common, but to Pernod Ricard, the world’s second
largest wine and spirits company, they do. Founded in 1975 by the
merger of two French companies, Pernod Ricard has 15 key brands
including Chivas Regal, Stolichnaya, Jameson, and Perrier Jouët.
“Our strategy is local roots, global reach,” says Jean Chavinier,
group vice president of Information Systems and Oracle Magazine’s CIO
of the Year for Europe, Middle East, and Africa. “Pernod Ricard’s decen-
tralized organization is one of our great strengths, since it sets us apart
from other companies and allows decision-making based on in-depth
knowledge of each market and consumer expectations.”
For Chavinier the strategy is also the challenge. “CIOs now have
to think globally to leverage cost savings and identify benefits for the
whole company, but we have to execute locally to stay close to stake-
holders and react quickly whenever conditions change,” he says. “As a
result, flexibility and adaptability are key drivers for us. The pace of our
winnerSPECS IT strategy implementation is also a key success factor—rather than
Name: Jean Chavinier
running lengthy IT projects over years, we try to deliver value to busi-
Job Title/Description:
Group Vice President of
ness with clearly defined projects that bring quick wins.”
Information Systems Chavinier’s main objective is to improve the efficiency of Pernod
Company: Pernod Ricard Ricard IT support while keeping IT costs under control. To do this, he
Location: Paris, France promotes best practices; sharing solutions, platforms, and resources;
Award: CIO of the Year, Europe, and developing a network approach across the Pernod Ricard IT orga-
Middle East, and Africa, 2006
nizations. “We are also improving our supply chain by implementing
forecasting and production planning modules [from Oracle], and we
have started a partnership with Oracle to update and extend the wine
modules of [Oracle’s] JD Edwards EnterpriseOne,” Chavinier says.
The company has grown aggressively, including acquisitions of
Seagrams in 2001 and Allied Domecq in 2005. Within a year, the size
of the group has nearly doubled, and IT is moving to a regional cluster
approach with a shared infrastructure. Allied Domecq was using an SAP
R/3 enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform and legacy systems,
but for its common ERP solution, Pernod Ricard chose to continue
to develop and roll out core finance, distribution, and manufacturing
models based on JD Edwards EnterpriseOne for its sales and manufac-
turing regions around the world.
Although this type of approach is not new, it’s a paradigm shift
for a traditionally decentralized organization such as Pernod Ricard.
“Changing a company’s culture is always much more complex than
solving specific technical issues,” says Chavinier.
A key task for Pernod Ricard is to create an IT community, since
the IT directors previously hardly knew each other. “After three years of
communications, conference calls, and IT meetings, we have managed
to establish an IT community with people sharing best practices at the
TON HENDRIKS

IT directors’ level,” says Chavinier.

“Good communications and a close community are an important
part of building a successful IT organization.”

30 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 20 05 ORACLE.COM/ORACLEMAGAZINE
 Adriana Ferreira
> CIO OF THE YEAR, LATIN AMERICA

CIO provides centralized infrastructure for

enterprise growth and remote capabilities.
The business world is sometimes called a jungle, but for
Adriana Ferreira, CIO of Brazil’s Companhia Vale do Rio
Doce (CVRD) and Oracle Magazine’s CIO of the Year for Latin
America, business really can get wild.
“We’re a large mining company, so our people need to
be able to go to the middle of the jungle and other remote
places to examine minerals and conduct business,” says
Ferreira. “We’re not talking big cities or even big countries,
so we’re designing an IT infrastructure that can support
people traveling even in remote parts of the world.”
With operations in more than 17 countries and a market
capitalization of more than US$55 billion, CVRD is the largest
mining company in the Americas and continues to grow
rapidly. From iron ore, aluminum, and copper to three rail-
roads and eight ports, CVRD has extensive and varied busi-
ness units operating around the world.
“The main challenge for
IT is supporting the growth of winnerSPECS
the company, including sup- Name: Adriana Ferreira
porting individual business Job Title/Description:
units,” says Ferreira, who’s CIO

responsible for providing the Company: Companhia Vale do

Rio Doce
IT infrastructure for more
Location: Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
than 23,000 users. “Although
Award: CIO of the Year, Latin
each unit used to have a America, 2006
separate IT department,
we’ve been centralizing IT
resources to support the rapid growth of the company.”
After centralizing operations, CVRD then selected spe-
cific functions to outsource and started to implement new
enterprise resource planning functionality based on Oracle
E-Business Suite. “We’ve been changing the governance
model of IT to be more flexible and more agile and support
the growth of the company,” says Ferreira. “Oracle
E-Business Suite helps us do that.”
For example, CVRD operates three railroads, each of
which used to have different business processes and IT
applications. Now, under the unified system, it has both an
integrated view and greater flexibility to share resources and
people among the railroads, since the systems and opera-
PAULO FRIDMAN

tions are consistent. “When we unify the systems, we’re

actually unifying the business processes and helping the
businesses to be more efficient,” says Ferreira.

ORACLE MAGAZINE NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 20 06 31

 Kevin Horner
> CIO OF THE YEAR, NORTH AMERICA

Alcoa CIO streamlines with Oracle.

Alcoa produces metal that’s incredibly strong and lightweight, but a

few years ago the company realized its IT systems weren’t.
In 2000, Alcoa—a US$26 billion company and the world’s largest
aluminum producer, with 129,000 employees operating in 44 coun-
tries—had 25 lines of business, each with its own IT and infrastructure
strategy. For example, “In North America alone, we had more than 40
procurement systems,” says Kevin Horner, CIO for Alcoa and Oracle
Magazine’s CIO of the Year for North America. “With that type of infra-
structure, we simply couldn’t support the business processes effectively
from a value standpoint.”
To unify its IT resources and streamline information flow, Alcoa
initiated a strategy to consolidate its IT infrastructure and standardize
its applications. From 2001 to 2003, the company consolidated data
centers around the world, from more than 100 to 4. Between 2001 and
2006, Alcoa rolled out its enterprise business solution of common pro-
winnerSPECS
cesses and data—enabled by Oracle E-Business Suite—to hundreds of
Name: Kevin Horner
locations in North America, Europe, Australia, Latin America, and other
Job Title/Description:
CIO areas, replacing a wide set of individual, unintegrated applications with
Company: Alcoa an integrated Oracle architecture.
Location: Pittsburgh, Now, Alcoa has a footprint of about 78 Oracle E-Business Suite
Pennsylvania modules that are operational inside its production plants, from procure-
Award: CIO of the Year, North ment to financials to process manufacturing, demand planning, and
America, 2006
more. “The current Alcoa North America Oracle application system
is—from Oracle’s perspective—the largest and most complex system
supported in the world,” says Horner. “By the end of 2006, we’ll have
about 75 percent of our revenue operating inside of an Oracle applica-
tion environment. That makes a huge difference in how we can run our
business efficiently, optimize our facilities, and better serve customers.”
Alcoa is also continuing to invest in its solutions, including invest-
ments in three major analytics areas in 2006. “We’re augmenting our
sales and finance applications with customer, product, and market infor-
mation so we can segment our markets and better understand product
and customer profitability. This will enable improved strategic planning
and rationalization of our customers and products,” says Horner. “With
the analytical tools and our Oracle applications, we believe we can
achieve significant value on increasing product profitability.”
A key component of Alcoa’s success at integrating a huge number
of systems and streamlining its business processes has been the Oracle
stack. “One of the biggest benefits to us of the Oracle architecture is
the value of its integration from top to bottom,” says Horner. “It allows
you to gain visibility across your enterprise—from individual plants to
MARK BOLSTER

lines of business to collections of business units. It’s a big advantage to

have an integrated environment and common data that allows you to
look across the company.”

32 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 20 06 ORACLE.COM/ORACLE MAGAZINE

 Yoshikazu Amano
> CIO OF THE YEAR, ASIA PACIFIC

Team leader ensures that management and

customer requirements are met in a timely way.

For Yoshikazu Amano, managing officer, Toyota Motor Corporation, and

Oracle Magazine’s CIO of the Year for Asia Pacific, the role of CIO isn’t a
solitary position so much as a team endeavor.
“Everybody on my IT team has CIO-like responsibilities in helping
to ensure that new requirements from our management and users are
satisfied in a timely manner so that Toyota can achieve its corporate
growth objectives,” says Amano.
An important key to Amano’s success as an IT leader at Toyota
has been his ability to lead a streamlining of business processes and
information systems. For example, Amano’s team recently finished the
global standardization of a bill of materials and CAD system that cul-
minated in improved productivity of Toyota’s key business processes,
including its R&D and production processes.
Moving forward, Amano’s corporate IT team is working on an
enterprise architecture to articulate both the next-generation
standards for IT system development
winnerSPECS and management as well as
Name: Yoshikazu Amano
the technologies required to support
Job Title/Description:
Managing Officer
business processes from an
Company: Toyota Motor Corp.
end-to-end perspective.
Location: Tokyo, Japan
Amano sees globalization and gov-
Award: CIO of the Year,
ernance as his biggest challenge. As
Asia Pacific, 2006 Toyota’s business continues to grow
(2005 saw the launch of the Lexus
brand in Japan and new projects in countries from the Czech Republic
to India and China), the number and magnitude of local and regional
system requirements have increased significantly. Amano and his team
need to not only drive regional localization but also ensure that indi-
vidual plants adhere to standard baseline criteria.
Part of the globalization and governance solution has been Oracle’s
back-office applications. “We have deployed PeopleSoft Enterprise
Human Capital Management and PeopleSoft Enterprise Financial
Management Solutions in Japan, North America, and other overseas
subsidiaries and group companies,” says Amano. “They are very
effective in sustaining Toyota’s global back-office operations and
its competence.”
In addition, Toyota relies on Oracle Database. “We also use Oracle
YAZU NAKAOKA

Database for many third-party software applications throughout the

Toyota companies,” says Amano. “Oracle is valued for high availability,
great usability, and market leadership.”

ORACLE MAGAZINE NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 20 06 33

 Lisa Harris
> CTO OF THE YEAR

CTO finds that Oracle is the power behind

the technology.

For Lisa Harris, Oracle Magazine’s CTO of the Year, customer satisfac-
tion—and her measure of Oracle’s ability to deliver—comes down to
a paycheck.
“We need scalability, we need flexibility, and we need 24/7 capa-
bilities. We cannot be down,” says Harris, CTO of the Florida-based
human resource services company Gevity. “We need to deliver pay-
checks every day we’re in business. If we cannot deliver a paycheck,
we’re not in business.”
Gevity provides human resource services to small and medium
businesses, with 8,000 clients across the United States, serving almost
140,000 employees. Eleven years ago, Gevity selected Oracle to provide
the core foundation for its HR capability, and the company has grown to
winnerSPECS become one of the largest Oracle HR
Name: Lisa Harris payroll implementations in the world.
Job Title/Description: “Technology is core to our business,
CTO and Oracle is the power behind our tech-
Company: Gevity nology,” says Harris. “With 8,000 clients, each
Location: Bradenton, Florida with its own business rules, we need an applica-
Award: CTO of the Year 2006 tion and technology partner that provides the ability
to easily configure to each client’s particular rules.”
Over the years, Gevity has progressed through the Oracle stack, starting with
HR and Payroll and then implementing the rest of the enterprise resource
planning suite, as well as customer relationship management, Oracle
Application Server, and Oracle Fusion Middleware. This year it is imple-
menting Oracle COREid and Oracle Collaboration Suite. The resulting
scalable suite of Gevity services is delivered on Oracle Portal.
An important initiative for Gevity was its recent launch of a
new solution aimed at the midmarket and built using Oracle
Fusion Middleware 10g, including Oracle Identity Management
Suite as well as Oracle SOA Suite and Oracle Portal. And by
using Oracle BPEL Process Manager for application integra-
tion, Gevity was able to enhance the end-user experience of
the online portal and significantly improve service.
Key to it all has been Gevity’s ability to leverage Oracle’s
technology. Harris notes, “As Oracle extends its product line,
we are also able to extend our service offerings. Our Oracle
relationship is a competitive advantage.”
ALEX STAFFORD

34 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 20 06 ORACLE.COM/ORACLEMAGAZINE
 Regent Roberge
> DBA OF THE YEAR

Architect makes Oracle-based solutions work for a wide

range of retail customers.

Just as successful retail stores have to adapt their product lines to serve changing styles and
consumer interests, software suppliers to the retail industry have to adjust their solutions for
individual businesses and clients.
“Retail technology is very different from customer to customer. Some of our clients have
hundreds of stores and a limited number of items, and other clients have few stores but a huge
number of items,” says Regent Roberge, database administrator and principal architect for
Jesta I.S. and Oracle Magazine’s DBA of the Year. One of Roberge’s key challenges is to make
Jesta I.S. solutions work for a wide range of customer needs.
The Jesta I.S. Vision Suite of Oracle-based solutions enables
retailers and specialty markets to manage inventory, sales, trans- winnerSPECS
Name: Regent Roberge
fers, distributions, and other business functions. Jesta I.S. retail
Job Title/Description: DBA and
clients are located mainly in the United States, Europe, and Principal Architect
China and range from organizations that process 50,000 Company: Jesta I.S.
sales transactions per day to those that process 10 million. Location: Verdun, Quebec, Canada
Roberge works with Jesta I.S. clients to install, config- Award: DBA of the Year 2006
ure, and customize the Oracle database and application
server underpinning the Jesta I.S. solutions. Since each
installation is so different, both the application and the
underlying Oracle database typically have to be optimized for
customer needs. “If we have to do tuning at the database
level, it’s usually easy,” says Roberge. “We also leverage
database scalability so that as our client’s business
grows, it can simply add hardware to scale.”
Since Jesta’s application is built on the
Oracle stack, the architecture is important to
Roberge. “What I really like about Oracle is
that there are so many things that you can
do with the database and so many fea-
tures to take advantage of,” he says. “It
has so much flexibility and power.”
The fact that Jesta I.S. solutions
are built on Oracle helps make the
sale. “Most of our large clients,
especially in the retail and whole-
sale markets, are looking for
solutions based on Oracle
because they already run
Oracle,” says Roberge. “They
want to be able to integrate
PATRICK FORDHAM

with their existing systems that

already run on Oracle, so it’s
compelling for them and easy to
integrate for us.”

ORACLE MAGAZINE NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 20 06 35

 Deb Morton
> ORACLE APPLICATIONS IMPLEMENTER OF THE YEAR

Director leads migration from SAP to manage growth,

acquisitions, and consolidation.
When Deb Morton, Oracle Magazine’s Oracle Applications Implementer
of the Year, joined the storage networking products and solutions
provider McDATA in 2000, the company was preparing for its IPO. But
it was also expanding its business; moving into new markets; aggres-
sively acquiring new customers; and growing its revenues, shipments,
and customers at 30 percent quarter over quarter.
Not an easy set of challenges to manage, but Morton did just that.
In fact, after reevaluating infrastructure needs and doing a total-cost-
of-ownership and return-on-investment analysis, Morton and McDATA
decided to replace the company’s existing SAP enterprise resource
planning system with Oracle’s E-Business Suite.
Morton served as the key project manager for the Oracle 11i
E-Business Suite migration, implementing the full suite of Oracle appli-
cations in approximately seven months. Since then, McDATA has added
warehouse management and Oracle’s advanced supply chain to help
manage its new, fully outsourced contract manufacturing strategy.
“We don’t contemplate an upgrade without reviewing what the
improvements are on the business side. It’s not just about IT,” says
Morton. “For example, when we went to [Oracle E-Business Suite 11i
Release] 11.5.10, there were a lot of benefits for our finance organiza-
tion around intercompany invoice streamlining and streamlining the
order processing between locations and headquarters.”
With all the applications and solutions McDATA has deployed from
Oracle, Morton is increasingly impressed with the robustness of the
solutions. “When we rolled out 11.5.10, we were amazed at the lack of
patches we needed to apply—it was very solid,” she says. “We were
able to upgrade in six weeks.”
Another key initiative for McDATA is continuing to streamline
its business and IT operations. “We have an internal project called
“Consolidating to the Core.” With all the acquisitions we’ve done,
we’ve ended up with data centers around the United States and the
world. So we’re consolidating using winnerSPECS
our own products so we get the Name: Deb Morton
strength of a single data center with Job Title/Description:
failover for disaster recovery,” says Director of Business Systems

Morton. “We’ll be more cost-effective Company: McDATA

by consolidating our data center, but Location: Broomfield, Colorado

we’re not losing any of the perfor- Award: Oracle Applications

Implementer of the Year 2006
mance that users expect.”
With its ever-changing business
needs, McDATA finds Oracle’s Fusion path particularly compelling.
“Our strategy is to stay on top of the Fusion path that Oracle has laid
out,” says Morton. “We absolutely want to take advantage of that new
functionality, since it seems like we’re doing an acquisition or upgrade
or two every year. But we also need to make sure that each time we’re
RAY NG

delivering value to the business.”

36 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 20 06 ORACLE.COM/ORACLEMAGAZINE
 Albino Faustino Jr.
> IT MANAGER OF THE YEAR

For this CIO, success is all about connecting.

“The main challenge we face as a company is connecting everybody

in the business to the same systems so they can act together and
make business decisions from the same data sources and applica-
tions,” says Albino Faustino Jr., CIO of GRSA and Oracle Magazine’s
IT Manager of the Year. GRSA, part of the Accor Group and Compass
Groups, is a regional leader in catering and owns seven specialized
brands, which supply food services at schools, airports, bus stations,
companies, and hospitals.
Since he became CIO in 2004, Faustino has focused on imple-
menting a three-phase plan for converging strategic information and
integrating end-to-end processes. He started by consolidating eight key
systems into only two, both running on Oracle. “Apart from the intrinsic
benefits of a consolidated architecture, we have significantly reduced
our total cost of ownership by cutting system maintenance and support
costs,” says Faustino.
In the second phase, GRSA consolidated multiple data centers
into one built on a grid architecture. In the third phase, GRSA used
Oracle Collaboration Suite as a single-sign-on portal to deliver applica-
tions with supporting tools to users within a single view. The Oracle
Collaboration Suite portal will help move GRSA toward a service-
oriented architecture infrastructure.
An important part of Faustino’s success has been his partnership
with Oracle, beginning with GRSA’s 2003 implementation of Oracle
E-Business Suite. “The management of this project has been run in a
partnership between our IT team and Oracle consultants,” says Faustino.
“The project was efficiently run, based on the high-quality stan-
dards of Oracle AIM [Application Implementation Method] methodol-
ogy,” he says. “We completed it on time and on budget with a 1.5-year
return on investment. It was an excellent performance standard for this
type of project.”
Since the completion of the original Oracle deployment, GRSA has
expanded its capabilities with the use of Oracle 10g Real Application
Clusters and, most recently, Oracle Discoverer to develop a business
intelligence layer for translating a daily cost assessment model and as
a basis for a move toward menu centralization. “The implementation of
our business intelligence solution has practically doubled our business
in Brazil in the last three years,” says Faustino.
Overall, Faustino is extremely satisfied with the scope of GRSA
Oracle solutions and the benefits they’ve achieved. “We’ve been pio-
PAULO FRIDMAN

neers in this technology in Brazil, and we’ve achieved a 140 percent winnerSPECS
Name: Albino Faustino Jr.
gain in our processing speed,” says Faustino. “We’re very happy with
Job Title/Description: CIO
our Oracle-based deployments.”
Company: GRSA
Location: Sao Paulo, Brazil
Award: IT Manager of the
Year 2006

ORACLE MAGAZINE NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 20 06 37

 Michael Smith
> SPATIAL DEVELOPER OF THE YEAR
winnerSPECS
Name: Michael Smith
Scientist develops geographic information systems for Job Title/Description:
emergency response. Physical Scientist
Company: U.S. Army Corps
of Engineers
For Michael Smith, Oracle Magazine’s Oracle Spatial Developer of
Location: Hanover,
the Year, hurricanes and natural disasters are an integral part of the job New Hampshire
he does every day. Award: Spatial Developer of
A physical scientist for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Smith the Year 2006
and his group mainly work on civilian-related projects, including sup-
porting sound water resources solutions and emergency-management
functions when there’s flooding or hurricane damage.
“The Corps has a central system called EngLink, the emergency
response link, that we’ve developed the GIS [geographic information
systems] portion for,” says Smith. “We used an Oracle database with
spatial components and developed PL/SQL packages that allow individ-
ual users to log in from throughout the United States to create, update,
and examine GIS information that’s stored in the central database.”
Smith’s group works on a wide variety of other GIS-enabled
applications and finds that the Oracle Spatial solution is particularly
efficient. “One of the really nice things about Oracle Spatial is that
it doesn’t take a lot more development effort to do spatial applica-
DAVE BRADLEY

tions,” says Smith. “In addition to ease of use, the inherent features of
Oracle—such as role-based access and Virtual Private Database—add
to the effectiveness of Oracle Spatial applications.”

John Stegeman
> JAVA DEVELOPER OF THE YEAR
Program director uses community process and information
sharing to take the risk out of adopting new technology.

If you’re walking a tightrope with a short time to complete the act and you’re
trying out a new wire, it’s nice to discover that you have a safety net, as John
Stegeman, senior program director for Cambridge Solutions, discovered.
Stegeman, Oracle Magazine’s Java Developer of the Year, was working on
a consulting project for a large hotel chain that involved creating a Java-based
application for managing the hotel’s capital projects. “We were looking for the
latest and greatest Oracle Java tools that would enable us to deliver results fast
and to iterate improvements easily in the future,” says Stegeman. “We had only
two months to develop a medium-to-large–sized application.”
Cambridge Solutions went with Oracle JDeveloper, although the new version
winnerSPECS
had just been released. “Our biggest concern was that we’d have trouble finding
Name: John Stegeman
help when we ran into roadblocks using Java tools that were newly released,”
Job Title/Description:
says Stegeman. “We were saved by the community process for sharing infor-
STEPHEN DIGGES

Senior Program Director

Company: Cambridge Solutions mation that Oracle provides in the user forum [forums.oracle.com]. Whenever
Location: Oak Brook, Illinois we couldn’t figure out a problem, we’d post a question and get a response back
Award: Java Developer of the fairly quickly. Being able to get that kind of response was a big help.”
Year 2006

38 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 20 06 ORACLE.COM/ORACLEMAGAZINE
 Pratik Ray
> COMPOSITE APPLICATIONS DEVELOPER OF THE YEAR

Architect’s philosophy of integration leverages

technologies and benefits the bottom line.

