I've been tagged 3 times; 8 things about me

Few busy days without any blog reading and after I've gone through my feeds it occurred that I've been tagged 3 times:

1. By Eddie Awad
2. By H.Tonguç YILMAZ
   
3. By Jorrit Nijssen (Jornica)
   

Thanks You for tagging.
Now I feel that I really need to write something about me:

1. I was born and grow up in Krosno in south-east Poland (see satellite picture),
2. I 15th when Communism fall down in Poland. At this moment Poland is member of Schengen Agreement, and I can travel around Europe without passport. Lot of changes in last 19 years,
3. I'm Thawte Web of Trust Notary,
   
4. In 1993 I took 2nd place in Nation Contest in Programming for College Students. Unfortunately I was 6 month too old to take part in international final :(
5. In 1990 I've sold my first program; small DB written in Clipper. I did not think that this program will be used for so many years. In 1999 I had to do some changes to support year 2000,
6. My first program was written in Basic and was run on PSP-80 (page in Polish)
   
7. I'm married and we have 2 daughters (6 and 2 years old),
8. My favourite TV show is Top Gear with Jeremy Clarkson , Richard Hammond and James May.
   

I will not invite anyone directly as I do not want to accused of spam. All my readers that have blogs are welcome to post 8 things about themselves.

Cheers,
Paweł

I've got spammed (in comments)

Due to quite massive spam I'm receiving today in comments I had to turn on word verification for comment posting. Hope it will protect me from spam for future. And sorry for inconvenience when commenting,

Cheers, Paweł

Blog roll reorganization

Today i've reorganized my blogroll. Until now I was reading news using OraNA.info maintained by Eddie Awad. But there is too many post that are out of my interest. So i've decided to subscribe to feeds from some of them. Here is full list: Adrian Bilington, Alex Gorbachev, Alexander Kjerulf - CHO, Alexander Kornbrust, Alison Holloway, AMIS Blog, Blogging about Oracle, Carl Backstrom, Chen Shapira, Christopher Jones, Coskan Gundogar, Creating Passionate Users, Dimitri Gielis, Dominic Brooks, Don Seiler, Eddie Awad, Eric S. Emrick, Escape from Cubicle Nation, Gary Myers, H.Tonguç Yilmaz, Howard Rogers - Dizwell, Jeff Moss, Jeremy Schneider, Jonathan Lewis, Jorrit Nijssen, Kevin Closson, Laurent Schneider, Lewis Cunningham, Lutz Hartmann, Marco Gralike, Niall Litchfield, OraQA, Patch, Patrick Wolf, Penelope Trunk, Pythian Group, Robert Baillie, Sayed Jaffar Hussain, Steven Feuerstein, Steven Karam, Tanel Poder, Tim Hall, Tom Kyte, Venkatakrishnan J, YAS.

Cheers, Paweł

One Year Blogging

It's one year since I started blogging. It's time for some statistics and summary. During last year:

1. I've published 69 posts - it's 1 post every 6 days (on average)
2. 51 post are about Oracle (74%)
3. Over 29200 page views
4. 84% of traffic comes from Google
5. 35% of traffic is from US, Next on list are: UK (8%), India (7%), Germany (5%) and Poland (4%)

Top 10 of most often visited pages:

1. Oracle 11g new features
2. Restore CONTROLFILE and/or SPFILE from autobackup
3. ORA-03297 on empty datafile
4. ORA-30625 and XMLType
5. Visual SourceSafe - Invalid DOS Path
6. Empty String IS NOT NULL?
7. Oracle XMLType: exctractvalue vs. extract
8. Applying Oracle 10.2.0.3 patch
9. XMLType and Namespace problem
10. UTL_MATCH - String Similarity in Oracle

Most commented posts:

1. Visual SourceSafe - Invalid DOS Path
2. Yet another tokenizer in Oracle
3. Log Buffer #48
4. What tool do you use to make blog backup?
5. Rolling Back the DDL

And finally post that I think are valuable but not so often seen or commented:

1. Moving domain index to another tablespace
2. Monitor progress of long running processes
3. Extracting Data to Excel using only SQL*Plus
4. Rows to single string or aggregating strings
5. Flashback Table and Materialized View – not working together
6. Group Comparison Conditions
7. Search Oracle Blogs - I was before Eddie with this idea; but Eddie has more readers...
8. Binding list variable
9. Blogger Beta Backup tool
10. Moving/Adding Control file when using SPFile
11. Table that cannot be deleted

I hope that in next months I will find time and good subjects to blog about.

Cheers, Paweł

Log Buffer #48

Welcome to 48 edition of Log Buffer. While I read Log Buffer regularly for many months already it's first time I do review of databases blogosphere. Thanks to Dave Edwards from Pythian for inviting me.

