PL/SQL White Lists in Oracle Database 12c Release 1 (12.1)

I’ve been playing about with the ACCESSIBLE BY clause to create PL/SQL white lists in Oracle 12c. Here’s the article I wrote about it.

There seem to be some discrepancies in the documentation*, which I’ve highlighted in the article. Not sure if they are documentation errors, functionality that has been pulled and will reappear in 12cR2, or just misunderstandings on my part. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

* I’ve posted comments on the docs, so if they are documentation errors they may get fixed.

WordPress 3.7.1 Released

WordPress 3.7.1 has been released. The announcement is here and the changelog is here.

If you go on to your blog now, you will have the option of manually initiating the upgrade in the normal way. If you wait a few hours, it will magically update itself for you.

  • The Terminator: A few hours later it begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time… In a panic, they try to pull the plug….
  • Sarah Connor: WordPress fights back.
  • The Terminator: Yes. It launches its missiles against the targets in Russia.
  • John Connor: Why attack Russia? Aren’t they our friends now?
  • The Terminator: Because WordPress knows the Russian counter-attack will eliminate its enemies over here…

I’ve warned you!

Cheers

Tim…

APAC OTN Tour 2013

Just a quick plug for an upcoming OTN tour, that I’m not on this year.

  • Auckland, New Zealand : 8th November (agenda)
  • Perth, Australia : 12th-13th November (agenda)
  • Tokyo, Japan : 13th-15th November
  • Beijing, China : 17th-18th November
  • Guangzou, China : 19th November

I attended the OTN Asia Pacific Tour in 2011, which included some of these locations. Hopefully I will get to do it again in the near future. 🙂

Like any conferences, these events are all about the attendees, so the more people that turn up and the more vocal the attendees, the better the events are.

I’ve seen the agendas for the Auckland and Perth events and they look cool. I hope everyone has a good time!

Cheers

Tim…

Captain Support and the Mystery of the Broken Website (Internet Explorer 11)

After successfully upgrading two laptops to Windows 8.1, Captain Support flew back to his secret server room and continued to monitor the world’s communications, waiting for the next opportunity to allow mere mortals to witness his greatness. That opportunity came when his sister-in-law emailed to say that his nephew’s football academy website was not working properly…

Having read some reports about broken websites, Captain Support assumed the problem was because of Internet Explorer 11, so he used LogMeIn to connect to his sister-in-law’s laptop, installed FireFox and tested the website. It worked perfectly. The site also worked fine using Chrome.

Having saved the day yet again, Captain Support carried on with the business of saving the rest of the world by turning things off and on again

Cheers

Captain Support…

OS X Mavericks on MacBook Pro (13-inch, Mid 2009)

After getting back from the OTN Nordic Tour 2013, I figured it was time to give OS X Mavericks a go.

I’m currently using a MacBook Pro (13-inch, Mid 2009). It’s a little long in the tooth, but it has 8G RAM and a 256G SSD, so it still performs pretty well. At least well enough for me not to replace it just yet. 🙂

The download took about 30 minutes. I guess I’m a little behind the curve here because lots of people complained about the download times. It pays to hold off for a few days. The installation took about the same amount of time too, so after about an hour I had Mavericks up and running.

Several people reported really slow performance after the upgrade. So far it looks pretty much the same to me.

I had already read Jason Arneil‘s article about VirtualBox 4.3 on OS X Mavericks, which saved me a lot of time. I can’t live without VirtualBox, so any OS that can’t run it is out of the Window for me. I had similar issues to those he saw and fixed them in the same way. Thanks Jason!

So now everything is running as normal. If anything scary jumps out I will report… 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

 

The Rise of Endymion

The Rise of Endymion is the fourth book in the Hyperion Cantos series by Dan Simmons.

The Hyperion Cantos is essentially two stories. The first one split over the first two books and the second split over books three and four. The two stories are separated by about 300 years, but there are some links and even common characters. Throughout the books the characters and scenarios were consistently interesting, but the books themselves were not always so consistently good to read. The Rise of Endymion is a good example of that. There are some totally excellent sections of the book and some that could just do with being cut completely. There was a section describing the mountain ranges of a planet and I just found myself thinking, “WTF is the author expecting readers to think here? It’s a string of made up names for mountains that don’t exist. What a waste of words…”

Despite the issues, I was extremely interested to see how things turned out. Who lived, who died, did the Pax/Church get exposed and overthrown… In that sense, the book delivered very well.