Composite applications and Sanskrit may not seem to have a lot in

common unless you’ve met Pratik Ray, Oracle Magazine’s Composite
Applications Developer of the Year.
Ray studies Vedic scriptures for insights. “I love learning about Vedic
culture, because one aspect of it is the integration of human life—how we
depend on each other. Each of us as individuals is integrated with others,
and we are all an integral part of the universe.” Ray applies the compa-
ny’s philosophy of integration and innovation to develop new versions of
Landmark’s OpenWorks software, the most widely used Exploration and
Production Project Data Management system in the oil and gas industry.
Bridging the past and future is important for both Ray and Landmark’s
customers. “As we develop new generations of project data manage-
winnerSPECS
ment, we have to support the legacy systems and maintain backward
Name: Pratik Ray
compatibility for our existing customers,” says Ray. “We do that by using
Job Title/Description:
composite applications and leveraging Oracle technologies.” Systems Architect
For Ray the direction of IT architectures is certain. “Organizations have Company: Landmark
investments in their existing products and don’t want to rewrite them Location: Houston, Texas
PAUL HOWELL

because something new comes out, unless there’s a value-added proposi- Award: Composite Applications
tion for their customers,” he says. “Composite applications let organiza- Developer of the Year 2006

tions integrate technologies seamlessly for the benefit of the bottom line.”

David Ufton
> XML DEVELOPER OF THE YEAR
Architect stores and transports energy with XML.

If energy could be captured in an XML format, David Ufton, senior architect at

EnergySys, could design a better way to process and transport it. The company
develops applications (most notably, for hydrocarbon accounting) for the oil and
gas industry. The applications, based on Java architectures and leveraging XML,
manage everything from inventory positions to processes that schedule vessels
arriving to transport oil, gas, or liquefied natural gas from processing plants.
“We used to have relational tables in the database. We were forever writing
code to translate that data into the business and user interface tiers,” says
Ufton, Oracle Magazine’s XML Developer of the Year. “Then we realized that if
winnerSPECS we stored XML in the database, we could process it in the business tier in XML
Name: David Ufton form, transform it using standard tools, and pass it straight to the user interface.”
Job Title/Description: The result: an enterprise architecture that uses XML standards from end to
Senior Architect
end. “We use Oracle’s XML DB, XPath, and XQuery to retrieve and create the XML
Company: EnergySys
that we have in the repository,” says Ufton. “Although the packets of information
Location: Guildford, England
JOHN BLYTHE

we pass across tiers are somewhat larger than traditional solutions, we don’t
Award: XML Developer
of the Year 2006
have to translate them as much as we did with older approaches. Using XML
creates a far more flexible and robust architecture that benefits our clients.”

ORACLE MAGAZINE NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 20 06 39

winnerSPECS
Name: Gordon Mohr
Job Title/Description:
Architect and Lead Developer
Company: Internet Archive
Gordon Mohr
Location: San Francisco, California > OPEN SOURCE DEVELOPER OF THE YEAR
Award: Open Source Developer
of the Year 2006
Developer watches Web innovations and uses open
source to go back in time.

“If you enter a URL in our Wayback Machine, you’ll get a list of all the
captures we’ve made of that site over the 10 years of our history,” says
Gordon Mohr, Oracle Magazine’s Open Source Developer of the Year. “You can
click on the links and browse the Web as it was at a prior date and time.”
An architect and lead developer for Web projects at the Internet Archive,
Mohr has been a pioneering user of Oracle Berkeley DB Java Edition, incor-
porating it into an open source Web crawler, Heritrix.
“The Heritrix crawler uses hundreds of threads to communicate with
Web sites and retrieve their contents,” says Mohr. “Oracle’s open source
Berkeley DB Java Edition is a good fit for our requirements since it works so
well with big, changing data sets in a highly concurrent environment.”
Mohr has been a key contributor to the Berkeley DB Java Edition devel-
opment effort by stress-testing the system and working with the develop-
ment team to analyze, reproduce, and fix key bugs.
A key challenge is keeping up with Web designs and technologies. “We

BOB ADLER
watch innovations in browsers and Web site design closely, since our soft-
ware has to capture it all in an automated fashion,” says Mohr.

Steven Feuerstein
> PL/SQL DEVELOPER OF THE YEAR
Writing good code—and testing it—is one
developer’s mission.

“PL/SQL developers don’t test their code often enough or deeply enough,”
says Steven Feuerstein, Oracle Magazine’s PL/SQL Developer of the Year. “It’s
a big problem, and not just in our small part of the programming world. Sure,
unit testing is tough and there are lots of obstacles, but we’ve got to reduce the
number of bugs that make it into production applications.”
Feuerstein emphasizes testing in his training sessions and conference pre-
sentations. He’s also the development manager for a new unit testing tool for
PL/SQL from Quest Software. Of course, there is more to coding than testing, and
Feuerstein’s ten books on PL/SQL prove the point. He complements his interest winnerSPECS
in testing with a broader focus in his Best Practice PL/SQL column on Oracle Name: Steven Feuerstein

Technology Network and his PL/SQL Practices column in Oracle Magazine. Job Title/Description:
PL/SQL Evangelist
His take on the PL/SQL language? “It’s elegant and accessible. It may not
Company: Quest Software
have all the power of Java, but it is without doubt the premier database pro-
Location: Chicago, Illinois
gramming language,” says Feuerstein. “And let’s face it: the tens of thousands
ANDREA MANDEL

Award: PL/SQL Developer

of mission-critical production applications built on PL/SQL will be running for of the Year 2006
decades. It’s critical for developers to pay attention to the robustness, maintain-
ability, and testability of that code.”

40 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 20 06 ORACLE.COM/ORACLEMAGAZINE
 Kunal Malik
> ORACLE FUSION MIDDLEWARE DEVELOPER OF THE YEAR

Director streamlines access and empowers customers.

With platforms that control devices from Apple’s AirPort to NASA’s Mars Rover,
Wind River Systems routinely creates efficient technology solutions. But when
the company needed a streamlined way for customers to access its internal
applications, Wind River turned to Oracle Fusion Middleware.
“When we did the competitive evaluation, the comparison and value
weren’t close,” says Kunal Malik, director of global applications for Wind River
and Oracle Magazine’s Oracle Fusion Middleware Developer of the Year. “It was
an easy decision to standardize on Oracle Fusion Middleware.”
winnerSPECS A key goal was to empower customers and provide them with more self-
Name: Kunal Malik
service–based applications. The solution needed to be secure but easy to
Job Title/Description:
Director of Global Applications
navigate as customers accessed different applications. “In a matter of months,
Company: Wind River Systems
we launched the solution worldwide. It integrated all the composite applica-
Location: Alameda, California
tions, including support-ticketing systems, license-managing systems, and
Award: Oracle Fusion Middleware
other custom applications,” says Malik. “Customers register once, and they get
Developer of the Year 2006 access to everything.” Oracle Fusion Middleware has helped Wind River transi-
MARGOT HARDFORD

tion to a service-oriented architecture (SOA).

“If you ask me what my SOA strategy is, I’d have to say it’s Oracle Fusion
Middleware,” says Malik. “It provides great time to market, it’s able to inte-
grate, and it’s able to build and leverage reusable services that we create.”

John Scott
> ORACLE APPLICATION EXPRESS DEVELOPER OF THE YEAR
Business owner brings fast, easy development to personal
Web sites and e-commerce systems alike.

Oracle Application Express enables fast, easy creation of Web-based applications,

and John Scott, owner of Shellprompt Hosting and Oracle Magazine’s Oracle
Application Express Developer of the Year, sees unlimited opportunities for it.
“I haven’t come up against a Web site or system that I wouldn’t like to do
in Oracle Application Express,” says Scott, who recently became an Oracle ACE.
“It can be used for any Web site that’s backed by a database—there are a huge
number of potential applications out there on the internet.” Shellprompt Hosting
specializes in hosting Oracle-based Web sites and applications. “Oracle has refined
the technology into something you can use to develop everything from a personal
Web site to a sophisticated e-commerce system,” says Scott. “You don’t even
need to install anything on your computer to use it—all you need is a browser.” winnerSPECS
Name: John Scott
Oracle Application Express also reduces maintenance and security concerns.
Job Title/Description:
“It’s a lot simpler to maintain an application written in Oracle Application Express Owner
because everything is stored in the database, meaning you have fewer moving Company: Shellprompt Hosting
parts to look after,” says Scott. “Oracle has gone to great lengths to ensure that
JOHN BLYTHE

Location: Leeds, England

the security features available in the database, such as fine-grained access Award: Oracle Application Express
control, can be seamlessly used in your application.” Developer of the Year 2006

ORACLE MAGAZINE NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 20 06 41

 Mark Arratoon
> BPEL DEVELOPER OF THE YEAR

Architect uses BPEL to keep systems in good health.

“Solving the collaboration problem between devices, information,

and different people with different roles is very complex,” says Mark
Arratoon, a senior technical architect for GE Healthcare Integrated
IT Solutions and Oracle Magazine’s BPEL Developer of the Year. GE
Healthcare provides healthcare products and services ranging from
medical imaging to information technologies.
“Combining loosely coupled service-oriented architecture [SOA]
approaches with the transparency and maintainability of business-
process-management [BPM]–based process design is a great fit for
the complex and varied collaborations that happen between people
and machines in today’s hospital and healthcare environments,” says
Arratoon, whose group provides information system solutions for hos-
pitals and integrated delivery networks.
Arratoon sees BPM and its associated standards such as
Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) as the perfect fit
for healthcare. “We’re driven by standards-based approaches
and platforms,” he says. “One of the key standards for BPM
is BPEL, and we believe that BPEL is emerging as the
dominant standard and approach to developing BPM-
based solutions.”
BPEL gives organizations transparency into the
processes that constitute their business, and it gives
them a relatively easy way to maintain and extend
those processes as they grow and change. “That’s
important for us, because we find that for many
large-scale healthcare ISVs [independent software
vendors] the problem of customized installations is
a large one, given the complexity of organizations,”
winnerSPECS says Arratoon. “Anything that helps us be more
Name: Mark Arratoon agile in the process of customization, installation,
Job Title/Description: and maintenance is a definite advantage.”
Senior Technical Architect
Enter Oracle BPEL Process Manager. “We’re
Company: GE Healthcare
very impressed with Oracle BPEL Process
Location: Burlington, Vermont
Manager and its relative maturity and rich capa-
Award: BPEL Developer
of the Year 2006 bilities, compared to other tools,” says Arratoon.
“We’re particularly impressed with Oracle BPEL
Process Manager’s close adherence to the BPEL SOA
standards. Oracle is in the forefront of shaping those
standards as they evolve.” Arratoon also likes Oracle BPEL
Process Manager’s support for different application servers
and database platforms. “As a supplier to the enterprise-
level healthcare providers, we need to have the flexibility to
deploy on different platforms, so it’s important for us that
our server-side architecture adheres to standards as we
go forward,” says Arratoon.
DAVE BRADLEY

Arratoon is optimistic about the possibilities. “BPM,

BPEL, and SOA hold great promise for healthcare from
our point of view,” says Arratoon.

42 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 20 06 ORACLE.COM/ORACLEMAGAZINE
 winnerSPECS
Name: Linda Leong

Linda Leong Job Title/Description:

System Architect
Company: Hansen Information

> .NET DEVELOPER OF THE YEAR

Technologies
Location: Rancho Cordova,
California
Architect’s solutions start at the database. Award: .NET Developer
of the Year 2006

“A reliable application depends upon solid database design, and with

today’s emphasis on workflow and top-down system design, people
sometimes lose sight of designing a solid database structure,” says
Linda Leong, a system architect at Hansen Information Technologies
and Oracle Magazine’s .NET Developer of the Year.
Hansen creates public sector enterprise applications that manage
government services from local cities and towns to state and federal
agencies worldwide. Hansen’s latest release, Hansen 8, is designed
around a .NET framework, so customers can deploy their applications on
Microsoft’s Internet Information Server and access them via browsers.
As important as .NET is to Hansen solutions, Oracle Database is an
equally critical component for many customers, since many Hansen
clients run on the Oracle platform. Leong focuses extensively on opti-
mizing the Hansen platform and its .NET framework for Oracle-based
deployments. “Many of our clients use Oracle for their large-scale
database applications,” notes Leong. “The database is a core tier of our
BOB ADLER

application, so we use Oracle’s ODP.NET data provider. We use ADO.NET

to interact with the database from our .NET business logic.”

Rob Aneweer, winnerSPECS

Name: Rob Aneweer, Erin Ham

Erin Hamm Job Title/Description:

Portal Developers
Company: American Century
> PORTAL DEVELOPERS OF THE YEAR Investments
Location: Kansas City, Missouri
Award: Portal Developers
Developers create a business launching pad. of the Year 2006

Running a successful investment company requires that your employees

have the right information at the right time. That’s why American Century
Investments upgraded its portal strategy by deploying Oracle Portal.
“Our vision is that the portal becomes the work space for all American
Century employees—the launching pad from which we do our jobs,” says Rob
Aneweer, who along with Erin Hamm is Oracle Magazine’s Portal Developer
of the Year. American Century had an internal portal composed of flat HTML
pages, but the company has converted to a dynamic portal environment based
on Oracle Portal and Oracle Business Intelligence Suite. The process integrated
more than 80,000 legacy Web pages into Oracle Portal and consolidated frag-
mented intranet sites and disparate content sources into one portal.
“The key to our portal’s success is its integration to external applications
outside of the portal, dashboard reporting, and the integration of the exter-
nal database for the display of key metrics within the portal,” says Hamm.
WILBORN ASSOCIATES

Oracle Portal’s security features are also important.

“We’ve taken advantage of the security inherent in the Portal applica-
tions so that we can distribute information to specific groups within our
company,” says Aneweer. “It’s much more efficient than our previous intranet.”

ORACLE MAGAZINE NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 20 06 43

 Øystein Amundsen
ORACLE JDEVELOPER EXTENSIONS DEVELOPER OF THE YEAR
>
Finding solutions and sharing them is what this developer
is all about.
Consultant Øystein Amundsen’s natural inclination is to find solutions.
Although he programs extensively in Oracle JDeveloper, Amundsen, Oracle
Magazine’s Oracle JDeveloper Extensions Developer of the Year, also needs to use
Microsoft Visual Source Safe for version management of his code and applications,
because it’s the company’s standard.
When he couldn’t find existing support for using Microsoft Visual Source Safe
with the Oracle JDeveloper environment, he solved the problem by creating an
Oracle JDeveloper Extension that allows developers to easily integrate the two.
winnerSPECS
Amundsen also made the extension available as an open source project, so Name: Øystein Amundsen
other developers can leverage the code, learn from it, and enhance it. Job Title/Description:
For Amundsen, the Oracle community can be a rich source of support and System Developer
opportunity. “There are a lot of plug-ins out there that make the job of writing Company: Bouvet AS
code easier. Developers should explore the upgrade center [the integrated func- Location: Karmsund, Norway
tion in Oracle JDeveloper, located in the top menu bar at Help/Check] and see Award: Oracle JDeveloper
Extensions Developer of the
what’s available, because they can really make things easier,” says Amundsen. TON HENDRIKS Year 2006
“If there are features that you’re lacking, I’d recommend checking out the
Oracle JDeveloper Extension API, because it’s easy to understand and it holds
the key to almost all the features of the Oracle JDeveloper environment.”

winnerSPECS
Name: Dennis Alley
Job Title/Description: Partner
Company: Computer Sciences
Corporation
Location: Oak Brook, Illinois
Award: RFID Architect
of the Year 2006
Dennis Alley
> RFID ARCHITECT OF THE YEAR
Developer uses RFID to streamline business.
For Dennis Alley, Oracle Magazine’s RFID Developer of the Year
and a partner at Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC), radio-
frequency identification (RFID) is an increasingly important way to
streamline business processes. For example, working with a major
defense contractor, Alley was recently challenged to design an RFID
solution that could be used by all of the contractor’s business units
to meet the Department of Defense compliance shipping requirements.
Rather than take a simple “slap and ship” approach to RFID
deployment, Alley’s team suggested using Oracle Database and
Oracle Application Server and enhancing Oracle’s RFID Supplier
Compliance Workspace application so the contractor could incorpo-
rate interfaces with the customer’s SAP system and share informa-
tion to streamline processing and reduce manual interactions.
“We ended up wanting to deliver a solution that went beyond
the Oracle RFID Supplier Compliance Workspace application, so we
designed extensions to the database and reworked the application
to interface with SAP and generate the RFID-enabled military ship-
ping labels,” says Alley.
To meet their goals, the CSC team worked closely with Oracle
ANDREA MANDEL

engineers. “We worked very cooperatively with Oracle—it was a

good give-and-take situation,” says Alley. “We were able to com-
plete the work on time and get the solution installed successfully.”

44 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 20 06 ORACLE.COM/ORACLEMAGAZINE
 winnerSPECS

Basheer Khan Name: Basheer Khan

Job Title/Description:
President

> INTEGRATION ARCHITECT OF THE YEAR Company: Innowave Technology

Location: Los Angeles, California
Award: Integration Architect of
Architect finds that integration improves efficiency. the Year 2006

“Integration has always played a critical role in improving the efficiency

of businesses and providing information to decision-makers,” says
Basheer Khan, Oracle Magazine’s Integration Architect of the Year.
“While there have been other historical approaches, we’re now seeing
the industry move toward a more efficient, flexible, scalable, and stan-
dards-based approach to data and process integration.”
Khan uses this approach at his own company, Innowave Technology,
helping companies integrate their Oracle, JD Edwards, and PeopleSoft
applications with third-party applications. For example, he recently lev-
eraged Oracle Fusion Middleware and a service-oriented–architecture
approach to integrate 52 touch points between a customer’s Oracle
E-Business Suite applications and a third-party logistics provider.
“What’s compelling about the solutions that Oracle brings to the table
with Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle BPEL Process Manager is that
no matter what legacy or third-party application a customer may have,
they can easily use Oracle adapters to integrate their systems without
RAFFI ALEXANDER

a lot of investment in rewriting their code,” says Khan. “That makes it

easy for customers to maintain and troubleshoot any integration—it’s
kind of a ‘what you see is what you get’ approach to integration.”

Marc Staheli
> SMB ARCHITECT OF THE YEAR
CTO chooses Oracle to scale up to
multibillion-dollar customers.

Even small companies dream big. And when they do, they plan their IT
infrastructure in advance. “We’re a small company now, but we antici-
pate growing dramatically, so Oracle gives us peace of mind because
we can scale up endlessly with them as we grow,” says Marc Staheli,
CTO of vAudit and Oracle Magazine’s SMB Architect of the Year.
vAudit provides a suite of online tools that helps companies comply
with their sales and use tax across the United States and Canada. Staheli
and his partner Robert Schulte created the idea in 2003 when they
realized the potential of helping companies manage their tax compli-
ance issues. Initial funding came in 2005, and the company now serves
clients with revenues ranging from US$20 million to US$5 billion.
winnerSPECS When it came time to build the infrastructure, vAudit chose Oracle
Name: Marc Staheli Database 10g Standard Edition with Real Application Clusters and
Job Title/Description: Oracle Application Server 10g, along with Oracle JDeveloper. “We do
CTO
have a significant amount of traffic, so we wanted to have an extremely
JAMES ARONOVSKY

Company: vAudit Group

stable platform and one that could support significant growth,” says
Location: San Diego, California
Staheli. “Oracle’s platform comes with a comprehensive set of powerful
Award: SMB Architect
of the Year 2006
tools and features, which makes us very efficient and highly productive.
Oracle’s solutions really fit the SMB market these days.”

ORACLE MAGAZINE NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 20 06 45

winnerSPECS
Name: Vasif Pasha
Job Title/Description:
Vasif Pasha
Software Engineer
Company: SUMCO USA
> ORACLE FUSION MIDDLEWARE ARCHITECT OF THE YEAR
Location: Phoenix, Arizona
Award: Oracle Fusion Middleware
Engineer integrates system information with workflow
Architect of the Year 2006 capabilities improves collaboration.

Sometimes little things can mean a lot—especially in the silicon wafer

manufacturing business, where a small drop in production can result in
a huge hit to corporate profits or a large financial loss.
To avoid such problems, SUMCO USA, a manufacturer that supplies
silicon wafers for chip manufacturers, turned to Oracle BPEL Process
Manager to manage its customer order specification review processes.
“The implementation of a spec registration system was essential for
our company, and the key was to reduce the cycle time for order pro-
cessing. We needed the ability to review specifications collaboratively to
make efficient decisions on product manufacturing,” says Vasif Pasha,
software engineer for SUMCO USA and Oracle Magazine’s Oracle Fusion
Middleware Architect of the Year. “Efficient integration of our system
processes with human workflow capabilities was critical not only for
achieving reduced cycle time for order processing but also generating
cycle time data for reports.”
Integration was an important consideration for SUMCO USA. It
needed to create systems that could work easily across multiple plat-
forms, languages, and technologies, since the company works closely
with a large number of chip manufacturing companies. SUMCO USA
used Oracle BPEL Process Manager to improve its decision-making
process for capability analysis of wafer manufacturing by integrating
information and workflows to collaborate with divisions across multiple
sites and systems. The implementation involved creating business
processes on-the-fly and enabling parallel execution of flows within a
business process.
While SUMCO USA faced new challenges with the e-mail notification
service and subsystem install with the initial product version, Pasha
and the SUMCO USA team worked closely with Oracle’s BPEL engineer-
ing team to address them. “Oracle’s team has been extremely quick
in responding to our questions and giving us alternative solutions for
problems we came up with,” says Pasha.
The project was a success. “I think one of the key points is that it’s
not difficult to implement a solution with Oracle BPEL Process Manager,”
says Pasha. “It doesn’t take much time, it’s reliable, and you basically
implement an SOA [service-oriented architecture] with minimal effort
while producing an extremely valuable solution for your company.”
For Pasha, using Oracle BPEL Process Manager to support, auto-
mate and manage complex workflows that included a high degree
of human interaction was exciting. “I had a great time implementing
Oracle BPEL Process Manager and building solutions on top of it,” says
MICHAEL MERTZ

Pasha. “Developers who are interested in SOA or BPEL don’t need to

be apprehensive about learning a new language or technology—they
should try it, and they’ll see how easy it is to use.”