This edition will be mostly related to development tools, techniques and environments for database applications. Let start with Inside Oracle APEX where Patrick Wolf presents internals of APEX Repository. In turn Dimitri Gielis is discussing how to reuse Oracle APEX components effectively. If you still do not know what APEX is, you can begin with Oracle Application Express—What’s it All About? by Peter Lorenzen.

Jonathan Bruce at his Weblog is reviewing and recommending DataDirect Connect for ADO.NET Oracle provider for Visual Studio.
Anton Scheffer from AMIS is solving Sudoku with single SQL statement using MODEL Clause; really impressive method, I must find time to experiment with MODEL clause as it seems to be very powerful.

Linear Algebra is not commonly known feature of Oracle database. Marcos M. Campos on Oracle Data Mining and Analytics is presenting how it can be used for Principal Components Analysis and Visualization. Unfortunately complexity of examples rather will not help with wider usage of UTL_NLA package.

Jonathan Lewis on his Oracle Scratchpad presents differences in new (Oracle 10g) and old sorting algorithm. Difference is visible only for those who were using side effect of sorting by ROWID in previous oracle releases.

Jorrit Nijssen alias Jornica issued an warning on using after statement trigger and returning clause together as there is an side effect.

For many of Oracle DBAs it might be weird idea: Kevin Closson is proposing to install Oracle over NFS. He states that it's cheaper, simpler and will be even better with upcoming Oracle 11g. By the way Oracle 11g will be launched on 11th of July according to Eddie Awad. This announcement made big rumour in Oracle blogosphere and Lutz Hartmann is now documenting new feature of collecting statistics in 11g.

Laurent Schneider is discussing Best Practices for Aliasing columns in SQL queries. Dominic Delmolino on Oracle Musigns suggest another method: uniquely name columns. Also Steven Feuerstein on Toad World shows good practice: "Don't put COMMIT; in you code!".

Kevin Closson and Doug Burns discuses what is the role of Oracle, OTN, Technorati and readers for bloggers community.

Jeff of his Jeff' SQL Server Weblog that database design should not be made due to desired output. "We often see bad designs submitted at SQLTeam.com with the justification of that design being the client wanted it that way! ... you need to demonstrate to them that even when storing the data properly, we can *still* create a View which returns those exact results, making them happy".

Data Quality: Where to Validate? Beth on Confessions of a database geek is reviewing levels where validation should occur also giving some recommendations.

Roland Bouman shows What MySQL can do to enter the off-line Web. In my opinion the idea of using Web applications offline will be very hot in nearest future.
Peter Zaitsev is discussing an issue with degraded performance after upgrading MySQL 4 to MySQL 5. He also presents some workaround for that problem.
Paul McCullagh on PrimeBase XT shows how to manipulate BLOBs in MySQL using BLOB Streaming Engine.
Ronald Bradford on Technical Notes and Articles of Interest reviews Clustering solution for MySQL database.
Kevin Burton is predicting end of RAIDs . Instead he proposes to use many instances of MySQL with replication mechanism.
Xaprb announced release of MySQL Archiver 0.9.1 tool to archive content of critical OLTP tables.

JonC is answering most common Security Questions Applied to MySQL and pointing that biggest challenge is to deal with human errors. Alex Kornbrust is presenting THC Orakel new tool to Sniffer Oracle Passwords. He also points few errors in white-paper that is accompanying the tool.

Mark Rittman is on vacations leaving us with lot of BI Articles and Links to read.

Steve Jones on SQL Musings talks over High Availability of SQL Server. Euan Garden on his blog announces interesting Web Casts about new features of SQL Server 2008. While Jamie Thomson show how Group by Grouping Sets will work in Katmai: SQL Sever 2008.

Josh Berkus is reporting on JPUG 2007 PostgreSQL Conference and his keynote on "PostgreSQL Today and Tomorrow". "This was the most challenging conference for me so far since the entire conference was in Japanese, a language of which I have no comprehension."

At the and some news from my country. Jakub Pawlowski is summarizing XV PLOUG (Polish Oracle Users Group) Seminary - "Oracle Application Server 10g R3: applications, productivity, security, reliability."
That's all for today. Wait for next Log Buffer on June 15th presented by Coskan Gundogar.

Paweł

Oracle Blog Aggregators and Bloggers Community

Today I've noticed that my blog became aggregated on official Oracle Blogs site. For me it is really good news as it can bring me more readers. My blog is also aggregated at OraNA.info by Eddie Awad (Oracle blogger of the year 2006) and on orablogs.com by Brian Duff (Oracle employee). Unfortunately I cannot find any of my post on OTN Semantic Web. I hope it will change in near future, as this is still beta release...
For me it seems that latest discussions about Oracle Bloggers community have positive impact. Official list of Oracle blogs not maintained by Oracle employees is more complete now. Also The Pythian Group is doing great job for Oracle community by publishing series of Log Buffer.

