Month: November 2009

November 15

Its free. Its cool. You need them for the APEX XFILES demo application. As far a as I know now, you need two supporting PL/SQL packages to make the APEX XFILES application work:

The origins of those PL/SQL packages, etc, are supporting code used by the XMLDB Development team themselves. More info, demo’s or scripts can be found on the OTN XMLDB website. The XMLDB Development team started to split the scripts up for use in specific areas. The old xdbutility zip package had most of them still combined. Now the xdbutilities.zip package with PL/SQL scripts and packages (aka. the “Oracle XML DB Ease of Use Tools for Structured Storage“) its specific usage is pinpointed on manipulating and managing XML Schemas which are used for XMLType-based storage (I saw that 99% of them reflect, are usable with XMLType tables Object Relational storage only). In the now, for the first time, available document it states:

November 13
November 9

Apparently there is already a Early Adopter Release since september, but even so, I am very happy that the first XMLDB features are getting implemented. The readme describes the new feature for XMLDB as

  • XML Type tables are visible in the Connections navigator
  • XML Type columns data can be edited in Data tab

I tried it a bit and saw to my plesant surprise that it also provides, will provide, direct XDB Repository access to files and folders. Really cool. The first (small) mistake was also noticed by me, in the overview, describing an XML Schema as a datatype BLOB. Hint for the Oracle SQL Developer Team, a more descriptive, correct content type can be deducted from the XDB$RESOURCE table due to the fact that the content type/mime type will be display in this table (see also xdbresource.xsd) “purchaseOrder.xsd” as text/xml.

Look and feel regarding the editing of XMLType is a bit like Toad does it, at least in the Early Adapter version. Not a direct possibility to edit an XML document, but a extra window that pops-up before you get the option to edit the content.

Oracle SQL Developer 2.1 EA Release - XMLDB Features

Click on the picture to enlarge