46 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 20 06 ORACLE.COM/ORACLEMAGAZINE
 Chris Newcombe
> EMBEDDED ARCHITECT OF THE YEAR

Software engineer strives for elegance of design to

maintain simplicity and transparency.

“My main technology interest is building flexible, scalable systems that

are highly available in the presence of operator errors or software defects.
That’s why I’m such a strong advocate of Oracle Berkeley DB,” says
Chris Newcombe, senior software engineer at Amazon.com and Oracle winnerSPECS
Magazine’s Embedded Architect of the Year. “Elegance of design is essen- Name: Chris Newcombe
tial, because elegance implies minimal artificial complexity.” Job Title/Description:
A transparent and efficient IT infrastructure is imperative for Amazon. Senior Software Engineer

Transparency enables the business without impeding Amazon’s innova- Company: Amazon.com

tion, yet systems must also be high-performing and cost-effective so that Location: Seattle, Washington

Amazon can keep prices low for customers. Award: Embedded Architect of
the Year 2006
For years Amazon has used Oracle Berkeley DB for fast read-only
caches of catalog data. Newcombe built a nonintrusive repartitioning
solution for the primary catalog cache, based on Oracle Berkeley DB. It’s
a mission-critical system that serves several hundreds of thousands of
requests per second.
“Berkeley DB applications can be designed to require very little (poten-
tially zero) human administration cost, which helps keep our costs down,”
REX RYSTEDT

says Newcombe. “Berkeley DB has simple, convenient APIs, which helps

with rapid prototyping and fast time to market.”

Jim McDonald
> SECURITY ARCHITECT OF THE YEAR
Manager makes the case for data security by tying it to
business strategy.
When industrial giant Ingersoll Rand created a portal for its dealer network, the
company planned to streamline business processes and make the portal secure.
“At Ingersoll Rand, security is a top priority and an integral part of our IT strategy,”
says Jim McDonald, manager of IT and Oracle Magazine’s Security Architect of the
Year. One of McDonald’s biggest challenges is trying to be both a security strategist
and an implementer.
Keeping the business requirements foremost is critical. “A single security breach
winnerSPECS could cost more than the investment in proper security,” says McDonald. “That’s the
Name: Jim McDonald key: talking about security as an investment and tying it to the business strategy.”
Job Title/Description: In developing the portal, both business and security goals were paramount. “We
Manager of IT invested significantly in our portal’s security infrastructure,” McDonald says. “Our busi-
Company: Ingersoll Rand ness case was that we could simplify access for our dealer portal and at the same
CATHERINE GIBBONS

Location: Annandale, time tighten our defenses around data security.”

New Jersey
The result was a dealer portal with security built around Oracle’s COREid identity
Award: Security Architect of the
Year 2006 management platform that enabled Ingersoll Rand to delegate management capabili-
ties to individual dealers.

ORACLE MAGAZINE NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 20 06 47

 Brad Maue
> BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE IMPLEMENTER OF THE YEAR

CTO uses business intelligence to increase efficiencies

and improve client service.

What is business intelligence worth? One law firm can tell you.
“Our Oracle-based data warehouse has more than paid for itself by
a factor of five or ten,” says Brad Maue, CTO of Stuart Maue Mitchell &
James, a pioneer in legal cost management. The firm specializes in han-
dling all legal fees for major litigations such as large class-action suits.
“We put all [the bills] into an Oracle database and sort everything out
for our clients, along with identifying billing abuses,” says Maue, Oracle
Magazine’s Business Intelligence Implementer of the Year.
winnerSPECS
Stuart Maue Mitchell & James started its business intelligence Name: Brad Maue
initiative to enable customized reporting for its customers. It uses Oracle Job Title/Description:
Database 10g for the data warehouse: Transactional data is imported CTO
nightly, and clients use Oracle Discoverer to run ad hoc queries and Company: Stuart Maue Mitchell
& James
reports. The solution has been extremely successful with the firm’s
Location: St. Louis, Missouri
clients; it contains information on more than US$2.2 billion in legal fees.
WILBORN ASSOCIATES

Award: Business Intelligence

“The Oracle Warehouse Builder was phenomenal,” says Maue. “In Implementer of the Year 2006
the past you’d have to write tens of thousands of lines of code manually,
while Oracle Warehouse Builder has built-in intelligence and just writes
the code for you. It cuts down on development time by a factor of ten.”

Ton Hardeman
> BUSINESS PROCESS MANAGEMENT ARCHITECT OF THE YEAR
Architect uses business process management to manage
complexity and increase customer satisfaction.

Every financial company has to translate its strategy into a business model.
For financial giant ABN AMRO, the resulting business processes are complex,
because its business is built around a multichannel sales and customer service
approach. ABN AMRO needs to ensure that its customers can start a business
process (such as opening a new account) in one channel (such as a call center)
and continue it in another (such as a bank) seamlessly. To manage the complexi-
winnerSPECS ties and enable business agility, Chief Business Architect Ton Hardeman and his
Name: Ton Hardeman team designed a business process management (BPM) solution for multichannel
Job Title/Description: customer contact for key processes and built the infrastructure using PeopleSoft
Chief Business Architect
CRM components with PeopleTools as a programming environment.
Company: ABN AMRO
“It’s had a direct and positive impact on our business,” says Hardeman,
Location: Amsterdam,
the Netherlands Oracle Magazine’s Business Process Management Architect of the Year. “With
Award: Business Process this BPM solution, we’ve seen an increase in customer satisfaction. In addition,
Management Architect all customer interaction around standard bank products has been unified into
TON HENDRIKS

of the Year 2006

one system, giving a 360-degree customer view. A BPM management layer
manages/guides the interaction with the customer. Our customers obtain better
service, and we have more up-sell and cross-sell opportunities.”

48 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 20 06 ORACLE.COM/ORACLEMAGAZINE
 Jay Parmar winnerSPECS
Name: Jay Parmar

> DATA WAREHOUSE ARCHITECT OF THE YEAR

Job Title/Description:
Programme Manager
Company: Egg
Manager uses data warehouse to get data quickly. Location: Derby, England
Award: Data Warehouse Architect
of the Year 2006
In today’s business climate, having a lot of customer data is only good if it
can be put to use quickly. Especially if you’re like Egg, an internet-based
bank that’s part of the Prudential Group.
Originally, Egg had relied on an outsourced service to manage its
data. But it frequently took up to six weeks for managers to get data for
marketing or business analysis purposes—way too long in a fast-moving,
consumer-driven company.
“To be competitive we needed to build our own data warehouse. We
based it on Oracle and Sun, and that delivers data in near-real time,” says
Jay Parmar, former head of data and now programme manager for Egg
and Oracle Magazine’s Oracle Data Warehouse Architect of the Year.
Egg’s warehouse now sits on a Sun F15, under Oracle9i Database. It
leverages Oracle’s materialized views and parallelism to provide added
flexibility and uses Oracle Discoverer for reports. The data warehouse is
approximately 2TB in size and shifts several gigabytes daily.
“With the new Oracle-based warehouse, we could increase our
marketing capability from a handful of campaigns to more than 100
per month across a range of channels,” says Parmar. “In addition, we
JOHN BLYTHE

increased our ability to deliver against regulatory reporting requirements.

We’ve built a much more strategic solution than we ever had before.”

Brian T. Wilkinson
winnerSPECS > SOA ARCHITECT OF THE YEAR
Name: Brian T. Wilkinson
Job Title/Description:
Senior Manager for
Manager finds that many business processes can
SOA Practice benefit from a service-oriented architecture.
Company: Accenture
Location: Chicago, Illinois Implementing a service-oriented architecture (SOA) requires technology. But it
Award: SOA Architect also requires something else—a business driver.
of the Year 2006
“You need a strong connection to the business process to improve exist-
ing processes, enable new capabilities, and ultimately make SOA successful,”
says Brian Wilkinson, senior manager, SOA Practice at Accenture and Oracle
Magazine’s SOA Architect of the Year. “Not all business processes should be
architected using SOA, but there’s a healthy set that can benefit greatly from
SOA—and those are the ones that organizations should address.”
Over the past year, Wilkinson’s team at Accenture has produced an SOA
reference architecture to define a set of reference services that organiza-
tions can easily deploy to speed the implementation of an Oracle Fusion
Middleware–based project. “With SOA, the ability now exists to integrate the
human and automated components of a business process and gain real-
time visibility into business performance metrics and compare them against
historical trends,” says Wilkinson. “As a result, organizations can change the
way they’re performing in the marketplace in almost real time with SOA.”
Wilkinson says that Accenture is already seeing clients benefit from SOA,
ANDREA MANDEL

a trend that he says will increase over time. “We see SOA and how Oracle
has ‘baked’ it into Fusion as fundamental to the future of Oracle,” he says.
“Oracle’s SOA direction is consistent with how Accenture views SOA.”

ORACLE MAGAZINE NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 20 06 49

 Anthony Abbattista
> CONTENT MANAGEMENT ARCHITECT OF THE YEAR

Managing structured and unstructured data is critical to this VP.

winnerSPECS
Name: Anthony Abbattista
Job Title/Description:
Vice President of Enterprise
Technology Strategy and Planning
Company: Allstate Insurance
Location: Northbrook, Illinois
For some firms, content management isn’t a luxury. “In a business like ours—
property and casualty insurance—the amount of structured and unstructured
data that moves through our business processes is astonishing,” says Anthony
Abbattista, vice president of enterprise technology strategy and planning for
Allstate Insurance and Oracle Magazine’s Content Management Architect of the
Year. “To manage that data, we’re automating and virtualizing many of our busi-
ness processes with Oracle Content Management Services to increase efficiency
and to attract and retain customers.”
A key factor of Allstate’s content management strategy was developing a tax-
onomy that enables a standard set of services across the enterprise, so employees
can access information easily. “We’re unleashing the power of both our existing
data and the new content that we’re creating,” adds Abbattista. The result is back-
office operations and business processes that serve customers better. “Having a
content management strategy that marries structured and unstructured data into a
coherent record management strategy is important,” he says.
Resiliency was also important for Allstate. “Because Oracle has great tech-
nology with RAC [Oracle Real Application Clusters], the database, and a good

Award: Content Management
Architect of the Year 2006
ANDREA MANDEL
application server layer, we could take advantage of that physical configuration
as a disaster recovery mechanism,” he says. “Oracle has such a strong database
heritage that they tend to have bulletproof infrastructure at the base level.”

Tim Hall winnerSPECS

Name: Tim Hall

> ORACLE ACE OF THE YEAR Job Title/Description:

DBA/Developer
Location: Birmingham, England
Teaching how to learn is consultant’s goal. Award: Oracle ACE of the Year
2006

Tim Hall became Oracle Magazine’s Oracle ACE of the Year by not
minding his own business. “I’m inquisitive,” says Hall. “I like to be
involved when people make design decisions, because I believe that a
DBA should be the most skilled person at handling a database as well
as helping developers understand [how] to optimize their applications.”
Hall earned a PhD in 1994 and took a job programming Oracle Forms;
at his current job, he is responsible for all the databases (Oracle Database
10g Real Application Clusters and Oracle9i ) and Oracle Application
Servers. And he shares his knowledge with the Oracle community.
“Whenever I was studying for an OCP [Oracle Certified Professional] exam
and writing revision notes, I would put them on the internet so others
could read them,” says Hall. “I get e-mails from all over the world from
people telling me how much my notes helped.” But for Hall, enabling new
learning is even more important. “It’s fine to tell people how to do some-
JOHN BLYTHE

thing, but if you can show them how to learn, that’s much better.”
To learn more about the Oracle ACE program, visit oracle.com/
technology/community/oracle_ace.

50 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 20 06 ORACLE.COM/ORACLEMAGAZINE
 winnerSPECS
Name: Logan McLeod
Job Title/Description:

Logan McLeod IT Strategist

Company: Dell Inc.

> ORACLE GRID CONTROL ARCHITECT OF THE YEAR

Location: Round Rock, Texas
Award: Oracle Grid Control
Architect of the Year 2006
Strategist manages huge stack with Oracle Grid Control.

Managing a worldwide IT infrastructure requires efficient use of IT

resources and a thorough knowledge of what is deployed and where. To
gain that, Dell Inc. IT embraced Oracle Grid Control. Last year Dell Inc.
IT embarked on a global deployment of Oracle Grid Control to manage
all of Dell Inc.’s Oracle Database production infrastructure, enabling a
single console for managing all database infrastructure throughout the
enterprise, regardless of the deployment platform or physical location.
“Our biggest challenge was our own legacy—we’ve got thousands
of Linux servers that have been deployed over many years by many
teams,” says Logan McLeod, IT strategist at Dell Inc. IT and Oracle
Magazine’s Oracle Grid Control Architect of the Year. “So the biggest
challenge was getting the Oracle Grid Control agents deployed con-
sistently on all those servers.” Once the agents were deployed, the
benefits were realized immediately. “Now we can instantly get a holis-
tic view of our entire database environments around the world,” says
McLeod. “We’re also managing our database environment much more
FRANK CURRY

proactively and have begun leveraging capacity and change manage-

ment capabilities of the tool. Grid provides a solid foundation for our
Oracle strategy here at Dell Inc. IT.”

Rob Patton, Barak Moffitt

> HIGH AVAILABILITY ARCHITECTS OF THE YEAR
Directors scale up their site for greater availability, reliability.

With almost ten million people coming to edmunds.com every month to

research new and used cars and collect automotive advice, high availability
definitely matters.
“Availability is critical to our dealer leads and advertising revenue,” says
Barak Moffitt, Oracle Magazine’s High-Availability Architect of the Year, along
with Rob Patton. “We chose Oracle 10g RAC [Real Application Clusters] for
our database primarily because we have aggressive high-level design prin-
ciples for availability, scalability, reliability, and performance.”
Two years ago, Edmunds realized that its hosting architecture needed to
be replaced with one that could scale up while assuring improved availabil-
winnerSPECS
ity. To achieve this, Edmunds put in place a new data center approach that
Name: Rob Patton, Barak Moffitt
provides high availability by relying on a wide-scale deployment of Oracle
Job Title/Description:
Fusion Middleware on top of Oracle Database 10g using Linux and Intel Executive Director, Business
EM64T technologies. Intelligence and Data Architecture;
Executive Director, Production
“By using Oracle technologies, we were able to create separate yet sym-
Operation (respectively)
metric operational environments to handle the wide spectrum of consumer-
RAFFI ALEXANDER

Company: Edmunds.com
and business-oriented services that Edmunds needs to deploy,” says Rob
Location: Santa Monica, California
Patton. “With Oracle we now have high availability and increased flexibility,
Award: High Availability
while benefiting from widely supported standards.” Architects of the Year 2006

ORACLE MAGAZINE NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 20 06 51

 Eddie Awad
> ORACLE-RELATED BLOGGER OF THE YEAR

Developer shares and communicates news, information

with other Oracle users.

For Eddie Awad, Web logs are a way to keep his head straight about Oracle.
“I’m addicted to Oracle, and I like to share what I learn with other people,”
says Awad, Oracle Magazine’s Oracle-Related Blogger of the Year. “My blog has
become a notebook for me and a great way to share and communicate with winnerSPECS
Name: Eddie Awad
other Oracle users.”
Job Title/Description:
Awad is an application developer for ESCO and has worked with Oracle Application Developer
since 1994. Awad started blogging to stay in touch with friends but soon real- Company: ESCO
ized that blogs could be useful for keeping track of the IT challenges he encoun- Location: Portland, Oregon
tered in his work. So he started a more-technical blog focused on Oracle. Award: Oracle-Related Blogger of
Awad also created the Oracle News Aggregator (oradot.com/news), a site the Year 2006

LINCOLN BARBOUR PHOTOGRAPHY

that allows readers to monitor Oracle-related news sources and blogs, Firefox
extensions that make it easier for developers to search Oracle documentation,
and oraQA.com, an Oracle question-and-answer blog.
Accuracy is important for Awad, and he keeps the blog fresh by publishing
three or four times a week. “My posts tend to be specific to a certain problem,”
says Awad. “I ensure the accuracy and comprehensiveness of my posts by pro-
viding examples, citing sources, and pointing to additional relevant information.”

winnerSPECS
Name: Jonathan Lewis
Job Title/Description:
Consultant Jonathan Lewis
Company: JL Computer
Consultancy > ORACLE AUTHOR OF THE YEAR
Location: Surbiton, England
Award: Oracle Author of the Consultant tries to reach as many people as possible by
Year 2006
writing books.

Computer glitches rarely launch a writing career, but for Jonathan Lewis, Oracle
Magazine’s Oracle Author of the Year, the Y2K problem was a blessing.
In 1999 Lewis, who lectures, trains, and consults with companies around
the world on maximizing the efficiency of their Oracle databases, found that
corporate budgets were devoted to the Y2K problem. Rather than take a long
holiday, he used the time to write his first book, Practical Oracle8i. This year
Lewis wrote Cost-Based Oracle Fundamentals, the first of a three-volume series.
“Few people understand how Oracle’s Cost-Based Optimizer works. Virtually
anyone who worries about the performance of their database should read the
book,” says Lewis. “I decided to write down some of the stuff I knew about
cost-based optimization so that I could help thousands of people instead of
training individual groups of 50 or 100.”
He found a rich subject—the first book has more than 500 pages and he
has two volumes left to go. But it’s a job he enjoys.
“Researching technology problems can be interesting, and working with
customers on specific performance issues can be exciting,” says Lewis. “But
JOHN BLYTHE

the writing part of my job is the toughest bit, which is why it gives me the most
satisfaction when I think I’ve got it right.”

52 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 20 06 ORACLE.COM/ORACLEMAGAZINE
Be Amazed. Be Admired. Join Oracle.
Oracle Consulting across EMEA is currently accepting CVs for the following areas:

Technology Consultants Protected Enterprise; J2EE; data full-time salaried employees.

Architects for Oracle 10g mining; TimesTen; ProfitLogic; Details of these benefits may vary
RAC, VLDB/DW (10TB+), Retek; 360Commerce; or other slightly from country to country.
Integration/BPEL, Oracle Fusion applicable technologies. Details relevant to your country
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We are also looking for individuals numbers, and e-mail address) to
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Applications; PeopleSoft, in EMEA at the following site:
JD Edwards, and Siebel Oracle Corporation offers a emeajobs.oracle.com
applications; Analytics; Oblix; full package of benefits to our

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.

