Month: June 2007
June 21

Advanced Oracle SQL Programming

I just got a small e-mail from Laurent Schneider. He started a bold quest in writing a book about SQL programming called “Advanced Oracle SQL Programming“. I had the pleasure to meet Laurent, up in person, during my visit to Oracle Open World in San Francisco (2006).

He has a brilliant mind and likes, amongst challenging Chinese people into a chess game, to juggle with SQL puzzles and problems, and can be very creative like the examples he demonstrated with the XMLDB functions and regular expressions (see here). Advanced Oracle SQL Programming - Laurent Schneider

Despite the fact that he admitted that it won’t have examples like those of my collegaes Anton (“Solving a Sudoku with 1 SQL-statement: the Model-clause”) or Lucas (“Pie Charts in SQL – how pathetic can you get?”), regarding Sudoku puzzles and pie charts, I can’t believe this book won’t be mandatory lecture for all of us who needs to program with (and want to excel in) SQL (…and all us mere mortals who want to catch up…)

The content is described as:

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June 20

Reclaim virtual redo disk space; VMware Converter 3.0.1

I got a small problem regarding a acceptance environment build on VMware Server (currently version 1.02) on Windows. This virtual environment with, amongst others a Oracle 10gR1 database on it, was once build with the older VMware GSX 3.21 software, but the supported (and paid for) VMware GSX version has become over time, the free downloadable VMware Server edition.

When I started, I thought it would be useful to enable the snapshot function, so if an upgrade or patch process, for database, OS or application went wrong, I would be able to reset the virtual machine to it’s starting point and try again… I noticed that after upgrading the software to VMware Server 1.01, and after a while to VMware Server 1.02, that I couldn’t disable the snapshot function anymore because the enable/disable feature was grayed out. The VMware disks had a lot of REDO files, so I wanted to reclaim this space, because the SAN where the VMware virtual disks were residing, had almost no disk space left.

Normally, if the VMware Tools are installed in a VMware machine, it is possible to shrink the disk space of the virtual disks, but this feature is only available if, amongst others, the snapshot feature is not enabled. In my case, I couldn’t disable snapshot feature because it was grayed out and not clickable anymore…

So what now?

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June 16

VirtualBox 1.4.0

There is great virtual machine software out there, VMware, XEN, etc. VMware was one of the first I also dared to use for more serious environments, like for instance development environments. Triggered by my old friend Erwin Brinkhuis, he completely switched to Linux (in his case Ubuntu), I had a look at VirtualBox. This product has, IMHO, real potential to become a VMware contender. Currently it can be used on Linux and Windows, a OSX version is in the making.

VirtualBox Vista

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