As Published In July/August 2004

OTN Community Bulletin

Learn what's happening in Oracle's most dynamic online community.

Community News

From the Editor Can anyone doubt that unnecessary complexity is Public Enemy No. 1 for today's developers, DBAs/sysadmins, and system architects? We've taken that fact to heart on OTN, which has eliminated much of its own complexity to streamline your access to technical resources for prototyping, building, testing, deploying, and managing applications. The results include new "Browse by Role" pages for developers, DBAs/sysadmins, and ISV personnel; streamlined, universal navigation; and a lighter, cleaner, more intuitive home page. Overall, it's now simply easier to get around on OTN. Justin Kestelyn, OTN Editor in Chief justin.kestelyn@oracle.com

Read "The Hitchhiker's Guide to PHP"
PHP is proving to be among the most popular subjects with OTN members. That scripting language's flexibility, relatively gentle learning curve, support for rapid prototyping and deployment, and speed—not to mention its open source allure—are drawing attention from developers as well as DBAs and sysadmins interested in development issues. (In fact, the popularity of PHP scripting content on OTN may be partly explained by the typical DBA's comfort with text-manipulation utilities.)

In March, in response to this growing interest, OTN launched a new technical article series called "The Hitchhiker's Guide to PHP" (otn.oracle.com/pub/articles/php_experts). As series editor Sudhakar Ramakrishnan writes in his introduction to the series, the purpose of the series is to offer a multifaceted view of the PHP phenomenon—from an examination of the PHP "scripting culture" to case studies in PHP-based application prototyping and deployment.

Highlights include an essay from Rasmus Lerdorf, credited as the principal creator of the language, about the origins of the PHP "movement" as well as his thoughts on its fate; a case study about how the PHP/Oracle development model accelerated the prototyping and deployment of an order-tracking application at Myers Internet; and a tutorial on creating efficient class designs for PHP applications.

There are plenty of other PHP-related resources on OTN as well; you can access them from one place at the Open Source Developer Technology Center at otn.oracle.com/opensource.

Focus on Oracle JDBC
With the availability of Oracle Database 10g on all major platforms, many OTN members are interested in learning about that release's nearly full support for JDBC 3.0 (retrieval of auto-generated keys, result set holdability, and returning of multiple result sets being the lone exceptions). For that reason, OTN recently introduced a new slate of hands-on technical resources:

• Sample code illustrating the use of CachedRowSet, Connection Caching, PL/SQL Index by Tables, and Web RowSet
• The tutorial series "Understanding the New Features of Oracle 10g JDBC"
• New how-to documents focusing on handling CLOBs, using named parameters, and storing and retrieving references to external data
• The JDBC (10.1.0.2.0) drivers
• The updated Oracle JDBC FAQ, a rich source of information about installation, error messages, supported features, and release-specific issues, is available at otn.oracle.com/tech/java/sqlj_jdbc/htdocs/jdbc_faq.html

Linux Sysadmin Basics for DBAs
Over the last half year, OTN has been steadily increasing its supply of technical articles focusing on the use of Linux utilities such as sed, vi/vim, and awk as well as the proper manipulation of system and file commands. The result is a "terminal mass" of information about basic Linux sysadmin tasks that will be of great value to DBAs beginning to dabble in sysadmin techniques—or perhaps even formally inheriting some of those responsibilities (a not uncommon phenomenon these days).

You can access these materials in the "Linux" section of the technical article archive at otn.oracle.com/pub/articles/tech_dba.html#linux or, if you prefer to explore the full range of OTN's Linux-related technical resources, at the Linux Technology Center itself.

New Columns

"From C++ to PHP"
by Philippe Lachaise
A C++ developer shares his experiences from learning PHP scripting.

"Welcome to the '2 Day DBA'"
by Justin Kestelyn
Oracle Database 10g's focus on database manageability pays off for DBAs.

New Tech Articles

Most Popular* Content on OTN Technical Articles 1. "Oracle Database 10g: The Top 20 Features for DBAs" (series), by Arup Nanda 2. "Disciplined PL/SQL," by Steven Feuerstein 3. "The Hitchhiker's Guide to PHP" (series), various authors 4. "Guide to Linux File Command Mastery," by Sheryl Calish 5. "SQL In, XML Out," by Jonathan Gennick Sample Code & Tutorials 1. PL/SQL Sample Code 2. JDBC Sample Code 3. Oracle Forms Online Demos & Sample Code 4. Tutorials Index 5. JDBC How-Tos *For the three-month period ending March 15, 2004

For DBAs/Sysadmins

"New Life for Old Microsoft Access Data"
by Marcel Gagné
Learn how to easily migrate Access data to Oracle Database on Linux using open source tools.

"Guide to Linux File Command Mastery"
by Sheryl Calish
A crash course in Linux file commands.

For Developers

"Setting Up Oracle and PHP on Mac OS X"
by Matt Rohrer
Oracle, Mac OS X, and open source technologies such as PHP and gqlplus make for an enjoyable, productive, and stable development environment. Here's how to set yours up.

"PHP and ASP.NET Go Head-to-Head"
by Sean Hull
A point-by-point comparison of price, speed and efficiency, security, and cross-platform support between the two most popular means of building Web applications.

"Build a PL/SQL Web Service"
by Jason Price
Oracle Database 10g Web Services allow you to take advantage of your develop-ment investment in PL/SQL and SQL while consuming external Web services from within the database. Here's how to build your own.

New Sample Code & Tutorials

JDBC RowSet DML Sample Application
This new sample app demonstrates the use of JDBC RowSets in DML operations on a database table.

RowSet Implementation Tutorial Series
Explore the use of RowSet implementations such as Cached RowSet, JDBC RowSet, and Web RowSet.

TLD Caching Tutorial Series
Using TLD Caching in JSP to improve performance during application startup and JSP translation.

OC4J 10g Developer Preview 2 How-Tos
Get up to speed with the new capabilities available in the OC4J 10g (10.0.3) Developer Preview 2.