ORACLE MAGAZINE NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 20 06 53

 d e v e l o p e r FRAMEWORKS
Jump-Start J2EE Development
Finish development faster with Oracle JHeadstart.
s you’ve seen in previous
columns, Oracle JDeveloper
10g and Oracle Application
Development Framework
(ADF) provide a complete development
environment with a host of declara-
tive features similar to 4GL tools you
may have used in the past. To help you
make the most of the powerful Oracle
JDeveloper/ADF combination, the Oracle
ADF Learning Center (at oracle.com/
technology/products/adf/learnadf.html)
provides numerous helpful resources,
such as ADF Developer’s Guide for Forms/
4GL Developers, a companion sample
application, and an end-to-end tutorial.
This column shows you another pow-
erful tool to help you harness the poten-
tial of Oracle JDeveloper: the Oracle
JHeadstart application generator. It
demonstrates the new Oracle JHeadstart
10.1.3 version to show you how quickly
you can create real-world applications in
Oracle JDeveloper.
WHAT IS ORACLE JHEADSTART?
Oracle JHeadstart is an Oracle JDeveloper
extension, developed by Oracle Con-
sulting, that generates Web-tier code for
application modules. It was developed as
a result of years of real-world experience
by Oracle consultants who have built
many hundreds of applications for their
customers. It was designed to make the
advanced features of both Oracle ADF
and JavaServer Faces (JSF) easier to use
in your own Web applications.
Oracle JHeadstart works by adding
a set of integrated editors to the Oracle
JDeveloper environment. By using these
editors, along with the data model you’ve
designed for your Oracle ADF business
service, you create and iteratively refine a
high-level application definition for your
project. This application definition lets
you control the functionality and organi-
zation of information in your Web user
interface, based on the view objects in
your application module’s data model.
The application definition editor
in Oracle JHeadstart lets you describe
a logical hierarchy of pages that can
include forms, tables, wizards, search
regions, lists of values (LOVs), shuttle
pickers, and other features standard
in modern Web user interfaces (UIs).
Furthermore, Oracle JHeadstart uses ter-
minology familiar to Oracle Forms and
Oracle Designer users, to make it easier
for you to make declarative choices for
your application definition.
The Oracle JHeadstart application gen-
erator doesn’t actually generate Java code.
Instead, it creates (or regenerates) all of
the declarative artifacts for the view and
controller layers within your Oracle ADF–
based Web application. These artifacts
use your ADF application module as their
business service and your ADF Model
layer for declarative data binding. The
generated files Oracle JHeadstart creates
are the same ones you would produce on
your own when using Oracle JDeveloper’s
built-in visual editors. The key difference
is that Oracle JHeadstart creates them en
masse, based on a higher-level applica-
tion definition you can iteratively refine
until the generated pages match your end
users’ requirements.
The generated files include
O JSF application pages with data-bound
ADF Faces UI components
O Oracle ADF Model page definition XML
files describing each page’s data bindings
O JSF managed bean settings and naviga-
tion rules to handle application page flow
O Resource files containing localizable
UI strings
Once you’re satisfied with your
Oracle JHeadstart–generated pages, you
can use the Oracle JDeveloper develop-
ment environment to fine-tune your UI
ORACLE MAGAZINE
BY STEVE MUENCH
or develop additional pages. If you modify
an Oracle JHeadstart–generated page,
you can adjust the generator templates
so the page adheres to your specifica-
tions on subsequent runs of the applica-
tion generator, or you can set a flag to
prevent the customized page from being
regenerated at all. Because the Oracle
JHeadstart–generated pages and your
custom-designed pages both leverage the
same Oracle ADF Faces UI components,
your pages will all automatically inherit
a consistent look and feel.
GENERATING YOUR FIRST WEB APPLICATION
The best way to appreciate what Oracle
JHeadstart can do is to take the fully
functional trial edition for a spin. In this
section, I’ll experiment with just a few
of Oracle JHeadstart’s many application
generation preferences, using the famil-
iar EMP and DEPT tables in the SCOTT
schema. You can find installation instruc-
tions for the Oracle JHeadstart 10.1.3 trial
edition at the Oracle JHeadstart Product
Center on OTN (oracle.com/technology/
consulting/9iServices/JHeadstart.html).
After installing it, check the Extensions
tab of the Oracle JDeveloper Help->
About dialog box to ensure that you see
the Oracle JHeadstart extension.
In Oracle JDeveloper, start by cre-
ating a new application, using the
Web Application [JSF, ADF BC] tem-
plate. Right-click the Model project,
select New, and start the Business
Components from Tables wizard from
the New Gallery dialog box. (Because
I’ve performed these tasks in previous
columns, I’ll go through the steps quickly,
but if you need a more basic walk-
through of Oracle JDeveloper, check out
any of the past Frameworks articles.) In
the wizard, specify oramag.model as the
package name and create default entity
objects and updatable view objects based
NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 20 06 55
FRAMEWORKS
on the EMP and DEPT tables. Name your
application module HRModule, and do not
create any read-only view objects.
Next, edit the HRModule compo-
nent to provide more-meaningful names
for your default view object instances.
To do so, right-click HRModule
from the Applications Navigator and
open the Application Module Editor.
Select the Data Model panel, and
rename the DeptView1, EmpView2,
and EmpView1 view instances to
Departments, DepartmentStaff, and
Employees, respectively.
Now that you have a simple appli-
cation module in place, you can use
Oracle JHeadstart to generate a Web
application for it. Start by right-
clicking the ViewController project
from the Application Navigator and
selecting Enable JHeadstart on this
Project. On the title page of the
JHeadstart Enable Project wizard, click
Next, and then click Finish. After the
wizard performs the required configu-
ration steps, click Finish again to exit
the wizard. Click the Save All toolbar
button to save all the changes.
Now you can add a new Oracle
JHeadstart application definition. Right-
click the ViewController project again,
and select New JHeadstart Application
Definition. On the first page of the New
JHeadstart Application Definition
wizard, choose HRModuleDataControl
as the data control to use for your
Web application. It should actually
be selected by default, because it’s the
only one in your workspace. Leave the
Create default Groups for all Data
Collections check box checked. This
setting creates a default application defini-
tion, based on the view objects in your
application module’s data model, which
you then can modify to fit your needs.
Click Next, and keep the defaults for
the service name and application defini-
tion XML filename on the next page that
appears. Click Next again, and check the
Generate LOV’s instead of dropdown
lists? check box. Leave the default layout
styles for parent and child groups, and
click Next. Click Finish on the next
screen, and the wizard will create a new
Oracle JHeadstart application definition.
56 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 20 06 ORACLE.COM/ORACLEMAGAZINE
Finally, click Finish again to close the
dialog box and click Save All to save all
the changes.
After you’ve saved all your project
files, right-click the ViewController
project again and select Edit JHeadstart
Application Definition, which launches
the JHeadstart Application Definition
Editor. You will use this editor later to
fine-tune your application generation
options. For now, simply note that this
editor is a modeless window that you
can keep open at the same time as your
main Oracle JDeveloper IDE window.
The editor displays the hierarchical
structure of the groups of information
that constitute the pages of your Web
application. Note that the structure ini-
tially mimics the hierarchical structure
of the view objects in the data model of
your HRModule.
Now run the Oracle JHeadstart appli-
cation generator. By running it now,
you can see the kind of Web application
you get when using the default appli-
cation definition settings. To run the
application generator, click the Run the
JHeadstart Generator toolbar button in
the Application Definition Editor or right-
click the ViewController project from
the Application Navigator and select Run
JHeadstart Application Generator.
When the Generation Finished alert
appears, click OK.
RUNNING THE DEFAULT APPLICATION
To run the application, right-click
the ViewController project from the
Application Navigator and select Run.
Oracle JDeveloper launches the embedded
Oracle Containers for J2EE (OC4J) server
and opens the generated application in
your Web browser, using a tabbed display.
If you toggle between your browser
window and the JHeadstart Application
Definition Editor, you’ll see that each top-
level group in the application definition
is rendered as a separate top-level tab
in your UI. On the Departments page,
click the DepartmentStaff button to drill
down to the related staff members in that
department. As you do so, note that a
navigation guide known as breadcrumbs
appears above the page title to show you
where in the Web site hierarchy you are.
Now click the Employees tab, and note
that the page defaults to a table display
style, featuring page-by-page scrolling
and the ability to easily perform multirow
inserts, updates, and deletes. If you
click the Save button, all your changes
will be saved.
The online version of this column, at
oracle.com/technology/oramag/oracle/06-
nov/o66frame.html, includes additional
content about the Oracle JHeadstart–
generated features in this default applica-
tion and information on how to custom-
ize and regenerate the application with
Oracle JHeadstart.
Like Oracle ADF itself, Oracle
JHeadstart comes with an excellent,
detailed developer’s guide that walks
you through every generation option
and advanced feature. You can visit the
Oracle JHeadstart product center on
OTN (oracle.com/technology/consulting/
9iServices/JHeadstart.html) for additional
online product demos, tutorials, and
white papers, as well as details on pricing,
support, and related consulting services. 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
Developer’s Guide for Forms/4GL Developers (Oracle,
2006) and wrote Building Oracle XML Applications
(O’Reilly 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 column content
oracle.com/technology/oramag/oracle/06-nov/
o66frame.html
READ more about
Oracle JDeveloper 10g and
Oracle ADF
oracle.com/technology/products/jdev
oracle.com/technology/products/jdev/tips/muench/
designpatterns
DOWNLOAD
Oracle JHeadstart
oracle.com/technology/consulting/9iServices/
JHeadstart.html
Oracle JDeveloper 10g
oracle.com/technology/products/jdev
VISIT the Oracle ADF Learning Center
oracle.com/technology/products/adf/learnadf.html
 d e v e l o p e r BROWSER-BASED BY M IKE HI CHWA

Taking Up Collections
Use collections to manage session state in Oracle Application Express.
racle Application Express is an
easy-to-use application develop-
ment tool. However, sometimes
even simple applications can
get a bit tricky.
That is exactly what happened when a
former colleague of mine asked for some
assistance in building an application to
help him manage his wholesale shoe
business. He had been using a spread-
sheet to manage orders, but he wanted to
move to the Web and use an Oracle data-
base. He had been dabbling with Oracle
Application Express but didn’t know how
he could duplicate his spreadsheet.
He wanted his salespeople to be able
to order one or more shoe styles for
retailers (his customers) by using a simple
grid specific to each product, just as they
were doing at the time with the spread-
Figure 1: Identify customer (Create Order wizard, step 2)
sheet. As a one-time Oracle employee, my
former colleague also wanted to store the grid populated automatically with color, handy whenever your application needs
data in properly normalized tables. price, and size information. to maintain an arbitrary number of
The solution described in this Data entered and preserved across attributes, such as a “shopping cart” of
column, Matrix Order, is available with page views can be transformed into a attributes you load into your application
the online version of this column, at table, MATRIX_ORDER_ITEMS, that tables at checkout.
oracle.com/technology/oramag/oracle/06- has one row per cell in the grid. The This application collects the order
nov/o66browser.zip. You can download a application uses collections to manage data via the wizard, enabling the sales-
single SQL file, install the application at a grid of data until the user gives final person to preview the order on a differ-
apex.oracle.com or in your local Oracle approval, at which point the data in the ent page and return to the prior page
Application Express 2.2 instance, and collection is transposed and stored in and make changes, if necessary. When
see how everything works. The single application tables. the Create Order wizard finishes, the
SQL file creates the application, tables, contents of the collection are used to
sequences, and sample data required to WHY COLLECTIONS? populate the MATRIX_ORDER_ITEMS
illustrate the solution. A collection is an Oracle Application table; the collection is then emptied until
The solution is a three-step wizard, Express utility that can manage a two- the next session begins.
Create Order, that lets salespeople iden- dimensional session state—basically a
tify the customer (step 1) and then select table of data. The APEX_COLLECTIONS CREATING A COLLECTION
a product style and enter quantities for API offers developers methods for popu- When you initiate the Create Order
each available color and size (step 2). lating, querying, and updating collections. wizard, a before-header PL/SQL page
In step 3, the complete order appears, In many ways, collections are similar process (shown in Listing 1) seeds the
allowing confirmation or cancellation. to tables. The big difference is that they collection with all product styles and
Step 2 of the wizard, shown in Figure are specific to an Oracle Application colors, along with a column for each
1, collects order details in an efficient, Express session, so collections are available size. The page process deletes
intuitive way: Salespeople can select a (conveniently) cleaned up when your the collection if it already exists and
product from the product list and have a session is purged. Collections come in creates the matrix necessary to manage

ORACLE MAGAZINE NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 20 06 57

BROWSER-BASED
the data entry screen.
Step 2 of the wizard creates a report
layout based on this SQL query:
select c001, c002, c003, nvl(c004,’0’)
c004, nvl(c005,’0’) c005, nvl(c006,’0’) c006,
nvl(c007,’0’) c007
from apex_collections
where collection_name = ‘MATRIX’ and
c001 = :p3_product
Note that APEX_COLLECTIONS is a
public view with columns C001 through
C050, although this example uses only
seven columns.
The contents of the collection—
MATRIX—are populated from the query.
C001 is the product style, C002 is the
color, C003 is the unit price, and C004
through C007 contain the values for the
quantity ordered: sizes S, M, L, and XL.
After creating the report and adjust-
ing the column headings, I modified the
last four columns (S, M, L, and XL) to
be updatable. I did this by clicking the
column in the Report Attributes tab
of the Edit Region page in the Oracle
Application Express Application Builder.
To make the last four columns updat-
able, I simply changed the Display As
attribute to Text Field and set Element
Width to 8.
SAVING REPORT COLUMNS INTO
A COLLECTION
The application must allow users to move
around on the pages of the wizard in
any way they want to, entering different
quantities for multiple products; preview-
ing the in-process order; and returning
to a prior page and making changes, if
necessary. That means that each time the
user leaves the Order Entry page, the
application must save changes to the col-
lection. To handle this, the application
uses an after-submit PL/SQL page process
(shown in Listing 2, available with the
online version of this column, at oracle
.com/technology/oramag/oracle/06-nov/
o66browser.html) that updates order
values in the collection.
The PL/SQL page process loops
through all the rows of the MATRIX
collection, updating each of the size
columns (S, M, L, XL). The value of the
58 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 20 06 ORACLE.COM/ORACLEMAGAZINE
codeLISTING 1: “Reset collection” before-header page process
if apex_collection.collection_exists(p_collection_name=>’MATRIX’) then
apex_collection.delete_collection(p_collection_name=>’MATRIX’);
end if;
apex_collection.create_collection_from_query(
p_collection_name=>’matrix’,
p_query=>’select
p.pro_style,
p.pro_color,
p.pro_unit_price,
max(decode(p.pro_colour,’S’,0,null)) s,
max(decode(p.pro_colour,’M’,0,null)) m,
max(decode(p.pro_colour,’L’,0,null)) l,
max(decode(p.pro_colour,’XL’,0,null)) xl
from matrix_products p
group by p.pro_style, p.pro_colour, p.pro_unit_price
order by 1,2,3’);
first updatable column in the first row
of the report can be accessed by use of
the WWV_FLOW.G_F01(1) array value;
the second updatable column of the first
row is WWV_FLOW.G_F02(1).
When a salesperson changes a
product in the list, the report queries the
details of the new product and creates a
new matrix with no values.
As the product changes, the exist-
ing values (for the previously displayed
product) need to be saved for the
previously saved product, not for the
newly selected product. A hidden item,
P3_PRODUCT_ON_LOAD, ensures
that this happens correctly: The value
of this hidden item is set to the value of
the selected product by use of an after-
header computation.
TRANSFORMING COLLECTION MEMBERS INTO
TABLE ROWS AND COLUMNS
So far I’ve shown how to populate,
query, and update a collection. Now,
the last step is to transform the collec-
tion into an INSERT statement for the
MATRIX_ORDER_ITEMS table.
Step 3 of the wizard, shown in Figure
2 and available with the online version
of this column, queries the collection to
display the current orders and provides
a Confirm Order button. Clicking the
button initiates the on-submit page
process (shown in Listing 3, available
with the online version of this column),
which saves the collection to the table
by looping through the collection and
inserting a row into the MATRIX_
ORDER_ITEMS table for each cell in
the collection.
At the end of the loop, the process
populates page items (including order
numbers and totals) that are used in the
“Order Processed” confirmation message
displayed to the user. After this PL/SQL
page process executes, the ordering
process is complete.
That’s the process. The Matrix Order
application demonstrates how to use col-
lections to manage session data entered
in a matrix format. The application
stores and maintains the data across any
number of product changes, and then it
loads the collection into the application
tables for permanent storage. O
Mike Hichwa (michael.hichwa@oracle.com) is vice
president of software development at Oracle and
manages Oracle Application Express, Oracle SQL
Developer, and other database development tools. He
was the original architect of Oracle Application Express.
READ online-only column content
oracle.com/technology/oramag/oracle/06-nov/
o66browser.html
DOWNLOAD
Oracle Application Express 2.2
oracle.com/technology/products/database/
application_express
sample application code
oracle.com/technology/oramag/oracle/06-nov/
o66browser.zip
VISIT the Oracle Application
Express Forum on OTN
forums.oracle.com/forums/forum
.jspa?forumID=137
LEARN more in the
Oracle Application Express
Developer’s Guide
download.oracle.com/docs/cd/B31036_01/doc/
appdev.22/b28839/toc.htm
 d e v e l o p e r PL/SQL PRACTICES
On Object Types in Collections
Best practices for retrieving objects and object attributes from objects
have declared an object type, varray, that
has three columns of datatype number,
varchar2, and another object, respectively.
How can I retrieve the third field (object
type) from the varray?
Let’s construct a varray (a type of
collection in which you specify the
maximum number of elements that may
be defined in the collection) that follows
your requirements, and I will show how
you can reference each and every part of
it. Because I like to eat, I will work with
a food paradigm for the example.
First I create an object type for
general food things; its three attributes
let me keep track of the name of the
food item, its food group, and the domi-
nant color of the food:
CREATE TYPE food_t AS OBJECT (
name VARCHAR2 ( 100 )
, food_group VARCHAR2 ( 100 )
, color VARCHAR2 ( 100 )
);
/ name as the type on which they are
Next, I create a meal object type com-
posed of the number of people served,
the type of meal, and the food served:
CREATE TYPE meal_t AS OBJECT (
number_served INTEGER
, meal_type VARCHAR2 ( 100 )
, food_served food_t
);
/ := meals_vat ( );
Now I create a varray of up to three ele-
ments to hold all the meals in a day:
CREATE TYPE meals_vat
IS VARRAY ( 3 ) OF meal_t;
/ l_one_day_of_meals.EXTEND;
Next I write the code in Listing 1 to
populate the varray with three meals for
BY STEVEN FEUERSTEI N
codeLISTING 1: Populating the varray
DECLARE
-- A locally defined varray initialized with no elements.
l_one_day_of_meals meals_vat := meals_vat ( );
BEGIN
-- Make room for the three meals.
l_one_day_of_meals.EXTEND ( 3 );
-- Add breakfast, using the constructor for both the meal
-- and within it the food object type instance.
l_one_day_of_meals ( 1 ) :=
meal_t ( 4, ‘BREAKFAST’
, food_t ( ‘Scrambled Eggs’, ‘Protein’, ‘Yellow’ ));
-- Add lunch
l_one_day_of_meals ( 2 ) :=
meal_t ( 6, ‘LUNCH’
, food_t ( ‘Deluxe Salad’, ‘Vegetables’, ‘Mostly Green’ ));
-- Add dinner
l_one_day_of_meals ( 3 ) :=
meal_t ( 10, ‘DINNER’
, food_t ( ‘Tofu and Rice’, ‘Protein’, ‘White’ ));
END;
/
the day: breakfast, lunch, and dinner. END;
Note that I use constructor func- /
tions (functions that have the same
That is how to add elements to the
defined, created by Oracle Database) to varray. Now let’s access the values within
create object type instances in line with an element in the varray using the code
the assignment. I could also declare shown in Listing 2.
local variables to hold the intermediate Note the interesting lines in Listing 2:
objects, as in the following: Lines 4–8. In this block, I initialize the
varray with a single element, calling
DECLARE both the meal_t and food_t constructor
-- A locally defined varray functions to load up the first row in the
-- initialized with no elements. varray with my breakfast data.
l_one_day_of_meals meals_vat Line 12. I obtain the number of people
served breakfast, by specifying the varray
-- A local object type and then the index in that collection:
-- instance for breakfast
l_breakfast food_t l_one_day_of_meals ( 1 )
:= food_t ( ‘Scrambled Eggs’,
‘Protein’, ‘Yellow’ ); Line 15. I show the name of the food
BEGIN served for breakfast using dot nota-
tion (specifying object.attribute, just as
l_one_day_of_meals ( 1 ) I would specify a table’s column with
:= meal_t ( 4, ‘BREAKFAST’, table.column) to get to the attribute of
l_breakfast ); the element in the varray:
ORACLE MAGAZINE NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 20 06 59
PL/SQL PRACTICES
l_one_day_of_meals ( 1 ).food_served
The food_served attribute is,
however, very different from number_
served. Rather than being a scalar value,
it is itself an object. So I can obtain the
value of an attribute of that object by
using dot notation once again, followed
by the name of that attribute:
l_one_day_of_meals ( 1 ).food_served
.name
That should give you a solid under-
standing of how to reference elements and
subelements in these complex structures.
RETRIEVING OBJECT ATTRIBUTES
FROM OBJECTS
I have declared a nested object type table that
has three columns of datatype number, varchar2,
and another object, respectively. I then define
a relational table with this nested table as a
column. How can I retrieve an attribute of this
object from a nested table in a row of the table?
The previous answer in this column
describes how to use dot notation to
drill down to a collection’s object’s
attribute. Let’s now take a look at how
you can get a hold of that data when
it is stored as a column in a table. In
this answer, I work with nested tables
instead of varrays. Everything I demon-
strate here applies to both types of col-
lections, except where noted.
I build a relational table on top of the
types defined in the previous question
and this new nested table type:
CREATE TYPE meals_nt IS
TABLE OF meal_t;
/ READ online-only column content
CREATE TABLE all_my_meals (
date_served DATE,
name VARCHAR2(100),
meals_served meals_nt
) NESTED TABLE meals_served
STORE AS i_meals_nt
/ employ dot notation along these lines:
I then insert two rows into this table
as shown in Listing 3, available with
the online version of this column at
oracle.com/technology/oramag/oracle/
60 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 20 06 ORACLE.COM/ORACLEMAGAZINE
codeLISTING 2: Accessing an element in a varray
SQL> DECLARE
2 -- A locally defined varray initialized with one element.
3 l_one_day_of_meals meals_vat
4 := meals_vat ( meal_t ( 4
5 , ‘BREAKFAST’
6 , food_t ( ‘Scrambled Eggs’, ‘Protein’, ‘Yellow’ )
7 )
8 );
9 BEGIN
10 -- If more than 2 people are served,
11 -- then show the name of the food.
12 IF l_one_day_of_meals ( 1 ).number_served > 2
13 THEN
14 DBMS_OUTPUT.put_line (
15 l_one_day_of_meals ( 1 ).food_served.name );
16 END IF;
17 END;
06-nov/o66plsql.html. Unfortunately, this would not work;
I can then query the data from the you would get the following error:
relational table as follows:
SELECT amm.meals_served.meal_type
SQL> select * from all_my_meals *
2 / ERROR at line 1:
ORA-00904: “AMM”.”MEALS_SERVED”
DATE_SERV .“MEAL_TYPE”: invalid identifier
---------------------------
MEALS_SERVED(NUMBER_SERVED, MEAL_ Life is a bit more complicated, but
TYPE, FOOD_SERVED(NAME, FOOD_GROUP, not too much. The online version of this
COLOR)) column shows how to apply the TABLE
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ operator and use dot notation to get the
22-JUL-06 meal_type values. O
MEALS_nt(MEAL_T(4, 'BREAKFAST', FOOD_
T('Scrambled Eggs', 'Protein', 'Yellow')), Steven Feuerstein (steven@stevenfeuerstein.com) is
MEAL_T(6, 'LUNCH', FOOD_T('Deluxe Salad', Quest Software’s PL/SQL evangelist. He has published
'Vegetables', 'Mostly Green')), MEAL_T(10, 10 books on Oracle’s programming language, including
'DINNER', FOOD_T('Tofu and Rice', 'Protein', Oracle PL/SQL Programming and Oracle PL/SQL Best
'White'))) Practices (O’Reilly Media). Feuerstein is building a unit
testing tool for PL/SQL programs (www.unit-test.com).
23-JUL-06
MEALS_nt(MEAL_T(4, 'BREAKFAST', FOOD_
T('Scrambled Eggs', 'Protein',
...
oracle.com/technology/oramag/oracle/06-nov/
But you don’t want to simply display o66plsql.html
all that data. You want to drill all the
READ more
way down to an attribute of the object Best Practice PL/SQL
within the nested table. Let’s suppose oracle.com/technology/pub/columns/plsql
that you want to see the type of meal Feuerstein
served for each row in the nested table. www.oracleplsqlprogramming.com
It might seem as though you could LEARN more about using PL/SQL
collections with SQL object types
Oracle Database PL/SQL User’s Guide and Reference
download.oracle.com/docs/cd/B19306_01/
SQL> SELECT amm.meals_served appdev.102/b14261/objects.htm#sthref2434
.meal_type DOWNLOAD Oracle Database 10g
oracle.com/technology/software/products/database/
2 FROM all_my_meals amm oracle10g
3 /
 t e c h n o l o g y RECOVERY
Restore to the Point
Use named points in time to roll your database back by using flashback technology.
ane, the lead DBA at Acme Bank,
has three visitors today. The
first, Paul, is the head of Quality
Assurance. Paul’s team creates a
variety of test scenarios for the applica-
tions. For each scenario, they put together
the test data, and after they
run each test, they need to
modify the data to bring
back the pretest values.
The second visitor
is Tom, the operations
manager. Tom is responsible
for processing batch financial
transaction files from each
branch of the bank. If the
file from a branch produces
an error, the entire process is
aborted and must be started
from the beginning.
The third visitor is Harry,
a business manager of an
application developed by a
third-party vendor. Harry
gets updates from the
vendor to modify the data-
base structure, modify data, and so on, as
part of the application upgrade process.
Most upgrades go smoothly; however,
when an upgrade fails, things get messy.
Harry’s team spends considerable time
devising ways to undo failed changes.
Paul, Tom, and Harry are asking Jane
to help make their processes more effi-
cient. Jane assures them that she has
a solution. Fortunately, Acme is using
Oracle Database 10g Release 2, and it is
possible to “rewind” the database to a
named point in time.
SETUP
Jane sits her visitors down and reminds
them all of how it’s possible to turn back
the hands of time and reinstate the data-
I-HUA CHEN
base to a certain point in time using a
simple command: flashback database. In
Oracle Database 10g Release 2, Jane says,
the functionality is now enhanced signifi-
cantly by the ability to name a specific
point in time, called a restore point. Using
this, Paul, Tom, or Harry (or a DBA acting
on their behalf) can mark and flash back
the database to a logical point in time.
Jane starts a demonstration on a test
database. She notes that the database
must be running in archivelog mode and
with flashback logging enabled. She first
shuts down the database and then brings
it up in mounted mode.
shutdown immediate;
startup mount;
Then she converts the database to run in
archivelog mode.
alter database archivelog;
To enable flashback, Jane first configures
two parameters in the database.
alter system set db_recovery_file_dest_
ORACLE MAGAZINE
BY A RU P N A N DA
size = 2G;
alter system set db_recovery_file_dest =
‘/u02/flashbackarea/acmeprd’;
In flashback mode, the database
creates flashback log files, which record
the old images of the data
after a change is made.
These files are kept in the
location specified by the db_
recovery_file_dest parameter,
up to the size specified by
the db_recovery_file_dest_
size parameter, which in this
case is set to 2GB.
Jane then enables flash-
back logging:
alter database flashback on;
She opens the database:
alter database open;
She checks the status
of the archive log mode
and flashback:
select flashback_on, log_mode
from v$database;
FLASHBACK_ON LOG_MODE
----------------------------------- ----------------------------
YES ARCHIVELOG
This confirms that the database is
indeed in flashback mode.
RESTORE POINTS
Jane proceeds to demonstrate how to
use restore points, starting with an
example of how Paul’s QA team can
benefit from this technique. Jane creates
a restore point named qa_gold.
create restore point qa_gold;
NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 20 06 61
RECOVERY
This command, Jane reminds them,
is new in Oracle Database 10g Release 2.
It creates a named restore point, which
is an alias to the system change number
(SCN) of the database at that time.
Jane runs one of the QA team’s tests,
altering the test data. To flash back the
database to the restore point she created,
Jane shuts down the database, restarts it
in mounted mode, and issues the
flashback database command.
shutdown immediate;
startup mount;
flashback database to restore point
qa_gold;
That’s it; the database is now
“rewound” to the restore point named
qa_gold. There was no need for Jane
to back up the database and perform a
point-in-time recovery. Paul couldn’t
be happier.
For Tom, Jane demonstrates a slightly
different approach. Since Tom runs
the batch process on one file at a time,
Jane suggests creating a restore point
after processing each file with some
predetermined naming convention, for
example, after_branch_n, where n is the
BRANCH_ID.
To keep track of the files being pro-
cessed, Tom has a table—PROC—with
only one column—BRANCH_ID, which
stores the id of the branch whose file
has been processed. Jane runs through
the following process as an example of a
typical batch run using restore points:
1. She creates a restore point named
start_batch to mark the start of the
process.
create restore point start_batch;
2. She updates the PROC table to
specify the branch being processed.
update proc set branch_id = 1;
commit;
3. She processes the file from branch 1.
4. After the branch 1 file is processed,
she creates a new restore point.
create restore point after_branch_1;
62 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 20 06 ORACLE.COM/ORACLEMAGAZINE
The process is repeated until the files
from all branches are processed.
Jane demonstrates the restore process
to use if a file from branch 23 has an
error. When the file from branch 23 is
picked up for processing, the BRANCH_
ID value in the PROC table will be 23.
SQL> select branch_id from proc;
BRANCH_ID
---------------------------
23
If the processing fails for the file from
branch 23, Jane rolls back the changes to
the after_branch_22 restore point.
shutdown immediate;
startup mount;
flashback database to restore point
after_branch_22;
alter database open;
To confirm that the flashback succeeded,
she checks the PROC table again.
SQL> select branch_id from proc;
BRANCH_ID
---------------------------
22
The value of the column is 22, for
the branch file one prior to the creation
of the restore point. All changes made
to the database after the creation of this
restore point are undone.
Sometimes, the file from a branch
fails but that is not known until much
later. For instance, the branch 23 file
processing may have failed, but that
is not discovered until the processing
of branch 29. Jane assures Tom that
whether he’s processing the branch 23
file, the branch 29 file, or any file in
between, he can easily roll back to the
after_branch_22 restore point.
In response to Harry’s application
update issue, Jane suggests a solu-
tion very similar to Paul’s. Just prior to
the database update, Harry or a DBA
would create a restore point named
pre_change. If the application update is
not successful, all that Harry or the DBA
needs to do is to flash back the database
to that restore point using the flashback
commands she demonstrated earlier.
GUARANTEED RESTORE POINT
Paul, Tom, and Harry leave Jane’s office
and go back to their respective depart-
ments to test their restore-point solutions.
A few hours later, Tom returns to
Jane’s office with an error message.
When he tried to flash back to a restore
point, he got this error:
ORA-38729: Not enough flashback
database log data to do FLASHBACK.
As the error shows, there are insuf-
ficient flashback logs to flash back the
database to the restore point. Jane’s
explanation is simple—the flashback
logs are kept up to the time specified by
the db_flashback_retention_target
database parameter.
The online version of this article, at
oracle.com/technology/oramag/oracle/
06-nov/o66recovery.html, includes infor-
mation on guaranteed restore points and
restore-point administration.
CONCLUSION
Using restore points, DBAs can mark a
location in time, which can then be used
to rewind and fast-forward the database
to a specific location. Although restore
points are very helpful in recovering the
database quickly from user errors, they
also have other excellent uses. O
Arup Nanda (arup@proligence.com) has been an
Oracle DBA for more than 12 years, handling all
aspects of database administration—from performance
tuning to security and disaster recovery. He is a
coauthor of PL/SQL for DBAs (O’Reilly Media, 2005).
READ online-only article content
oracle.com/technology/oramag/oracle/06-nov/
o66recovery.html
READ more about
restore points
download.oracle.com/docs/cd/B19306_01/
backup.102/b14192/rpfbdb002.htm
flashback database
oracle.com/technology/oramag/oracle/04-may/
o34tech_avail.html
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 Oracle Database 10g
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O N LY F R O M O S B O R N E
 t e c h n o l o g y EMBEDDED
When Microseconds Count
The Oracle TimesTen in-memory database is always ready.
racle Corporation has made
several strategic acquisitions
over the past couple of years,
and one of the more interest-
ing is an in-memory database called
TimesTen. Oracle TimesTen enables the
development of mission-
critical, real-time applica-
tions in which response
time must be measured in
microseconds, not milli-
seconds. It can be used
standalone or as a fast,
bidirectional cache for fre-
quently accessed data from
Oracle Database.
An emergency response
dispatch system, the sort
you might get connected to
by dialing 911 in the U.S.,
is a good example of an
application that can benefit
from Oracle TimesTen. (In
fact, Oracle TimesTen is
actually deployed in at least
one 911-related applica-
tion.) Response time in
such systems is more than critical—it’s a
matter of life and death.
When you dial 911 in most parts of
the U.S., the dispatcher immediately
sees your phone number and address
on the screen, and often the system pro-
vides a map showing your location and
perhaps even information on known
health problems at your location. For
example, a patient with a severe allergy
who has a prescribed epinephrine
autoinjector may choose to record that
information with emergency-response
dispatchers. Immediate access to loca-
tion and other critical information is
key to getting help dispatched quickly.
GETTY IMAGES
This article describes the imple-
mentation of a rudimentary database
system that might be used to display
critical information to emergency-
response dispatchers. It shows how
Oracle TimesTen can work with Oracle
Database to provide reliable, micro-
second response time, ensuring that
critical data is always available instantly.
ARCHITECTURE
Figure 1 shows a view of the architec-
ture behind Oracle TimesTen. In the
context of Oracle TimesTen, a database
is referred to as a data store. The on-disk
representation of a data store is called
a checkpoint file. When a data store is
first opened, the entire contents of the
data store are read into memory from
the checkpoint file. Subsequent INSERT,
DELETE, SELECT, UPDATE, and
other database operations take place
in memory. Data store changes from
those operations are periodically and
asynchronously written to the on-disk
checkpoint file. When the data store is
shut down, any remaining unwritten
changes are written to the checkpoint
file before the data store is closed.
ORACLE MAGAZINE
BY JON ATH AN GENNI CK
Oracle TimesTen also uses disk
storage as a recovery mechanism to
protect transactions. Transactions are
recorded in log files. If the system fails
and is restarted, the checkpoint file
will be read into memory, the trans-
action logs will be applied,
and the data store will be
open for business. The
periodic writing of data-
base changes to the check-
point file during regular
operation minimizes the
time needed for any such
recovery operation that
might occur.
Oracle TimesTen can
run as described as a
standalone database, but it
can also optionally run as
a performance accelerator
for data moving to or from
Oracle Database. Figure 1
shows the cache agent and
replication service that can
connect Oracle TimesTen
to Oracle Database. In this
article’s scenario, some data is stored in
Oracle TimesTen to illustrate the stand-
alone approach and other data is stored
in Oracle Database to illustrate perfor-
mance acceleration. You can combine
both approaches as needed.
CREATING AN ORACLE TIMESTEN DATABASE
Oracle TimesTen runs on several plat-
forms, including various Linux distri-
butions, Windows XP and Windows
Server 2003, Solaris, and HP-UX. The
Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database
Installation Guide provides install
instructions for all supported plat-
forms. The Windows installation is very
straightforward and is what was used to
run the example in this article.
Access to Oracle TimesTen is ulti-
NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 20 06 65
EMBEDDED

