Quick examples into Oracle PL/SQL collections.

There are three types of Oracle Collections you can use in PL/SQL :

• Index-by-Tables : Unbounded, Hashes , Single Dimensional
• Nested-Tables : Unbounded, Array, unordered, Single dimension
• VARRAYS : Bounded, Single Dimension

Each one of these Types have its own features and limitations.

Most of them, share some common functions like EXTEND, FIRST, LAST, ..etc

These self-explaining examples; helps the reader get a first introduction into each collection type .

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Oracle : What is APEX ?

APEX is a great Oracle product, yet some-how is under-rated.

Think of APEX for Oracle the same as Access is for Microsoft. It is light-weight-declarative tool to build database applications without much coding.

If you embrace this analogy between APEX and Access, then allow me to introduce APEX by comparing it to ACCESS.

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Oracle Virtual machine “OTN Developer Days” appliance.

If you are a developer and need your own Oracle environment to try out and test ideas without disrupting your main development environment, then I propose using a Virtual Machine with Developer Days appliance.

Choose what type of environment you want from this link and start following the instructions. I prefer the Developer Days appliance , since it requires reasonable resources and more related to my work. This virtual Machine contains:

• Oracle Enterprise Linux 5
• Oracle Database 11g Release 2 Enterprise Edition
• Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database Cache
• Oracle XML DB
• Oracle SQL Developer
• Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler
• Oracle Application Express 4.0
• Oracle JDeveloper
• Hands-On-Labs (accessed via the Toolbar Menu in Firefox)

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Visualize your Data with GraphViz

Ever wanted to visualize your  database information ?

here is a quick answer:

SQL –> XML –> XSL trasnformation–> DOT –> GraphViz –> JPEG/PDF

I work theses days with Siebel CRM system.  It is very configurable in how you want to store your data and display them.

One thing about Siebel Configuration, is that you can overload one table with multiple entities.  Each Siebel customization could be different in how you organize your entities into tables. So I had a problem in really understanding how the system was developed. Cases like which type of records link to which entities in the same table or other tables.

I was looking for someway to visualize Entity relation based on the data that is there in the Database -I’m not talking about Entity Relationship Diagram (ERD)- I’m talking about how certain customers relate to each others and to their addresses.

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