Productivity : Use Keypass to keep track of your environment’s credentials,

Some use Excel, Others simply use text files to keep track of their passwords, but I use keepass .

It is simply a vault for your logins and passwords which you can unlock with a single password. However I use it also for auto-piloting my login procedure.

keepass main window

The whole idea is not to have to use a pool of passwords for all systems and also to auto-start you log-in procedure and save waring off your precious fingers in typing useless usernames and passwords.

In this article I will show how to use keepass to auto-login to:

• Putty
• WinScp
• Toad
• SQLPLUS
• SiebelTools
• FieZilla

And from the examples above you would be able to use it with any command line tool as well.

You could also use it for keeping track of your web site usernames ,passwords and URL’s

It is available on Windows, Mac, Linux, Android and iPhone.

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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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Using Decision Tables for gathering requirements and development.

We are in the IT business, and a lot depends on how requirements are gathered. If we as IT Gurus try to implement a technology and ignore the requirements, then we have failed.

Our employers and clients are not interested in the latest technology, but they are rather interested in delivering the functionality their requirements dictates.

There are many ways to document requirements and there are times where you have to be innovative on how to document your client’s wishes and dreams. The better you are in this at the beginning, the better the final product will look at the end of the project.

One of the techniques I used many times to document and code requirements is Decision Tables.

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Java and Oracle : JDBC Layers and Connection types

I know no body does that, but I did it anyway :

I read through the JDBC connection types “http://download.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/technotes/guides/jdbc/getstart/intro.html#1019423” and thought I summarize the deferences between JDBC drivr types in this diagram:

Diagram Showing Layers of JDBC and Types with Oracle drivers

In short, there are 4 types of JDBC Connection, but only two are important from my experience:

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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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