mately through ODBC. (Java applica-

tions use JDBC, and the TimesTen Checkpoint File
Decrypted
JDBC driver, in turn, uses ODBC).
Creating an Oracle TimesTen data Read on Final write on
startup Changes asynchronously shutdown
store is as simple as defining an ODBC written during operation
datasource and then connecting to it.
Cache Connect
Assume, for the purposes of this article, Oracle TimesTen
that you have an Oracle Database from Oracle Database Data Store
schema named DISPATCH with the Application
tables shown in Listing 1. Further
Replication Oracle
assume that you have installed Oracle
TimesTen
TimesTen and your emergency response to Oracle Database
Libraries
dispatch application, the one that Shared Memory Segment
brings up critical information when a
call comes in, on a Windows server. Time
Use the following steps to create an
Oracle TimesTen data store to support Log Log Log Log Log
the dispatch application and cache
critical data from Oracle Database: Figure 1: Oracle TimesTen Architecture
1. Go to the Control Panel, and open
the ODBC Data Source Administrator.
(Select Start -> Settings -> Control
Panel -> Administrative Tools ->
Data Sources (ODBC)).
2. Add a system datasource, using the
TimesTen Data Manager 6.0 driver.
3. From the Data Store tab (see Figure
2), enter a datasource name (DSN), a
data store path, and a log directory. The
data store path should end in a filename,
but do not provide an extension.
4. Go to the General Connection tab,
find the User ID field, and type the
name of an Oracle Database user with
access to the tables in Listing 1. You
can use the schema owner’s name here.
5. Go to the Cache Connect tab,
find the Oracle Password field, and
enter a password for the user name
used in Step 4. Then find the Oracle
ID field, and enter the net service
name (from tnsnames.ora) for Oracle Figure 2: Setting up the Oracle TimesTen datasource
TimesTen to use when connecting to
Oracle Database. issue a CONNECT command to open the You now have a running Oracle
6. Click OK to create the ODBC datasource, thereby creating the data TimesTen data store in memory. By
datasource. store. For example default, Oracle TimesTen automati-
Note: When running under Linux or cally creates a data store the first time
other UNIX-based systems, you define C:\A>ttisql it is used. To see a list of system tables
a datasource by editing a .odbc.ini file. in that data store, enter the TABLES
See the Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Copyright (c) 1996-2006, Oracle. command. Type HELP to get a list of
...

Database Operations Guide for details.
7. Connect to your newly created ODBC
datasource, using the Oracle TimesTen
interactive SQL utility ttIsql (analogous
all available ttIsql commands. Be sure
Command> CONNECT dsn=ttdispatch; to type a semicolon (;) after any ttIsql
command you execute.
Connection successful: In your data store path directory
...

to SQL*Plus for Oracle Database). Then (c:\a\timesten in Figure 2), you’ll see

66 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 20 06 ORACLE.COM/ORACLEMAGAZINE
the two copies of the checkpoint file
with the extensions .ds0 and .ds1. The
name of these files is the name you
provided in Step 3 above. In your log
directory (also c:\a\timesten in this
example), you’ll see the log files with
the extension .log.
By using the TimesTen Data
Manager 6.0 driver (in Step 2), you
enable your application to interact
directly with the data store. There are
no context switches and no queries
sent out over the network—just direct,
fast access to the data. Multiple appli-
cations using the data store all share
access to the data store through a
shared memory segment.
By default, Oracle TimesTen reads
all data into memory when the first
user connects to a data store and writes
data back to disk when the last user
disconnects. This is one of the ways
Oracle TimesTen approaches zero main-
tenance. You have additional options
here, though. For example, you can set
Oracle TimesTen to read a data store
into memory upon server startup, so
that the data is already there when the
first user connects.
CREATING TABLES
You create a table in Oracle TimesTen
just as you would in any other data-
base. For example, create the following
table to allow residents to record poten-
tially life-saving data for emergency
dispatchers to access:
CREATE TABLE emergency_info (
phone_num VARCHAR(8),
info VARCHAR(160),
PRIMARY KEY (phone_num));
Now you can record comments that
might prove helpful to dispatchers and
responders in an emergency:
INSERT INTO emergency_info
VALUES (‘555-1234’,
‘Child Jeff allergic to egg white.
Epinephrine autoinjector in orange box
near refrigerator.’);
INSERT INTO emergency_info
VALUES (‘555-2345’,
codeLISTING 1: DISPATCH schema in Oracle Database 10g
CREATE TABLE phones (
phone_num VARCHAR2(8),
street_addr VARCHAR2(20),
city VARCHAR2(15),
PRIMARY KEY (phone_num));
CREATE TABLE call_log (
call_num NUMBER(9),
event_time TIMESTAMP,
event VARCHAR2(80),
PRIMARY KEY (call_num, event_time));
GRANT SELECT, UPDATE, INSERT ON call_log TO ttdispatch;
INSERT INTO phones VALUES (‘555-1234’,’100 W. Munising Ave’, ‘Munising’);
INSERT INTO phones VALUES (‘555-2345’,’101 E. Varnum’, ‘Munising’);
INSERT INTO phones VALUES (‘555-3456’,’E2904 S. First’, ‘Trenary’);
INSERT INTO phones VALUES (‘555-4567’,’N3284 M-67’, ‘Limestone’);
INSERT INTO phones VALUES (‘555-5678’,’N7569 Spruce St.’, ‘AuTrain’);
INSERT INTO phones VALUES (‘555-6789’,’112 Colwell’, ‘Grand Marais’);
COMMIT;
codeLISTING 2: Creating a read-only cache group
Command> connect dsn=ttdispatch;
Connection successful:
...
Command> call ttCacheUidPwdSet(‘ttdispatch’,’ttdispatch’);
Command> call ttCacheStart();
Command>
Command> CREATE READONLY
> CACHE GROUP phone_data
> AUTOREFRESH
> INTERVAL 5 MINUTES
> FROM dispatch.phones (
> phone_num VARCHAR(8) NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY,
> street_addr VARCHAR(20),
> city VARCHAR(15)
> );
Warning 5112: Cache table DISPATCH.PHONES contains
VARCHAR column(s). Oracle VARCHAR comparison rule is different.
codeLISTING 3: Performing the initial load
Command> SELECT * FROM phones;
0 rows found.
Command> LOAD CACHE GROUP phone_data
> COMMIT EVERY 100 ROWS;
6 rows affected.
Command> select * from phones;
< 555-1234, 100 W. Munising Ave, Munising >
< 555-2345, 101 E. Varnum, Munising >
< 555-3456, E2904 S. First, Trenary >
< 555-4567, N3284 M-67, Limestone >
< 555-5678, N7569 Spruce St., AuTrain >
< 555-6789, 112 Colwell, Grand Marais >
6 rows found.
‘Bedridden resident needs help not exactly the same as datatypes in
exiting home in case of fire.’); Oracle Database. For example, in Oracle
TimesTen, you use VARCHAR rather than
Oracle TimesTen datatypes are VARCHAR2. See the Oracle TimesTen
ORACLE MAGAZINE NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 20 06 67
EMBEDDED
In-Memory Database API and the SQL
Reference Guide documentation for
detailed information on datatypes,
including how Oracle Database
datatypes can be mapped onto Oracle
TimesTen datatypes.
CACHING READ-ONLY DATA
Phone number and address data in an
emergency dispatch system is likely
to be read-only. You want dispatchers
to see the address for a given phone
number, but you don’t want those same
dispatchers distracted from their jobs
by having to edit that address informa-
tion. It’s reasonable, then, to make the
PHONES table read-only for dispatchers.
Before you create a read-only cache
of phone/address data, create a cache
administrator user in Oracle Database.
This user owns the triggers and tables
that Oracle TimesTen creates in Oracle
Database to track changes to data so
that those changes can be used to effi-
ciently refresh the cached data in Oracle
TimesTen. For example, execute the
following statement while logged in as
the system user to create a cache admin-
istrator named ttdispatch:
CREATE USER ttdispatch
identified by ttdispatch
default tablespace users
quota unlimited on users;
Then make the following grant to
allow the cache administrator to create
triggers on tables owned by other users
(such as the DISPATCH schema owner):
grant create any trigger to ttdispatch;
Next, log in as the dispatch schema
owner and grant SELECT access on the
PHONES table to the cache administrator:
GRANT SELECT ON phones TO ttdispatch;
Now, switch over to Oracle TimesTen
and create a cache group. To do this,
1. Connect to your data store from
ttIsql.
2. Make a call to the built-in
ttCacheUidPwdSet() procedure and
specify the username/password for
68 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 20 06
Oracle TimesTen to use when con-
necting to Oracle Database as a cache
administrator.
3. Call ttCacheStart() to start the
TimesTen cache agent, which is respon-
sible for doing the actual work of
retrieving data from Oracle Database and
caching that data in Oracle TimesTen.
4. Execute a CREATE CACHE GROUP
statement to define a group of related
tables—in this case, only one table—to
be cached in Oracle TimesTen.
Listing 2 shows all four of these steps.
Note that the warning message at
the end of Listing 2 is a reminder that
Oracle TimesTen considers the empty
string (‘’) to be non-null whereas Oracle
Database treats the empty string as a
null. You’ll need to be careful about
this difference in behavior when writing
queries involving VARCHAR columns.
You now have a cache group named
phone_data. Within that group is a
single, empty table named PHONES.
The cache group is set to automatically
refresh, polling Oracle Database for
data changes at five-minute intervals.
However, that automatic refresh is ini-
tially created in a paused state. Issue
the LOAD CACHE GROUP statement
shown in Listing 3 to initialize the cache
with current data from Oracle Database
and to take the cache group out of
pause. From this point forward, Oracle
TimesTen will query Oracle Database
every five minutes (you can specify
larger or smaller intervals) for changes
to the PHONES table. The triggers and
support tables owned by the cache
administrator (ttdispatch in this case)
make such polling very efficient.
The online version of this article,
at oracle.com/technology/oramag/
oracle/06-nov/o66timesten.html,
includes information about creating a
write-through cache, replication errors,
and aging out old records.
BENEFITS OF TIMESTEN
Oracle TimesTen is flexible in ways well
beyond what you’ve seen here. In addi-
tion, with Oracle TimesTen
O You can create caches in which data is
automatically brought in as needed and
then aged out after a period of time.
ORACLE.COM/ORACLEMAGAZINE
O You can specify asynchronous logging,
or even no logging at all, to trade dura-
bility for performance.
O You can use Oracle TimesTen-to-
TimesTen replication to create standby
databases for high availability or to
mirror databases for load balancing.
O You can automatically pass queries
through to Oracle Database when they
access tables found in Oracle Database
but not in Oracle TimesTen.
Combined with sound database and
application design, the in-memory per-
formance of Oracle TimesTen enables
time- and mission-critical database-
backed applications. When minimizing
microseconds can save money or lives,
Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database
can deliver.
Thanks to Sam Drake and Simon Law
at Oracle for their patience in answering
many questions for this article; to the
Alger County, Michigan, Sheriff’s
Department for providing a detailed tour
of its dispatch center; and to Alger County
Emergency Medical Services for inspiring
the example scenario used in this article. O
Jonathan Gennick (www.gennick.com) is an
experienced Oracle professional and member of
the Oak Table Network. He wrote the best-selling
SQL Pocket Guide and the Oracle SQL*Plus Pocket
Reference, both from O’Reilly Media.
READ online-only article content
oracle.com/technology/oramag/oracle/06-nov/
o66timesten.html
READ more about Oracle TimesTen
oracle.com/technology/products/timesten/pdf/
wp/timesten_tech_wp_dec_2005.pdf
Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database
Architectural Overview
download.oracle.com/otn_hosted_doc/
timesten/603/TimesTen-Documentation/
arch.pdf
Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database
Installation Guide
download.oracle.com/otn_hosted_doc/
timesten/603/TimesTen-Documentation/
install.pdf
DOWNLOAD
Oracle TimesTen
oracle.com/technology/software/products/
timesten
sample code for this article
oracle.com/technology/oramag/oracle/06-nov/
o66timesten.zip
 t e c h n o l o g y DATA WAREHOUSING
Managing Data Quality
Oracle Warehouse Builder 10g Release 2 handles the truth.
ow much confidence do you
have in the quality of your data?
How about the data your busi-
ness partners are feeding into
your data warehouse? As reported in a
November 2005 Computerworld article,
“Dirty Data Blights the
Bottom Line,” Gartner esti-
mates that more than 25
percent of critical data in
Fortune 1000 companies
will remain flawed through
2007 (computerworld.com/
printhis/2005/0,4814,
105928,00.html).
It may be impossible
to tell the good data from
the bad, because both are
reported identically through
the same interface. And if
you can’t tell which data is
good and which is bad, all
of the data is suspect.
So, how can data
quality be improved in
the organization?
1. Involve users. Data quality is ultimately
a business problem, so people in the
business must be involved. People fre-
quently enter the data being used, so
they are the first line of defense. People
are also the final consumers in most
cases and provide the last line of defense.
2. Monitor processes. Bad data actually
might have been accurate at one time
but has since decayed. For example,
prospect lists get outdated. The more
outdated the information, the more
time and money is wasted trying to
sell goods or services to the wrong
people. Business processes can ensure
timely and accurate updates to data.
Streamlining processes where pos-
sible can reduce the number of hands
DAN HUBIG
touching data, thereby reducing the
chances of manual data corruption.
3. Use Oracle Warehouse Builder. In addi-
tion to offering database design and
extract, transform, and load (ETL) fea-
tures, it includes the ability to profile,
cleanse, and audit data, based on data
rules. This technology provides an
umbrella over the data warehouse, using
predefined rules to catch critical mis-
takes before they make their way into
the decision-making process.
This article demonstrates how Oracle
Warehouse Builder 10g Release 2 can
profile datasources, determine data rules,
and generate corrections. To run the
examples in this article, install and config-
ure Oracle Warehouse Builder 10g Release
2 and create a repository by using the
Repository Assistant. See Oracle Warehouse
Builder Installation and Configuration Guide
for Microsoft Windows and UNIX, at oracle
.com/technology/documentation/
warehouse.html, for setup instructions.
INTRODUCING ORACLE WAREHOUSE BUILDER
Oracle Warehouse Builder is a design
tool for modeling and maintaining a
ORACLE MAGAZINE
BY RON HARDMAN
data warehouse. Its datasources are
not limited to Oracle databases. Oracle
Warehouse Builder also supports other
databases, including DB2, SQL Server,
Sybase, Informix, and Teradata. It also
works with file and enterprise application
datasources, so it supports
the complete collection of
data for the organization.
Oracle Warehouse
Builder provides profiling
and auditing capabilities
through its user interface,
allowing for complete
data quality management
when combined with the
previously mentioned user
participation and process
improvements. Historically,
profiling and cleansing
data required good knowl-
edge of SQL and PL/SQL,
but the Oracle Warehouse
Builder integrated pro-
filer and Data Correction
wizard make this task
relatively easy. Auditing capabilities apply
consistent data rules to the incoming data
stream, making the cleansing of new data
a very simple process.
Oracle Warehouse Builder core
components are now bundled with
Oracle Database 10g Release 2 at no
additional charge.
ORACLE WAREHOUSE BUILDER SETUP
To see profiling and data cleansing
for yourself, run the LOAD_DATA.sql
script, available with the online version
of this article at oracle.com/technology/
oramag/oracle/06-nov/o66owb.zip,
in the same database as your Oracle
Warehouse Builder repository owner.
The script creates users named
STUDENTS and STUDENT_TARGET
and creates a table called STUDENT_
NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 20 06 69
DATA WAREHOUSING