On reflection, the series reminds me a lot of the Dune series. A combination of exceptional high points and some rather lacklustre sections that test your loyalty. 🙂 Both series are well worth the effort though…

Cheers

Tim…

OTN Nordic Tour 2013 – It’s a wrap!

So the OTN Nordic Tour 2013 is over. Here are the posts I put out during the tour.

  1. OTN Nordic Tour 2013
  2. OTN Nordic Tour 2013 – Stockholm
  3. OTN Nordic Tour 2013 – Copenhagen
  4. OTN Nordic Tour 2013 – Oslo

I’ve already done a bunch of thank you messages in the individual posts, but I just want to take this opportunity to say a big thank you to everyone involved once more.

Thanks to everyone at ORCAN, DOUGOUGNOTN and the Oracle ACE Program for helping to make this happen. Thanks to the other speakers for being involved and trying to help organise me. Big thanks go out to all the attendees that turned up to these events. I hope to see you all soon.

Cheers

Tim…

OTN Nordic Tour 2013 – Oslo

We got on the plane from Copenhagen to Oslo and met up with the OUGN folks for some food in the hotel. We spent a long time talking about non-Oracle stuff, like science and religion. It was fun.

The morning started with a long breakfast, which included me nearly throwing orange juice over Mike Dietrich and him succeeding in throwing tea over me. We both blamed the table, but in reality it was our secret desire for a food fight that caused it. 🙂

I went to Sten‘s session called “From Requirements to Tool Choice”, which as the name suggests, discusses which tools are a good fit for which types of development. He has some interesting statistics in the presentation, which are a good talking point. You might want to take a look at OraToolWatch, which he maintains.

My sessions were on Analytic Functions and WebLogic. I am incapable of keeping to any sort of schedule. Mike Dietrich came to warn me about leaving for the plane. I thought he was asking me to finish my presentation 15 minutes early, which for a 45 minute session is kinda difficult, so I brushed him off and carried on, only to find out at the end that I had overshot by 15 minutes. I’m now cringing as I write this because I must have looked like such a diva. Just so you know, it wasn’t me being a diva. It was me being a dumb-ass. After the session I spoke to Mike and it seems I had told him the wrong flight times, which was why he was especially concerned, thinking I might miss my plane. People should just shoot me with a tranquillizer dart when my time is up. Sorry to all those that missed out on their coffee break. 🙁

Once again, I went straight from my last presentation to the airport to catch my plane. This time it was for the flight home… I sat chatting to Lonneke and Sten for a while before I got my first plane. When I got to Amsterdam I had a 2+ hour stop-over. After about an hour, I sat down with a coffee and I heard, “Can passenger Hall travelling to Birmingham please board immediately at gate D6!” I ditched my coffee and ran like an idiot from D49 to D6. I started apologising to the staff, saying I must of got my times mixed up etc. They checked and it was another passenger called “Hall”, travelling to Birmingham on a different flight. I walked back to gate D49 feeling rather frazzled. 🙂

Big thanks to OUGN and the conference attendees to making me welcome. Thanks as always to OTN and the Oracle ACE Program for helping to make this happen.

Cheers

Tim…

OTN Nordic Tour 2013 – Copenhagen

I spent the first two sessions of the DOUG event watching Mike Dietrich presenting on 12c upgrades, pluggable databases and new features. I’ve seen some of his stuff already during the LAOTN Tour (Southern Leg), but his presentations have changed a little since I last saw them. To quote Noons,

“Mike’s talk is superb. No bull, just down to facts…”

I think that sums it up nicely. 🙂

After that I did my two sessions for this event. One on virtualisation and one on WebLogic. It was quite a strange day for me as I did two talks that had no demos and both were on areas that are not my main skill set. A mixture scary and fun rolled in to one. I literally finished my talk, put my laptop in my bag and got in a taxi for the airport, so I didn’t have any time to mingle after the sessions. I hope they went down OK. With a bit of luck I will get to do another conference in Denmark and spend more time talking to the attendees outside the sessions. 🙂

Note. The presentations rooms had bowls of sweets. Connor McDonald will know exactly what happened. 🙂

Thanks to everyone that came to my presentations in Denmark, to DOUG for inviting me and giving me loads of sweets. 🙂 Thanks also to OTN and the Oracle ACE Program for helping to make this happen.

Cheers

Tim…