Pictures on Google map

Few days ago I wrote about idea to integrate Google Maps and Picasa pictures in the way that you can see pictures on map. Today I've discovered that it is already done in very similar way. When you go to maps.google.com there is an new tab My Maps. Then you can check "Photos from Panoramio" and you can scroll and pane map to see pictures from different places. Really cool feature. I'm looking forward for same functionality with Google Picasa. BTW, Panoramio was (will be) bought by Google in May 2007. I wonder if they integrate it with Picasa ...
Have Fun with pictures




Cheers, Paweł

Oracle 11g Announced: Features Preview

Oracle 11g was today announced. As an engineer I'm interested in new features of 11g release. I was already writing about this here and here. But this were just my thoughts based on others relations from Oracle Open World 2006.
Now official list of Oracle 11g new features is published. Here is page that contains more technical information on Oracle 11g.
Based on new features list I choose some that are very useful in project that I'm work now on, and I see them as important:

1. Binary XML storage and XML path indexing for schema-less XML documents
   
2. Result caches: improves speed of repeated execution of queries and function calls that access read-only or read-mostly data.
   
3. Database Resident Connection Pooling: enables faster connections to the database for application, that do not provide connection pooling (ex. PHP).
   
4. Faster triggers, including more-efficient invocations of per-row triggers
5. Faster simple SQL operations
6. SecureFiles: ti's new solution for storing large objects (LOBs) and datatypes such as XML
7. Automatic compilation for PL/SQL and Java in the database: new “native” compilation of PL/SQL that do not need C compiler.
   

New features that look interesting, and I want to play with them:

1. Semantic Technologies: native support for Resource Description Framework (RDF) and Web Ontology Language (OWL) standards,
2. Oracle Spatial enhancements: Richer, more-interactive map application development
3. New partitioning capabilities:
   - Partitioning by parent/child references,
   - Partitioning by virtual columns,
   - More composite partitioning options, including range/range, list/range, list/hash, and list/list,
   - Interval partitioning, which allows you to automatically create new partitions based on intervals, such as every month or every day,
   
4. Oracle Flashback Data Archive: enables fast query access to old versions of the data.
5. Expanded support for standards, such as XML Query (XQuery) 1.0 and service-oriented architecture (SOA)

I'm waiting for Oracle 11g to be available for download...

Cheers, Paweł

Extracting Data to Excel using only SQL*Plus

Lately I had to quickly extract some data from Oracle DB to Excel. There are a lot of tools that can do that, ex. Toad or SQL Developer, but I had only access to SQL*Plus. Additionally I was on Windows machine and database was in UTF8. And extracted data was also using many different languages.
Here are steps I used to archive my goal:

1. start command line (CMD)
2. set NLS_LANG variable
   

   set NLS_LANG=.UTF8

3. start sqlplus and log to database
   

   sqlplus user/pwd@db

4. set long line size and avoid paging
   

   SQL> set linesize 4000
   SQL> set pagesize 0

5. set markup html in sqlplus
   

   SQL> set markup html on spool on

   
   It is important to use spool on clause, as it adds html header to spool file when spooling is started
6. start spooling
   

   SQL> spool a.html

7. run your query
   
8. turn off spooling
   

   SQL> spool off

9. open file in Excel

I've tested this procedure on Oracle 10g R2 (10.2.0.1 and 10.2.0.3) and Excel 2003

Cheers, Paweł

After Vacations: Tagging Photos with Geo Location

Welcome back after my vacations. This time nothing about Oracle, but about some idea that was in my mind for few years and now is life: Google Picasa has new functionality: putting pictures on maps. I'm using Picasa to share pictures with friends and family for more than year now. And often I was asked: where did you take this picture? Now I can tag pictures with Geo coordinates and then are shown on map. Take a look at my public galleries on picasa, especially latest one with some pictures from my vacations.
There are still some features that I would like to see;When playing with google maps I would like to have option to show pictures from specific place. Pictures from public galleries could be presented. There might be an copyright issue, but it could be solved easily: users will have option to allow (or not) to publish pictures this way.
And I must buy Camera with build in GPS receiver to simplify mapping pictures...


Cheers, Paweł