TESTS, with the following definition: codeLISTING 1: SDX_CONTENT_AREA function

type t_arr is table of varchar2(2000) index by binary_integer;
Name Null? Type s t_arr;
------------------------------------- ---------------------- ---------------------------------- begin
TEST_ID NOT NULL NUMBER(10) s(0):= ‘MATH’; s(1):= ‘READING’; s(2):= ‘SCIENCE’; s(3):= ‘WRITING’;

TEST_NAME NOT NULL VARCHAR2(30) -- check for equality first. Function may be called when there is no error.
CONTENT_AREA NOT NULL VARCHAR2(10) for i in s.first..s.last loop
GRADE NOT NULL VARCHAR2(2) if (s(i) = CONTENT_AREA) then
return CONTENT_AREA;
STATE NOT NULL VARCHAR2(2) end if;
SCHOOL_ID NOT NULL VARCHAR2(15) end loop;
FIRST_NAME NOT NULL VARCHAR2(30)
for i in s.first..s.last loop
MIDDLE_NAME VARCHAR2(30) if (soundex(s(i)) = soundex(CONTENT_AREA)) then
LAST_NAME NOT NULL VARCHAR2(30) return s(i);
ETHNICITY VARCHAR2(1) end if;
end loop;
NEW_TO_SCHOOL VARCHAR2(1) return CONTENT_AREA;
AGE_TESTED NOT NULL VARCHAR2(3) end;
GENDER NOT NULL VARCHAR2(1)
TOTAL_SCORE NOT NULL NUMBER(3)
PERFORMANCE NOT NULL NUMBER(1)

The LOAD_DATA.sql script then

populates this table with sample test
results for use in the steps in this article.
Next, create a repository user as
follows:
1. To start the repository assistant,
select Start -> All Programs ->
OWB Home -> Warehouse Builder
-> Administration -> Repository
Assistant.
2. Select Advanced Setup and click
Next.
3. Click Next.
4. Select Manage Warehouse Builder
repository users and click Next.
5. Select Create the registration of one
Figure 1: Domain tab in the Profile Results Canvas
or more Warehouse Builder repository
users and click Next. Nodes are listed under each project and name, click Data Source, and click Next.
6. Select your repository owner, supply include items such as databases, data 7. Select Edit next to the default.
the password, and click Next. profiles, and data rules. O Provide all connection information,

7. Select the STUDENTS and When you open the Design Center including the STUDENTS / STUDENTS user
STUDENT_TARGET users and click and are logged in as the repository owner, name and password.
Next. you will see a seed project called MY_ O Make sure you select the correct data-

8. Supply the passwords for PROJECT. You can either use this project base version.
STUDENTS (which is STUDENTS by or create your own. Perform the follow- O Click Test Connect to verify your

default) and STUDENT_TARGET ing steps to create your own project:
(which is STUDENT_TARGET); click Next; 1. Right-click in the Project Explorer
and click Finish. and click New.
With user, data, and repository user 2. Enter STUDENT_PROJECT as the new
configuration complete, you can import project name.
the data. 3. Expand the STUDENT_PROJECT
project.
PROJECT DEFINITION 4. Expand the Databases node.
The Oracle Warehouse Builder Design 5. Right-click Oracle and click New.
Center organizes metadata by project. 6. Enter STUDENT_SOURCE as the module
connection information.
8. Click Finish.
At this point, the datasource con-
nection is established but you must still
select the objects in the datasource. The
Import Metadata wizard opens automati-
cally and prompts you for filter informa-
tion. Complete the wizard as follows:
1. Uncheck everything except Table and
click Next.

70 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 20 06 ORACLE.COM/ORACLEMAGAZINE
2. Expand Tables and select
STUDENT_TESTS for import.
3. Click Finish.
The datasource is now defined. Next,
create the target:
1. Right-click Oracle in the Databases
node and click New. Figure 2: Data Rule Panel
2. Provide STUDENT_TARGET as the
module name, click Warehouse Target,
and click Next.
3. Select Edit next to the default.
O Provide all connection information,

including the STUDENT_TARGET / STUDENT_

TARGET user name and password.
O Make sure you select the correct data-

base version.
O Click Test Connect to verify your

connection information.
4. Click Finish.
The data is ready for profiling.

PROFILING DATASOURCES
Profiling identifies data attributes such as
data structure, common formats, common
values, and minimum/maximum values.
From these findings, Oracle Warehouse
Builder determines domain values, or
values it believes should be allowed in
that column. Not all findings are absolute,
however. If your data includes the abbre-
viations for only half of the states in the
United States, for example, only those 25
states will be shown as existing values.
You must enter the other valid values
before using the values to establish a rule.
To see this in action, do the following:
1. Under the STUDENT_PROJECT
project in the Design Center, right-click
Data Profiles, and select New.
2. Enter STUDENT_PROFILE for the name
and click Next.
3. Select the STUDENT_TESTS table
and click Finish.
The Data Profile Editor opens, but
the data has not been profiled yet. The
Profile Objects window (top left) shows
the STUDENT_TESTS table being
analyzed. Below that is the Property
Inspector window. Modifying the prop-
erties in this window modifies the way
the profiler analyzes the data.
To start profiling, navigate to Profile
on the navigation menu at the top of
the Data Profile Editor and click the
Profile option. If you have never created
Figure 3: Cleansing with the Data Correction wizard
Figure 4: Corrected Modules tab
a profile before, you will be prompted
to create a schema to hold profile data.
Follow the wizard’s instructions, and
continue to create the profile. When
you’re finished, Oracle Warehouse
Builder submits a job that does the work,
so even though it returns to the main
window, it is working behind
the scenes. You can monitor the
status of the job in the Monitor
Panel at the bottom left of the
Data Profile Editor.
When the job completes,
you are asked whether you
want to retrieve the results
now. Click Yes, and the profile
results appear in the Profile
Results Canvas. Click the
Domain tab, and you will see
the results shown in Figure 1.
If there is more than one
of any value in the source data, it will
appear in the Found Domain column.
Also note the percentage displayed in
the % Compliant column. This reflects
the percentage of the source data that
complies with the identified domains.
CONTENT_AREA, for example, shows
READING and MATH. Click the value

ORACLE MAGAZINE NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 20 06 71

DATA WAREHOUSING
Figure 5: Viewing tables in the Mappings Editor
in the Found Domain column, and
examine the Data Drill Panel in the
region beneath it to see how these values
were derived, as shown in Figure 1.
SCIENCE and WRITING are in the
table, but they occur only once, so they
are not included in the Found Domain
column by default. You’ll also notice a
value of WRITEING (misspelled) in the
list. Click this value, and the source row
is shown to the right.
DEFINING DATA RULES
Now that the profiling is finished, it is
time to create some data rules. With the
value in the Found Domain column and
the CONTENT_AREA row still selected,
click the Derive Data Rule button to
launch the wizard. Follow these steps:
1. Enter CONTENT_AREA_CHECK as the
name for the data rule.
2. On the Define Rule page, choose
SCIENCE as a selected value.
3. Type WRITING as a fourth value and
click Finish.
The rule is displayed with a check
box beside it in the Data Rule Panel,
as shown in Figure 2. If additional rules
are defined in the profile, they are listed
here as well.
DATA CORRECTION WIZARD
The data rule can be used to create an
automated correction strategy. To create
a correction, use the Data Correction
wizard as follows:
1. Select Profile -> Create Correction
72 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 20 06
from the menu at the top of the Data
Profile Editor.
2. Choose Select an existing module,
choose STUDENT_TARGET, and click
Next.
3. Verify that the STUDENT_TESTS
table is selected and click Next.
4. Verify that CONTENT_AREA_
CHECK is selected as a data rule and
click Next.
5. Click Next.
6. Choose Cleanse as the action and
Soundex Match as the cleanse strategy,
as shown in Figure 3, and click Next.
7. Complete the wizard by accepting the
defaults on all remaining screens and
click Finish.
The wizard generates the map-
pings and functions that are required to
perform the correction. To see the map-
pings, tables, and functions created by the
wizard, click the Corrected Modules tab,
as shown in Figure 4. These mappings
show how Oracle Warehouse Builder
processes the data through temporary and
staging tables to complete the correction.
Double-click the M_STUDENT_
TESTS mapping to open the Mappings
Editor. The tables may appear one
behind the other in the window. To see
how the mappings are laid out, separate
the tables and organize them as shown
in Figure 5.
To see the function created by the
Data Correction wizard, return to the
Data Profile Editor and click the SDX_
CONTENT_AREA function. Click the
ORACLE.COM/ORACLEMAGAZINE
Implementation tab, and the function
in Listing 1 is displayed.
To deploy the correction, return
to the Design Center and navigate to
Tools -> Control Center Manager. In
the Object Details window, click the
Default Actions button and then the
Deploy icon in the top menu bar. This
submits a job to deploy the objects.
Run the mapping to correct the data
in the target table, by selecting the
M_STUDENT_TESTS mapping in the
Control Center Manager and clicking the
Run button. Confirm that WRITEING
is now shown as WRITING in the cor-
rected STUDENT_TESTS table.
CONCLUSION
Oracle Warehouse Builder’s Data Profile
Editor simplifies rule definition. Simply
specify the source and target, and all of
your data is analyzed. Domain values are
derived from existing data, providing a
great starting point for rule definition.
After you create rules, Oracle Warehouse
Builder’s Data Correction wizard makes
generating corrections easy. Specify the
rules that should be applied as well as
the action to take when a rule is violated,
and all mappings, tables, and functions
are generated automatically. O
Ron Hardman works with Academy District 20 schools
in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and is the founder of
5-Mile Software. 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
Warehouse Builder
oracle.com/technology/products/warehouse
Oracle Warehouse Builder Installation and
Configuration Guide for Microsoft Windows
and UNIX
oracle.com/technology/documentation/
warehouse.html
DOWNLOAD
Oracle Warehouse Builder 10g
Release 2
oracle.com/technology/software/products/
warehouse
sample data for this article
oracle.com/technology/oramag/oracle/06-nov/
o66owb.zip
 t e c h n o l o g y ASK TOM BY TO M KYTE

On Rescue Analytics and Popularity

Our technologist explains the saving power of analytics and shares popularity.
OW_NUM is the primary key of this series analysis against sparse data. substr(
table, and I need to update COLA and In this case, the Oracle Database 10g max(
COLB to fill up the nulls with the previ- Release 2 query would look like this: case
ous non-null values. After the update, when cola is not null
SELECT * should give the following results: SQL> select then
2 row_num, to_char(row_num,’fm0000000000’)
SQL> select * from t1; 3 last_value(cola ignore nulls) ||cola
4 over (order by row_num) cola, end
ROW_NUM COLA COLB 5 last_value(colb ignore nulls) ) over (order by row_num),
---------------------- ----------------------- ------------------------ 6 over (order by row_num) colb 11 ) cola,
1 Category 1 Mango 7 from t1 substr(
2 Category 1 Mango 8 order by row_num max(
3 Category 1 Mango 9 / case
4 Category 1 Banana when colb is not null
5 Category 1 Banana ROW_NUM COLA COLB then
6 Category 1 Banana ---------------------- ----------------------- ------------------------ to_char(row_num,’fm0000000000’)
7 Category 2 Vanilla 1 Category 1 Mango ||colb
8 Category 2 Vanilla 2 Category 1 Mango end
9 Category 2 Strawberry 3 Category 1 Mango ) over (order by row_num),
9 rows selected. 4 Category 1 Banana 11 ) colb
5 Category 1 Banana from t1
Suppose I have the following table: 6 Category 1 Banana order by row_num
7 Category 2 Vanilla /
SQL> select * from t1; 8 Category 2 Vanilla
9 Category 2 Strawberry If you are interested in understanding
ROW_NUM COLA COLB 9 rows selected. how that works, you can review oracle
---------------------- ----------------------- ------------------------ .com/technology/oramag/oracle/04-mar/
1 Category 1 Mango That release added the IGNORE o24asktom.html, “On Format, Negation,
2 NULLS clause for certain analytic func- and Sliding,” an earlier Ask Tom column
3 tions, such as LAST_VALUE (which in which I used a similar carry-down
4 Banana retrieves the last value of a given technique to group data.
5 column in an analytic window). With Once I have that query, updating the
6 IGNORE NULLS, you are able to original source data becomes as easy as
7 Category 2 Vanilla retrieve the last non-null value of any this merge:
8 given column in an analytic window,
9 Strawberry effectively allowing you to carry the SQL> merge into t1
9 rows selected. value down and populate that column. 2 using (
Now, in earlier releases you did not 3 select
Is this possible with one SQL statement, or do I have this capability and had to be a 4 row_num,
need to write a stored procedure? bit more creative in your approach; 5 last_value(cola ignore nulls)
Using analytic functions, you can an equivalent query (assuming ROW_ 6 over (order by row_num) cola,
materialize this data easily. I’ll show NUM is a 10-digit positive number) in 7 last_value(colb ignore nulls)
both approaches to carrying down the an earlier release would have been 8 over (order by row_num) colb
last non-null value. This is a problem 9 from t1
people have to solve many times in a select 10 ) t2
data warehouse when performing time row_num, 11 on (t1.row_num = t2.row_num)

