As Published In March/April 2004

From Our Readers

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.

Requesting Mastery

I am very interested in attending the Oracle Certified Master (OCM) practicum exam and would like to see content in the "Inside OCP" column related to tips and getting ready for the exam.
Joel Pérez
jfperez@ease.com.ve

Please see this issue's "Inside OCP" column.

Recent Housekeeping

I am attempting to locate an interesting article titled "Locally Managed Tablespaces," by Jonathan Gennick and published in the November/December 2000 issue of Oracle Magazine. The article is no longer available on your Web site. Obviously, you have recently done housekeeping, because I viewed it in December 2003.
Andrew Parker
Andrew.Parker@Unilever.com

In January 2004, we cleaned up Oracle Magazine's online content. We removed most Oracle Magazine content at oracle.com and otn.oracle.com that was posted before January 2001.

Locating Error

I enjoyed the "Expanding Role of Location" article in the January/February 2004 issue of Oracle Magazine.

The reference to the Open GIS Consortium Web site, however, is not correct. The correct URL is www.opengis.org.
Donald Wolgast
wolgastd@mchsi.com

Remembering Those That Came Before

I would like to read more articles on Oracle8i in Oracle Magazine. It would be very valuable for people like myself who don't have the latest database version to have a special section in Oracle Magazine about tips on previous database versions.
Andrea Donath
ADonath@matba.com.ar

Capturing Error

The "Capturing Change" article in the November/December 2003 issue of Oracle Magazine did not indicate that you need to run rdbms/admin/initcdc.sql to make Change Data Capture work.

We run only the catalog.sql, the catproc.sql, and maybe initjvm.sql scripts to create our databases. The initcdc.sql script is not called from any of these scripts.
Jim Blazek
jblazek@cosd.fedex.com

Getting to the Gate

I was troubled about the notes in "From Our Readers" and the "Women in IT" editorial in the January/February 2004 issue of Oracle Magazine. Having been in IT for the past 25 years, I had anticipated that by now I would see more than 10-15 percent females in IT organizations.

Perhaps the trouble goes deeper and starts earlier. High schools need to encourage female students to choose their programming classes. High school guidance counselors need to be made aware of the IT industry and to encourage young ladies to explore IS and software-engineering careers and engineering colleges. Perhaps female IT mentors in the community can contribute to this effort.

Hopefully, by getting more women "to the gate," we will have the opportunity to see more women awarded for their contributions.
Joan Lawson
JLawson@kronos.com

FORALL Error: Correction

I read "Oracle 10g Adds More to FORALL" in the January/February 2004 issue of Oracle Magazine. I have a question on one example.

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In Listing 2, how did you get the procedure ADD_TO_HISTORY to run in Oracle9i? Your 3 DENIED_* index-by tables are sparsely populated, so wouldn't Oracle9i throw a "no data found" error when you insert into the EMPLOYEE_ HISTORY table those index values of employees who are eligible for a raise?
Prashant Tambe
prashant.tambe@pnc.com

You are absolutely correct! My technique of moving rows from one collection to another in order to use that second collection to drive the FORALL is sound. Prior to Oracle 10g, however, that collection must still be densely filled, which my original code example did not guarantee.

When populating my new arrays for the FORALL command in Oracle9i, I should fill them sequentially. The corrected code is at otn.oracle.com/oramag/oracle/04-jan/o14tech_plsql.html.
Steven Feuerstein
steven@stevenfeuerstein.com