Cheers, Paweł

OraNA.info upgraded

Eddie Awad just announced that he has improved functionality of Oracle Blogs aggregator OraNA.info. Now it shows post from long history, not only last 20. It is now really usable.
And if you are Oracle Blogger, go and join OraBloggers group on Google groups.

Cheers, Paweł

Blogger Beta Backup tool

Finally i found time to prepare solution to backup my blog. I've decided to do that as I had problems to backup my blog using available tools. To archive that I use Blogger Beta Atom feeds, few tables in Oracle, and PL/SQL package to read blog posts, parse them using XML DB features and store in DB tables.

Requirements

• Oracle 10g (tested on Oracle XE on Windows and Oracle Enterprise 10.2.0.2 on Windows). Oracle9i should work also, but it's not tested.
• Blogs maintained by Beta Blogger and hosted on blogspot.com. You must allow to publish full content of your posts and comments.
• Direct connection to Internet

Installation

1. Download installation package
2. Create new Oracle schema and grant to it:
   1. roles CONNECT and RESOURCE
   2. EXECUTE on SYS.UTL_HTTP
3. run script install.sql

Usage

First You have to register blog you want to backup. Use BLOGSPOT_BACKUP.register_blog function:

begin
 dbms_output.put_line(
 BLOGSPOT_BACKUP.register_blog
 ('Software Engineer Thoughts', 'http://pbarut.blogspot.com/'));
 commit;
end;

To download all your posts with comments andl labels use this PL/SQL block:

begin 
 BLOGSPOT_BACKUP.synchronize_blog(null, false); 
 BLOGSPOT_BACKUP.synchronize_labels(null, null); 
 BLOGSPOT_BACKUP.synchronize_comments(null, null, false); 
 commit; 
end;

For more information take a look into BLOGSPOT_BACKUP specification.

Data storage

Table name	Desription
BLOGS	Blogs registered for backup.
BLOG_POSTS	Blog posts downloaded.
BLOG_LABELS	Labels associated to blog posts.
BLOG_COMMENTS	Comments related to blog posts.
FEED_CACHE	Used speed up tests. In tests phase feeds are read from this table instead of downloading every time.

End notes

I'm publishing this tool, as some of you might find it useful. It should work on all beta blogger blogs, but I do not give ant warranty. In case of any problems fill free to contact me.

Regards, Paweł

Search Oracle Blogs

Google announced release of new tool Google Custom Search Engine. Using this tool You can create our own list of sites you want to search within. There are also many options to customize search result pages, to have search results on your own site. You may also collaborate with other users, to create list of sites on specific topic.
Based o this I’ve created a new search engine that searches only Blogs related to Oracle. You can check if you are already listed. If not you can add your site. You are welcome to take part and propose sites with oracle related blogs. For sure I will include it in this listing.
On top of my page you can find search box. Try it.
If you want this search box on your page just copy following HTML code

<!-- Google CSE Search Box Begins -->
<form id="searchbox_007198821948994293043:dv284dbx17s" action="http://www.google.com/cse">
  <input type="hidden" name="cx" value="007198821948994293043:dv284dbx17s" />
  <input name="q" type="text" size="40" />
  <input type="submit" name="sa" value="Search" />
  <input type="hidden" name="cof" value="FORID:1" />
</form>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.google.com/coop/cse/brand?form=searchbox_007198821948994293043%3Adv284dbx17s"></script>
<!-- Google CSE Search Box Ends -->

Paweł

What tool do you use to make blog backup?

Today a have a question to you: What tool do you use to make backup of your blog?
My blog in hosted on blogspot and is run by beta.blogger.com. I was trying to make backup (mirror) using HTTrack but it run into infinite loop. It was downloading every post many, many, many.... times with little changed name.
Looking forward for your recommendation…
Paweł

About Blog and Me

Hi All Readers! I'm a Software Engineer with many years of experience in developing computer software. I'm mostly working on software that uses Database Systems. In past I was using dBase and Clipper. Since 1996 it is Oracle. I was working on all version since Oracle 7.3 and on many platforms: Novel, Sun Solaris, IBM AIX, Compaq Tru64, Windows. On this blog I want to share my knowledge and experience with all visitors. I hope You will find some interesting and useful topics here. I'll be writing about my current problems and solutions, tricks I use in everyday work, bugs and workarounds, and thinks that are interesting to me, and You might find interesting too. Cheers, Paweł