ORACLE MAGAZINE NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 20 06 73

ASK TOM
12 when matched
13 then update
14 set cola = t2.cola,
15 colb = t2.colb;
9 rows merged.
That again uses an Oracle Database
10g feature: a merge with just the
UPDATE component. In earlier releases,
I would have had to supply not only
a WHEN MATCHED clause but also
a WHEN NOT MATCHED clause. In
this case, because the USING set of
data is based entirely on the data I am
merging into, I know that the WHEN
NOT MATCHED clause will never
happen (because there cannot be any
ROW_NUM in T2 that is not in T1).
So I can just use a dummy WHEN
MATCHED that tries to insert a NULL
into ROW_NUM:
merge into t1
using
( Here is a sample implementation:
second query from above
) t2
on (t1.row_num = t2.row_num)
when matched
then update
set cola = t2.cola,
colb = t2.colb
when not matched
then insert (row_num)
values (NULL);
And that does it.
THE MOST POPULAR ANSWER EVER
It was first posted more than five years ago,
and it is the most-read question and answer
on Ask Tom (asktom.oracle.com)—with
almost a quarter of a million views as of
this writing. Here it is:
I want to declare multiple cursors based on
the values passed through a procedure, and
only the WHERE conditions of the cursors will
change. The body of the procedure is the same
for all the cursors otherwise.
This sounds like a good use of ref
cursors to me. Suppose you wanted
to build a generic routine that would
look at the inputs passed to it and
build a WHERE clause for each NON-
NULL parameter passed. This would
74 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 20 06 ORACLE.COM/ORACLEMAGAZINE
result in a large number of statically
defined cursors, so you would use a
ref cursor instead, allowing you to do
this dynamically.
I’ll demonstrate below. I’ll write a
routine that will print out some EMP
data. This routine will take up to three
inputs to constrain the result set. I want
to have up to eight different cursors pos-
sible here:
O
One with no WHERE clause (all
inputs null)
O
Three with a single predicate
O
Three with “pairs” of predicate
conditions
O
One with all three predicate conditions
Additionally, because the use of bind
variables is one of the most important
things in Oracle programming, I’ll want
to make sure I use them as well. This
will be tricky, because I don’t know if
I’ll have zero, one, two, or three of them
until runtime. I’ll use an application
context to solve that problem.
SQL> create or replace
2 context MY_CTX
3 using MY_PROCEDURE
4 /
Context created.
That created my application context
and bound it to my yet-to-be-created
procedure MY_PROCEDURE. Note that
only MY_PROCEDURE will be able to set
values in this context. See asktom.oracle
.com/~tkyte/article2 for more information
on application contexts and their use.
Now for convenience I’ll wrap DBMS_
OUTPUT.PUT_LINE in a small routine.
This is to handle strings larger than
255 characters (not necessary in Oracle
Database 10g Release 2, in which the line
size limit is increased to 32K).
SQL> create or replace
procedure p ( p_str in varchar2 )
2 is
3 l_str long := p_str||chr(10);
4 l_piece long;
5 n number;
6 begin
7 loop
8 exit when l_str is null;
9 n := instr( l_str, chr(10) );
10 l_piece :=
substr( l_str, 1, n-1 );
11 l_str :=
substr( l_str, n+1 );
12 loop
13 exit when l_piece is null;
14 dbms_output.put_line
( substr( l_piece, 1, 250));
15 l_piece :=
substr( l_piece, 251 );
16 end loop;
17 end loop;
18 end;
19 /
Procedure created.
I use this P routine later to dump the
dynamically generated query so I can
see what was built for each execution. It
is not really relevant to the example, just
part of the demonstration.
Now for the “meat” of the answer.
Here’s the routine that dynamically con-
structs a predicate for us:
create or replace
procedure my_procedure
( p_ename in varchar2 default NULL,
p_hiredate in date default NULL,
p_sal in number default NULL)
as
type rc is REF CURSOR;
l_cursor rc;
l_query varchar2(512)
default ‘select *
from emp
where 1 = 1 ‘;
cursor l_template is select * from emp;
l_rec l_template%rowtype;
Here I use what I call “template”
cursors. I like to use these with dynami-
cally opened ref cursors. I use them to
define a record to fetch into. Here, in this
simple example, I could have skipped it
and just defined l_rec as EMP%rowtype,
but I wanted to show how this would
work if I didn’t issue SELECT * on a
single table but on many columns from
many tables. This just helps me create a
nice record type for PL/SQL. The tem-
plate query has only a SELECT and a
FROM. I never put a WHERE clause on
it (even when joining), because I never
actually open it. I just use it to get the
default datatypes, names, and so on for
a record definition right below it. Also,
note the where 1 = 1 trick. That is so
I can just append zero, one, or more
predicates to this query without having
to figure out if I need to append the
WHERE condition or the AND condi-
tion. And because I started the WHERE
clause, I just add AND conditions. Note
that if you are joining multiple tables,
you’ll already have a predicate (using the
old-style join conditions) and won’t need
the where 1 = 1 trick.
begin
if ( p_ename is NOT NULL )
then
dbms_session.set_context
( ‘MY_CTX’, ‘ENAME’,
‘%’||upper(p_ename)||’%’);
l_query := l_query ||
‘ and ename like
sys_context( ‘’MY_CTX’’,
‘’ENAME’’ ) ‘;
end if;
The technique I’m using here is that
for each input, I inspect it to see if it is
non-null. If it is, I add it to the WHERE
clause and set the value in the context.
Note how in the WHERE clause, I
always use the SYS_CONTEXT func-
tion. I never put the literal value into the
query—that would be very bad for
O
Performance
O
Scalability
O
Shared pool utilization
O
Perhaps most important: security
(SQL injection).
To read about SQL injection, you can
refer to oracle.com/technology/oramag/
oracle/05-jan/o15asktom.html, an earlier
Ask Tom column on that subject.
Also, note how I had to double the
quote marks to get a single quote mark
in the character string literal. In Oracle
Database 10g Release 1 and later, I could
use the new quoting method for string
literals introduced in that release:
l_query := l_query ||
q’| and ename like
It was first posted more than five years ago, and
it is the most-read question and answer on Ask
Tom (asktom.oracle.com)—with almost a quarter
of a million views.
sys_context( ‘MY_CTX’,
‘ENAME’ ) |’;
To provide a response that works in
all current releases of Oracle Database,
I’ll use Oracle9i Database and the earlier
approach of using double quote marks
in the remaining text. Now, continuing
on, I process the HIREDATE column:
if ( p_hiredate is NOT NULL )
then
dbms_session.set_context
( ‘MY_CTX’, ‘HIREDATE’,
to_char(p_hiredate,
‘yyyymmddhh24miss’));
l_query := l_query ||
‘ and hiredate >
to_date(
sys_context( ‘’MY_CTX’’,
‘’HIREDATE’’ ),
‘’yyyymmddhh24miss’’) ‘;
end if;
Note here how I am careful to pre-
serve the date and time component (you
are the only one who knows if this is
necessary for your application). Also,
always wrap the SYS_CONTEXT call in
a TO_DATE call when you are compar-
ing with a DATE, to avoid implicit con-
versions in the query at runtime. Last, I
process the third column, SAL:
if ( p_sal is NOT NULL )
then
dbms_session.set_context
( ‘MY_CTX’, ‘SAL’, p_sal);
l_query := l_query ||
‘ and sal >
to_number(
sys_context( ‘’MY_CTX’’,
‘’SAL’’ )
) ‘;
end if;
Note the explicit conversion for the
NUMBER here. Use TO_NUMBER to
ORACLE MAGAZINE
avoid implicit conversions. Now I am
ready to debug the query, using my P
routine, and open the ref cursor:
p( l_query );
open l_cursor for l_query;
loop
fetch l_cursor into l_rec;
exit when l_cursor%notfound;
dbms_output.put_line
( l_rec.ename || ‘,’ ||
l_rec.hiredate || ‘,’ ||
l_rec.sal );
end loop;
close l_cursor;
end;
And that’s it. I now have a routine
that will open one of eight possible dif-
ferent cursors. Here is a small test run
just to see how it works:
SQL> exec my_procedure
select * from emp where 1 = 1
SMITH,17-dec-1980 00:00:00,800
...
KING,,5
PL/SQL procedure successfully completed.
SQL> exec my_procedure(p_ename=>’a’)
select * from emp
where 1 = 1
and ename like
sys_context( ‘MY_CTX’, ‘ENAME’ )
ALLEN,20-feb-1981 00:00:00,1600
...
JAMES,03-dec-1981 00:00:00,950
PL/SQL procedure successfully completed.
And so on. Because this question and
answer is the most-read, it is also one of
the largest pages on Ask Tom. I encour-
age you to read it, at asktom.oracle.com/
~tkyte/cursor.html; it is interesting to
read the alternative methods proposed
NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 20 06 75
ASK TOM
by other readers and see the variations
on a theme that this page presents.
SUBQUERIES OR JOINS?
In terms of database performance, which
one is better—joins or subqueries? Can you
explain with an example? Also, what is the dif-
ference between nested loops and hash joins,
and how do you determine which one to use
for better performance?
Well, in general, joins and subqueries
are semantically different. They may
return entirely different results and are
not interchangeable. What you should
do to choose is
O
Use a subquery when you need no
columns from the tables referenced in
the subquery
O
Use a join when you do need some of
the columns
For example
select *
from emp
where deptno in
( select deptno
from dept );
would be “better” than
select emp.*
from emp, dept
where emp.deptno
= dept.deptno;
But for purely semantic reasons, the
first query is more meaningful. It says
“get me every row from EMP such that
EMP.DEPTNO is in the DEPT table.”
The second query says “join EMP to
DEPT.” You have to read more into the
query yourself to understand its goal
(the question being asked). To the opti-
mizer, those two particular queries are
identical, and the performance will be
the same.
And remember, a subquery cannot
simply be replaced by a join (and vice
versa), because they often result in differ-
ent answers. Consider:
SQL> select *
2 from dept
3 where deptno in
4 (select deptno
76 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 20 06
5 from emp) What’s your opinion on this?
6 / I found the question a bit ironic,
given that the site where the person
DEPTNO DNAME LOC asked this particular question (Ask Tom)
---------------------- --------------------------- ------------------------ uses PL/SQL for both back-end database
10 ACCOUNTING NEW YORK code and front-end presentation via
20 RESEARCH DALLAS Oracle Application Express (formally
30 SALES CHICAGO known as Oracle HTML DB).
You can probably guess the gist of
SQL> select dept.* my answer, which was: There is more
2 from dept, emp than one language, and it can make
3 where dept.deptno good sense to use PL/SQL entirely, or
4 = emp.deptno Java, or .NET, or whatever language
5 / happens to lend itself best to the
task at hand. A good back-and-forth
DEPTNO DNAME LOC discussion followed. You can see it
---------------------- --------------------------- ------------------------ online at asktom.oracle.com/~tkyte/
10 ACCOUNTING NEW YORK WhatLanguage.html. O
10 ACCOUNTING NEW YORK
20 RESEARCH DALLAS Tom Kyte (thomas.kyte@oracle.com) has worked
20 RESEARCH DALLAS for Oracle since 1993. He is a vice president in
20 RESEARCH DALLAS the Oracle Public Sector group and the author of
...
Expert Oracle Database Architecture: 9i and 10g
30 SALES CHICAGO Programming Techniques and Solutions (Apress,
14 rows selected. 2005) and Effective Oracle by Design (Oracle Press,
2003), among others.
The optimizer knows what to do—use
the proper construct based on the ques-
tion being asked. Subqueries and joins
are not interchangeable in general; use the
ASK Tom
one that conveys the most meaning. Oracle Vice President Tom Kyte answers your most
As for the access paths—the join difficult technology questions. Highlights from that
forum appear in this column.
types—the Performance Tuning Guide at asktom.oracle.com
download.oracle.com/docs/cd/B19306_ READ more Tom
01/server.102/b14211/toc.htm covers Expert Oracle Database Architecture: 9 i and 10g
Programming Techniques and Solutions
these topics: amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1590595300/
O
nested loops joins, at download
READ more about
.oracle.com/docs/cd/B19306_01/ analytics
server.102/b14211/ “On Format, Negation, and Sliding”
optimops.htm#sthref1385 oracle.com/technology/oramag/oracle/04-mar/
o24asktom.html
O
hash joins, at download.oracle
.com/docs/cd/B19306_01/server.102/ application contexts
asktom.oracle.com/~tkyte/article2
b14211/optimops.htm#sthref1394
ref cursors
asktom.oracle.com/~tkyte/cursor.html
WHAT LANGUAGE TO USE join types
There are popular questions, and there are Performance Tuning Guide
download.oracle.com/docs/cd/B19306_01/server.102/
just plain “hot” questions. By hot I mean b14211/toc.htm
questions that gather lots of heated feed- download.oracle.com/docs/cd/B19306_01/server.102/
b14211/optimops.htm#sthref1385
back. Recently, I was asked: download.oracle.com/docs/cd/B19306_01/server.102/
I have a client using PL/SQL for both back-end b14211/optimops.htm#sthref1394
database code and front-end presentation. what language to use
I think it’s more appropriate to use 3GL lan- asktom.oracle.com/~tkyte/WhatLanguage.html
guages, such as Java and .NET, for the pre- DOWNLOAD Oracle Database 10g
sentation and business logic tier, and to reserve Express Edition (Oracle Database XE)
oracle.com/technology/xe
PL/SQL for the data-intensive processes.
ORACLE.COM/ORACLEMAGAZINE
 t e c h n o l o g y INSIDE OCP
Testing Database Security
Questions and answers on securing your Oracle database by using FGA and VPD
he Oracle Database 10g: New
Features for Administrators
exam enables Oracle Certified
Professionals (OCPs) certified
on Oracle9i Database to upgrade their
certifications to Oracle Database 10g.
This is the only exam OCPs certified
on Oracle9i Database need to take to
upgrade their certification credentials to
Oracle Database 10g.
This column focuses on the fine-
grained auditing (FGA) and virtual
private database (VPD) features in
Oracle Database 10g. FGA, introduced
in Oracle9i Database, captures user
activities at a very detailed level and
helps prevent the need for manual,
trigger-based auditing. Introduced in
Oracle8i Database, VPD (also known
as fine-grained access control) provides
powerful row-level security capabilities.
The column presents sample ques-
tions you may encounter when taking
the Oracle Database 10g: New Features
for Administrators OCP exam. Note that
the sample question format and the SQL
code have been adjusted for presenta-
tion in this article.
FINE-GRAINED AUDITING
Auditing is the monitoring and record-
ing of selected user database actions. In
Oracle9i Database, FGA enabled record-
ing of row-level changes, along with
SCN values, to reconstruct old data.
FGA worked for SELECT statements
only and not for DML statements such
as UPDATE, INSERT, and DELETE.
For instance, by using FGA in Oracle9i
Database, you could determine that user
Smith had updated the SALES table that
is owned by SH but you could not see if
user Smith had updated the AMOUNT_
SOLD column or see the value of the
AMOUNT_SOLD column before an
update. In Oracle Database 10g, FGA
can audit DML statements.
The policies you establish with FGA
can monitor data access on the basis of
content. Using policies, you can specify
the columns and conditions for which
you want audit records. Conditions can
include limiting the audit to specific
types of DML statements used in con-
nection with the columns you specify.
You can also provide the name of the
routine (such as a PL/SQL procedure or
package) you want to be called when an
audit event occurs.
Which two statements are correct about the
features of FGA in Oracle Database 10g?
A. FGA records are stored in the SYS
.FGA_LOG$ table and are accessible
through the DBA_FGA_AUDIT_TRAIL
view.
B. The EXECUTE privilege on the
DBMS_FGA package is needed for
administering FGA audit policies.
C. You must enable FGA at the database
level by setting the AUDIT_TRAIL ini-
tialization parameter.
D. FGA policies cannot be enabled and
disabled without loss of the metadata
information.
The correct answers are A and B.
FGA records are stored in the SYS.FGA_
LOG$ table and are accessible through
the DBA_FGA_AUDIT_TRAIL view. To
administer FGA policies, you require
EXECUTE privileges on the DBMS_FGA
package. You use the DBMS_FGA.ADD_
POLICY interface to define each FGA
policy for a table or view, identifying
any combination of SELECT, UPDATE,
DELETE, and INSERT statements.
Answer C is incorrect because you do
not need to set AUDIT_TRAIL to enable
fine-grained auditing. Answer D is incor-
rect because you can temporarily enable
or disable FGA policies without losing
any metadata information. You can use
the DBMS_FGA.ENABLE_POLICY and
ORACLE MAGAZINE
BY A R A D H A N A P U R I
DBMS_FGA.DISABLE_POLICY proce-
dures to enable and disable audit policies.
You define the following audit policy:
BEGIN
dbms_fga.add_policy(
object_schema => ‘HR’,
object_name => ‘EMP’,
policy_name => ‘policy_emp_sal_comm’,
audit_condition => NULL,
audit_column => ‘SALARY,COMMISSION_
PCT’,
audit_column_opts=> DBMS_FGA.ALL_
COLUMNS,
statement_types => ‘SELECT, UPDATE’);
END;
Which SQL statements would be audited
as a result of this audit policy? (Choose all
that apply.)
A. UPDATE hr.emp
SET SALARY = SALARY+ 4000
WHERE EMP_ID=197;
B. UPDATE hr.emp
SET SALARY = SALARY+ 4000,
COMMISSION_PCT = COMMISSION_PCT+ 0.5
WHERE COMMISSION_PCT > 0;
C. SELECT emp_id, salary FROM hr.emp;
D. DELETE hr.emp WHERE emp_id = 100;
E. SELECT * FROM hr.emp;
The correct answers are B and E.
When you specify DBMS_FGA.ALL_
COLUMNS for the AUDIT_COLUMN_
OPTS parameter, audit trail entries are
created only when all the columns speci-
fied by the AUDIT_COLUMN parameter
are accessed by the operation(s) speci-
fied for the STATEMENT_TYPES param-
eter. Hence, in the example here, an
audit trail would be created when either
the SELECT or the UPDATE operation is
performed on the SALARY column and
the COMMISSION_PCT column.
Answer A is incorrect because the
UPDATE operation is performed on
the SALARY column only. Answer C is
NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 20 06 77
INSIDE OCP
INSIDE OCP
incorrect because the SALARY column
and the COMMISSION_PCT column
are not being queried. Answer D is
incorrect because the DELETE operation
is not specified for the STATEMENT_
TYPES parameter.
You have implemented regular auditing
by using the AUDIT command in Oracle
Database 10g. Also, you have defined
audit policies by using the DBMS_FGA
.ADD_POLICY procedure. You are inter-
ested in getting a combined view of
regular audits as well as the FGA audit
trail. What would you do?
A. Execute appropriate procedures in
the DBMS_CAPTURE_ADM package
B. Execute appropriate procedures in
the DBMS_METADATA package
C. Query the DBA_COMMON_AUDIT_
TRAIL data dictionary view
D. Query the UNION of DBA_AUDIT_
STATEMENT and DBA_AUDIT_
POLICIES
The correct answer is C. The
DBA_COMMON_AUDIT_TRAIL data
dictionary view is a union of the DBA_
AUDIT_TRAIL and DBA_FGA_AUDIT_
TRAIL data dictionary views. Note that
the DBA_AUDIT_TRAIL view provides
audit trail entries and the DBA_FGA_
AUDIT_TRAIL displays all audit records
for fine-grained auditing.
Answers A and B are incorrect
because procedures in the DBMS_
CAPTURE_ADM and DBMS_
METADATA packages do not provide
audit information. Answer D is incorrect
because to get combined audit informa-
tion, you can either query the UNION
of the DBA_AUDIT_TRAIL and DBA_
FGA_AUDIT_TRAIL data dictionary
views or query the DBA_COMMON_
AUDIT_TRAIL data dictionary view.
VIRTUAL PRIVATE DATABASE
VPD works by transparently modify-
ing requests for data to present a partial
view of tables to users, based on a set
of defined criteria. When a user directly
or indirectly accesses a table, view, or
synonym protected by a VPD policy, the
server dynamically modifies the SQL
statement of the user. The modification
creates a WHERE condition (a predicate)
returned by a function implementing
78 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 20 06
the security policy. VPD policies can be
applied to SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE,
INDEX, and DELETE statements.
Consider a database user who is allowed
to see employee records in the Sales
division only. This user issues the fol-
lowing query:
SELECT * FROM emp;
The function implementing the secu-
rity policy returns this predicate: division
= ‘SALES’, and the database transparently
rewrites the query. The query actually
executed becomes
SELECT * FROM emp
WHERE division = ‘SALES’;
To implement VPD, you use the
DBMS_RLS package. Alternatively, you
can use the Oracle Policy Manager
graphical user interface, accessed from
Oracle Enterprise Manager, to apply
security policies to schema objects.
You added the following VPD policy:
BEGIN
dbms_rls.add_policy
(object_schema=>’hr’,
object_name => ‘employees’,
policy_name => ‘hr_policy’,
function_schema => ‘hr’,
policy_function => ‘hr_pol’,
policy_type => dbms_rls.static,
sec_relevant_cols => ‘sal,comm’);
END;
Which statements about this policy are
correct? (Choose two.)
A. Oracle Database reevaluates the
policy function at statement execution
time if it detects context changes since
the last use of the cursor.
B. The policy function is not reevaluated
for each query on the EMPLOYEES table.
C. The policy is applied to the SELECT
statement type only.
D. The policy predicates are cached in
the system global area (SGA).
The correct answers are B and D.
Note that POLICY_TYPE is specified as
static. For a static policy type, the policy
functions are executed once and then
cached in the SGA. Note that in previous
ORACLE.COM/ORACLEMAGAZINE
releases, policies were dynamic, which
means that the database would run the
policy function for each query or DML
statement. In addition to dynamic poli-
cies, Oracle Database 10g provides static
and context-sensitive policies. These
policy types provide a means of improv-
ing server performance, because they
do not always rerun policy functions for
each DML statement and can be shared
across multiple database objects.
Answer A is incorrect because
setting the POLICY_TYPE parameter to
CONTEXT_SENSITIVE causes the data-
base to reevaluate the policy function
at statement execution time if it detects
context changes since the last use of the
cursor. Answer C is incorrect because
the policy applies to SELECT, INSERT,
UPDATE, and DELETE statements when
the STATEMENT_TYPES parameter is
not specified.
The online version of this column,
at oracle.com/technology/oramag/
oracle/06-nov/o66ocp.html, includes an
additional example question on VPD.
CONCLUSION
Oracle Database 10g provides several
enhancements to FGA and VPD. FGA
captures user activities at a very detailed
level, which helps you avoid manual
trigger-based auditing, and combines the
trails of standard auditing and FGA. VPD
is a very powerful feature with the ability
to support a variety of requirements, such
as masking columns selectively, based on
the policy and applying the policy only
when certain columns are accessed. O

Aradhana Puri (ocpexam_ww@oracle.com) is a
manager, Certification Exam Development, at Oracle.
She has been with the company since 2000.
READ
online-only column content
oracle.com/technology/oramag/oracle/06-nov/
o66ocp.html
“Inside OCP” columns
oracle.com/technology/oramag/oracle/ocp
LEARN more about the Oracle
Certification Program, and download
a free exam guide
oracle.com/education/certification
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Oracle PartnerNetwork 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 SVOA Public Company Limited www.svoa.co.th
Accenture www.accenture.com Sysage Technology Co., Ltd. www.sysage.com.tw
Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. www.amd.com System Access Pte Limited www.systemaccess.com
Apple www.apple.com Sysware Corporation www.sysware.com.tw
Avnet, Inc. www.hallmark.avnet.com Systex Information (H.K.) Ltd. www.systex.com.hk
BearingPoint www.bearingpoint.com Taiji Computer Corporation www.taiji.com.cn
Capgemini www.capgemini.com Tata Infotech Ltd. www.TataInfotech.com
CDW www.cdw.com Wezoomtek Corporation www.wezoomtek.com
CGI Group, Inc. www.cgi.com Canada
Cisco www.cisco.com MTS Allstream Inc. www.allstream.com
Computer Sciences Corporation www.csc.com Oto Global Solutions Inc. www.oto.com
Comverse www.comverse.com Europe
Convergys www.convergys.com Actebis Peacock GmbH www.actebispeacock.de
Dell Inc. www.dell.com ACURE A/S www.acure.dk
Deloitte www.deloitte.com Afina Sistemas Informaticos www.afina.es
EDS www.eds.com Alcatel www.alcatel.com
EMC www.emc.com Alcatel CIT www.alcatel.fr
Fidelity Information Services www.fidelityinfoservices.com/FNFIS/ Anelia SAS www.anelia.fr
Fujitsu Group www.fujitsu.com Ares www.ares.fr
Hitachi www.hitachi.com Arinso Nederland BV www.arinso.com
HP www.hp.com Asseco Poland S.A. www.asseco.pl
IBM / IBM Global Business Services www.ibm.com Atos Origin IT Services UK www.atosorigin.com
i-flex www.iflexsolutions.com Atos Origin Nederland BV www.atosorigin.com
Infosys www.infosys.com Basilica Computing Limited www.basilica.co.uk
Ingram Micro www.ingrammicro.com Bechtle Logistik & Service GmbH www.bechtle.com
Intec www.intecbilling.com Borlas IBC www.borlas.ru
Intel www.intel.com Capgemini Telecom Media und Networks GmbH www.de.cgey.com
Microsoft www.microsoft.com CBOSS www.cboss.ru
NEC www.nec.com Cedar Consulting Ltd. www.cedarconsulting.co.uk
Network Appliance, Inc. www.netapp.com CIBER UK www.ciber.com
Novell www.novell.com ComArch S.A. www.comarch.pl
Red Hat www.redhat.com Compelsysao www.compelsysao.co.uk
Satyam www.satyam.com CompIT Technologies www.compit-t.com.by
Sun Microsystems www.sun.com Computacenter AG & Co. OHG www.computacenter.de
Sungard www.sungard.com ComputerLand S.A. www.computerland.pl
Tata Consultancy Services www.tcs.com Consit A/S www.consit.dk
TechData www.techdata.com CROC Incorporated www.croc.ru
Temenos www.temenos.com Cronos NV www.cronos.be
Unisys www.unisys.com Cronos Ibérica, SA www.cronosiberica.es
Wipro www.wipro.com CSC Portugal www.csc.pt
Africa Deutsche Post ITSolutions GmbH www.dp-itsolutions.de
2Cana Solutions (Pty) Ltd. www.2cana.co.za Developing World Systems Ltd. www.dwsonline.co.uk
EOH Consulting Services (Pty) Ltd. www.eoh.co.za DIGORA www.digora.com
Implementation Factory (Pty) Ltd. www.ifactory.co.za Distrilogie Belgium BVBA www.abcomp.be
Integrated Tertiary Software (Pty) Ltd. www.its.co.za DBConcepts Daten - und Informationsverarbeitungsges.m.b.H. www.dbconcepts.at
New Dawn Technologies www.ndt.co.za DNS Hungary Ltd. www.dns-hungary.hu
Waymark Infotech (Pty) Ltd. www.waymark.co.za Engineering Ingegneria Informatica S.p.A. www.eng.it
Asia Pacific Explorer (UK) Limited www.explorer.uk.com
ASG (Asia Pacific) Pty Ltd. www.asggroup.com.au FORS Development Center www.fdc.ru
Application Hosting Services Co., Ltd. www.a-host.co.th Fujitsu Services Limited www.uk.fujitsu.com
Attain IT Pty Ltd. www.attainit.com.au Getronics PinkRoccade www.getronicspinkroccade.nl
Automated Systems (HK) Ltd. www.asl.com.hk Global Services Aarhus & Copenhagen A/S www.maerskdata.dk
Beijing Futong Dong Fang Technology Co. Ltd. www.futong.com.cn Groupe LGS France www.lgsrecrut.com
DataHeaven Co., Ltd. www.dataheaven.co.kr GWI Unternehmensgruppe www.gwi-ag.com
Daesang Information Technology Co., Ltd. www.daesangit.com Hunkler GmbH & Co. KG www.hunkler.biz
Digital China (China) Limited www.digtalchina.com.cn I-Teco www.i-teco.ru
DMS Software Technologies (Pvt.) Ltd. www.dmsswt.com Inatech Solutions Ltd. www.inatech.com
ECS International Trading (Shanghai) Co., Ltd.. www.pci.com.cn Industrial and Financial Systems, IFS AB www.ifsworld.com
FPT Information System www.fis.com.vn Ineum Consulting www.ineum.fr
FPT Software Solutions www.fss.com.vn Infor Global Solutions GmbH www.infor.de
Fujian Fujitsu Communication Software Co.,Ltd. www.ffcs.cn Informacines Technologijos www.it.lt
Fusion5 Limited www.fusion5.co.nz Informatica El Cortes Ingles www.ieci.es
GTL Limited www.gtllimited.com Information Technologies Company www.it.ru
FPT Corporation www.fpt.com.vn Inter Access B.V. www.interaccess.nl
HAND Enterprise Solutions Co., Ltd. www.hand-china.com IT Alise www.it-alise.com
Huadi Computer Co., Ltd. www.huadi.com.cn KNAPP Systemintegration GmbH www.knapp.com
Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. www.huawei.com/cn KPMG Consulting www.kpmg.be
iCE Consulting Co Ltd. www.iceconsulting.co.th Kurt Salmon Associates www.kurtsalmon.com
Jigsaw Services Pty Ltd. www.jigsawservices.com.au Leaves www.leaves.ru
LG CNS Co., Ltd. www.lgcns.com LogicaCMG www.logicacmg.nl
IT&C Co., Ltd. www.itnc.co.kr LOGIX www.logix.fr
KPMG Consulting Co Ltd. www.kpmg.com.tw Mdtvision www.mdtvision.com
Kolon Data Communication Co., Ltd. www.kdc.kolon.co.kr Micros-Fidelio GmbH www.micros-fidelio.org
NCS Pte. Ltd. www.ncs.com.sg Montora www.montora.com
Nucleus Software Exports Ltd. www.nucleussoftware.com Morse Group www.morse.com
OED Technology Sdn Bhd www.patimas.com Msg Systems ag www.msg-systems.com
Propia Co., Ltd. www.propia.co.kr Network Centric Solutions Limited www.ncsltd.com
Pythis www.pythis.com Noetix www.noetix.com
Red Rock Consulting www.redrock.net.au Nokia Corporation www.nokia.com
Sam Yung Holdings IT Business Division www.syhds.com Oficina de Cooperación Universitaria www.ocu.es
Samsung SDS www.sds.samsung.co.kr OpenPSL www.openpsl.com
Shen Yang Neusoft Co., Ltd. www.neusoft.com Open Technologies www.ot.ru
Sierra Atlantic www. sierraatlantic.com Opitz Consulting GmbH www.opitz-consulting.de

80 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 20 06 ORACLE.COM/ORACLEMAGAZINE
 CERTIFIEDadvantage partner index
COMPANY NAME URL COMPANY NAME URL
Patech Solutions Limited www.patech-solutions.com Preteco SA www.preteco.com.ar
PC-Ware Information Technologies AG www.pc-ware.de Procwork CRM www.procwork.com.br
PDV-Systeme Erfurt Gesellschaft für Systemtechnik mbH www.pdv.de Recours Informatica Consultoria e Assessoria Ltda www. www.recours.com.br
Peak Systems Support Ltd. www.peaksystems.uk.com RedPartner, S.A. www.sistemas.com.ec
Peter-Service www.billing.ru Servicios, Tecnologia y Organizacion S.A. de C.V. (STO) www.stoconsulting.com
Prodatis Consulting AG www.prodatis.com Sinergy Solutions, S.A. de C.V. www.sinergysolutions.com.mx
Professional Computer Services S.A. www.pcs.gr Snoop Consulting S.R.L. www.snoopconsulting.com
QAS Ltd. www.qas.com Soft Bolivar S.A. www.softbolivar.com
Quantix Ltd. www.quantix-uk.com Solusoft www.solusoft.com
RDTEX www.rdtex.ru Soluciones Casee SOCASEE, S.A. www.socasee.com
RTC Real-Time Center AG www.rtc.ch Sonda del Peru S.A. www.sonda.com
Satyam Computer Services www.satyam.com SQL Technology S.A. www.sqltech.cl
S.C. RomSoft S.R.L. www.romsoft.info Sunrising Desenvolvimento de Sistemas www.sunrising.com.br
SCC PLC www.scc.com Synos Consultoria e Informatica www.synos.com.br
Sddc www.sddc.fr Sysdesign Consultoria Em Informatica Limitada www.sysdesign.com.br
SIV AG www.siv.de Tilsor S.A. www.tilsor.com.uy
Service & Systems Solutions www.northgate-is.com TSnet S.A. www.tsnetglobal.com
Softman SA www.softman.pl Unimix Tecnologia Ltda www.unimix.com.br
Software Design & Management AG www.sdm.de YKP Consultoria e Sistemas Ltda. www.ykp.com.br
Sogeti Espana www.sogeti.biz Middle East
Sopra Group www.sopragroup.com Bahwan Cybertek LLC www.bahwancybertek.com
Sphinx CST www.sphinx.co.uk Computer and Communications Systems www.ccs.com.jo
TEAM GmbH www.team-pb.de Computer Information Systems www.cis.com.lb
Teamsolve www.teamsolve.co.uk Computer and Engineering Bureau CEB www.ceb.com.jo
Tech Data Midrange GmbH www.tdmidrange.de Districom www.cis.com.lb
Technology Reply Srl www.reply.it Emirates Computers Est www.emiratescomputers.co.ae
Teta S.A. www.teta.com.pl Global Technology Services LLC www.gtsuae.com
TietoEnator Corporation www.tetioenator.com Hyperlink www.hyperlink-me.com
TimeStamp - Sistema de Informação www.timestamp.pt International Turnkey Systems (ITS) www.its.ws
TopS Business Integrator www.topsbi.ru Intracom Jordan www.intracom.jo
T-Systems International GmbH www.t-systems.com Mannai Trading Company Limited www.mannaicorp.com
Up to Data, Professional Services GMBH www.uptodata.de Mercator www.mercator.co.ae
Vector Software SRL www.vectorsoftware.ro Macro Software Systems LLC www.macro-soft.com
Version 1 Software www.version1.com Oracle Dedicated Competency Center www.mawarid-odcc.com
Vertis BV www.vertis.nl Raya Gulf LLC www.rayaholding.com
Whitehouse Consultants Ltd. www.whitehouse-consult.com Royah www.royah.com
WM-data Danmark A/S www.wmdata.com United States
Latin America 170 Systems, Inc. www.170systems.com
Abaco Tecnologia de Informacao Ltda www.abaco.com.br Abaris, Inc. www.abaris-inc.com
Acao Informatica Brasil Ltda www.acao.com.br Agilysys www.agilysys.com
Advanced Database & IT Sistemas de Informação S.A. www.advancedit.com.br Apex IT, Inc. www.apexit.com
Asi Consultants www.asiconsutants.com Applications Software Technology Corp. www.astcorporation.com
Aporte Gestao Empresarial e Tecnologia da Informacao Ltda www.aporte.com Applied Biosystems www.appliedbiosystems.com/sqllims
Appteck S.A. de C.V. www.appteck.com.mx BMC Software, Inc. www.bmc.com
Apply Solutions www.applysolutions.com.br CedarCrestone www.cedarcrestone.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 Compuware Corporation www.compuware.com
BGH, S.A. www.bgh.com.ar CSS International www.cssus.com
BusinessMind S.A. www.businessmind.com.ec DAZ Systems www.dazsi.com
Casa de Software S/A www.casasoft.com.br DLT Solutions, Inc. www.dlt.com
Commit Consultores de Empresas Ltda www.commitconsultores.com.br Enterprise Business Solutions, LLC www.theebsgroup.com
Datastar Argentina S.A. www.datastar.com.ar Hyperion Solutions www.hyperion.com
Datum, S.A. (Guatemala) www.datum.com.gt Impac www.impacservices.com
Datum, S.A. de C.V. (El Salvador) www.datum.com.sv Intermec www.intermec.com
Discover Technology Informatica Ltda www.discover.com.br KBACE Technologies, Inc. www.kbace.com
e-Builders & Consulting Group S. A. C. www.ebuilders.com.pe Kronos Inc. www.kronos.com
E-Partner Comercial e Serviços de Informática Ltda www.epartnerbr.com.br Lucidity Consulting Group LP www.luciditycg.com
EN-SOF Consultoria e Informática Ltda. www.en-sof.com.br MI Services Group, Inc. www.mi-services.com
ERP Soluciones S.A. de C.V. www.erpsol.com.mx Optimum Solutions Group, LLC www.optimumsolutions.com
Excelsis S.A.C.I.G www.excelsis.com.py OSI Consulting, Inc. www.osius.com
Elucid Solutions S.A. www.elucid.com.br OuterBay Technologies www.outerbay.com
Eserv Expert Services Del Ecuador SA www.eserv-andina.com Perot Systems Corporation www.perotsystems.com
FYC Soluciones Integrales, C.A. www.fyccorp.com Princeton Softech www.princetonsoftech.com
Grupo Quanam www.quanam.com 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 Solbourne Computer Inc. www.solbourne.com
Innovat S.A. www.itexperts.com.ec SYSTIME Computer Corporation www.systime.net
J Evans y Asociados S.A.C. www.jevansa.com.pe TITAN Technology Partners www.ttpartners.com
JFM Informática Ltda. www.jfm.com.br TUSC www.tusc.com
Kruger Corporation www.kruger.com.ec USinternetworking, Inc. www.usi.net
MOST S.A. www.grupomost.com Vertex, Inc. www.vertexinc.com
MPL Corporate Software SA www.mpl.com.br Waters Corporation www.waters.com
Netix Distribuidores de Tecnologia, C.A. www.netixcorp.com Wave Consulting Group www.wavecg.com
Nexsys www.nexsysla.com Whitbread Technology Partners, Inc. www.whitbreadtech.com
Officer Distribuidora www.officer.com.br Xcelicor, Inc. www.xcelicor.com

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Oracle Magazine, ISSN 1065-3171, is published bimonthly (six issues each year) with a free subscription price by Oracle Corporation. The office of publication and the general business
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82 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 20 06 ORACLE.COM/ORACLEMAGAZINE
 c o m m e n t IN THE FIELD
Asking the Right Questions
Data provides dry information on its own, but business analytics can pry the meaning loose.
ata is dead. It just sits there,
taking up space in your data-
base, on your storage system,
useless. Sure, it has the latest
inventory from the warehouse. But other-
wise, it’s of no help. It offers no insights,
like the sphinx, just biding its time until
someone asks the right question.
Business analytics can give you the
right questions. It goes beyond ad hoc
analysis and everyday queries and makes
visualizing and analyzing business data
easier; it can yield useful, sometimes
invaluable, information about your busi-
ness. An analogy might be the receipts
you keep for the IRS: they’re just slips
of paper. But a skilled accountant, using
standard procedures, can discover pat-
terns of earning, spending, and invest-
ment that are tremendously valuable.
Business analytics commonly uses
ordinary business tools to get answers.
Online analytical processing, data ware-
housing, and decision-support systems
all can be part of a business analytics
suite. Modeling is also a part of business
analytics, providing links between one
entity and the others that affect it. These
models are often dynamic—changing in
time—to reflect the nature of business.
Paradoxically, the best type of ana-
lytical tool may not be one that simply
answers your preconceived question.
Instead, it may come up with the ques-
tion for you, perhaps something you
never thought to ask. This can lead to
areas of discovery within your data that
you may never have imagined.
Three common goals of business ana-
lytics are to understand what happened
in the past, to see what’s going on right
now, and to predict the future. The right
analysis can help decision-makers recog-
nize what they need to do, or how they
need to change, to reach their goals.
Oracle supports business analytics in
several ways. First, it presents the data for
analysis. This may involve data marts or
data warehouses, cost-effective archives
for historical data, and rapid loading
of massive amounts of data. Second, it
provides analytical tools. Finally, it offers
ways to share information with the
world, such as XML gateways.
With the acquisitions of PeopleSoft
and Siebel, Oracle now offers a com-
plete palette of tools in Oracle Business
Intelligence Suite, which includes
Oracle Business Intelligence Discoverer,
Oracle Business Intelligence Spreadsheet
Add-In, Oracle Warehouse Builder,
Oracle Business Intelligence Beans, and
Oracle Reports.
Specific tools address well-defined
business areas. For example, look at
the Siebel Business Analytics applica-
tions that are part of the Oracle Business
Intelligence Suite. Oracle’s PeopleSoft
Financial Analytics applications provide
the tools to develop, manage, and
measure corporate strategies that can
drive the most profitable growth. Each
of these is like a question just waiting for
the data to apply itself to.
None of this is meant to replace the
normal queries and reports that busi-
nesses need. Rather, think of business
analytics as adjuncts to the usual infor-
mation generated, possibly providing
new insights into existing data.
My work has used business analytics
extensively in business—and in baseball.
As a consultant to several Major League
teams, I’ve helped decision-makers
understand their situations and plan for
the future. Business and baseball have
remarkable similarities. For example,
both sit on mountains of data and statis-
tics that are just waiting to be used for
analysis. Both also attempt to use past
performance to predict future results.
Business analytics puts data in
ORACLE MAGAZINE
BY ARI KAPLAN
context. In baseball, you may have a
player with 80 runs batted in. Is that
good? Well, it may depend on how
many runners were on base while he
was batting, who bats after him, or other
factors. In business, you may have a
product that sold 80,000 units. Is that
good? Again, the answer may depend on
factors that business analytics can tease
out for you. This process can give your
enterprise some meaningful metrics.
When I worked for Pricewaterhouse-
Coopers, my team analyzed products
for Macy’s and used advanced analytics
to determine product placement. For
example, some products sell better in
some areas of the store than in others.
Some products do well when near other
products. Learning this kind of informa-
tion buried in the usual business data can
help any enterprise maximize its profits.
Finally, let business analytics answer
a meta-question about the data itself: is
it useful? Some data can be very useful,
because it’s tied to trends or other
important features. Other data may have
no analytical use at all: it’s incidental to
the basic issues that decision-makers
must consider. Thus, business analytics
can tell us whether that data is useless—
or just waiting for the right question. 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, a
leader in mobile IT software. He has been involved in
Oracle technology since 1992.
READ more about Oracle Business
Intelligence
oracle.com/solutions/business_intelligence
DISCOVER Oracle’s Siebel Business
Analytics applications
oracle.com/solutions/business_intelligence/
sbaa.html
NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 20 06 83
 c o m m e n t ANALYST’S CORNER
Finding Information on Demand
Ease of use and risk management drive companies to enterprise search.
ue Feldman, research vice
president for content technol-
ogy at IDC, talked to Oracle
Magazine about enterprise
search and discovery technology.
Oracle Magazine: What’s new in the world
of enterprise search technology?
Feldman: We’ve seen major changes in
how enterprise search is used by compa-
nies to unify access to multiple sources
of information. The technology has
also become more sophisticated, with
elements of text analytics, like catego-
rization, or name extraction being built
into the software. We’ve seen advances
in how the index itself is structured to
handle both data and content in one
place. In addition, the skill level of the
average user has improved. Most people
are fairly adept at using search technol-
ogy on the internet, and they expect to
find corporate information just as easily.
Oracle Magazine: What is driving growth
in the enterprise search market?
Feldman: The main driver: People want a
single point of access to all their informa-
tion. Another big driver is risk avoidance.
Executives understand the need for com-
prehensive records management. They
need to be able to find and verify infor-
mation to meet compliance requirements.
Oracle Magazine: What are the essential
components of enterprise search tools?
Feldman: The most vital component is a
mature search-and-discovery platform
that can do secure crawling, index-
ing, and searching. A consumer search
engine searches HTML pages, but an
enterprise search engine must also be
able to search databases, e-mail systems,
intranet portals, document management
systems, and custom applications. You
also need administrative tools that help
you do relevance ranking, and it’s great
if you can hardwire some of the results
to your most frequently asked questions.
84 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 20 06 ORACLE.COM/ORACLEMAGAZINE
Oracle Magazine: What are some of the
advanced capabilities of these tools?
Feldman: The better search engines do
concept matching. For example, if you
search on high blood pressure, they’ll be
smart enough to return results that also
have the term hypertension. They can
also help you qualify your queries. The
term bush could refer to shrubbery or
a person. If you want information on
President Bush, you shouldn’t have to
wade through gardening information.
More-mature tools let you extract a spe-
cific kind of metadata called entities, so
you can specify names of people, places,
and common elements. This lets com-
panies organize their information and
improve search results by categorizing or
tagging concepts within each document.
Oracle Magazine: How do these tools
control access to private documents or
restrict access to specific workgroups?
Feldman: Enterprise-level search tools
let you set business rules, especially
for identity management and security.
For example, Oracle Secure Enterprise
Search 10g is integrated with Oracle’s
identity management solution, Oracle
Internet Directory, and it can be syn-
chronized with other identity manage-
ment solutions such as Microsoft’s Active
Directory. This helps you ensure that the
right people see the right information.
Oracle Magazine: How do companies
include search technology in their enter-
prise applications?
Feldman: Having a flexible platform is
important. It should be easy to embed
search capabilities in whatever you’re
doing, generally with Web services, and
to create composite applications that
include search functions. Your inventory
system, content management system,
workflow engine, and search engine
should work together—along with your
collaborative tools, instant messaging
BY DAVI D BAUM
system, and video conferencing system.
Oracle Magazine: Where is the return on
investment (ROI) in these initiatives?
Feldman: ROI comes from two primary
areas: increasing revenue and decreas-
ing costs. For example, if you can make
it easier for customers to find your
products, your online sales revenue will
increase. Research into clickstream data
reveals that you lose one-third of your
searchers after each click, so connect-
ing people rapidly to the information
they’re looking for is essential. Charles
Schwab saw an immediate payback of
US$128,000 per month from this type
of improvement. Retailers such as Macy’s
and Lands’ End show similar results.
These companies use smart search
engines to get you where you want to
go. Enterprise search technology also
can lead to huge savings in a customer
support center, because it helps users
pinpoint what they need. Each time you
answer a question automatically, it costs
about a penny. Each time you answer
with a low-level person reading a script,
it costs around $4. Each time an experi-
enced tech support person gets involved,
it costs $30 to $40. O
David Baum (david@dbaumcomm.com) is a freelance
business writer based in Santa Barbara, California.
IDC (www.idc.com) provides market intelligence,
advisory services, and events for the information
technology, telecommunications, and consumer
technology markets.
READ about Oracle Secure
Enterprise Search
oracle.com/database/secure-enterprise-search.html
DOWNLOAD Oracle Secure
Enterprise Search 10g
oracle.com/technology/software/products/search
Oracle Database 10g

“Best Database
Solution for Linux”

A panel of industry experts recognized Oracle Database 10g

as the most innovative database for Linux.

oracle.com
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.
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