Month: December 2009

December 17
December 7

Michael McLaughlin had written last week some nice small blog posts on XML DB. I couldn’t resist to see if I could make this one easier… 😉

The package DBMS_EPG is sole based on the xdbconfig.xml file, which is the configuration file for the XML DB Protocol Server, which is not, by the way, an Apache Server configured inside the database, but a custom build protocol server hook-in into the Oracle listener, that passes its data to the Shared Server SQL*Net Architecture.

So I made some attempts on my 11gR2 database, without using the nowadays “extract” deprecated functions… After fiddling around with the XMLTABLE function, using DBMS_XDB.CFG_GET() to get the content of the xdbconfig.xml XML document (its result is an xmltype datatype), the following simplified code that results the DAD’s in a varchar2(15) list.

SQL> SELECT u.dad as "PL/SQL DAD List"
  2  FROM   XMLTable(XMLNAMESPACES (
  3                                  default 'http://xmlns.oracle.com/xdb/xdbconfig.xsd'
  4                                ),
  5                  '//servlet-list/*[servlet-language="PL/SQL"]'
  6                  PASSING DBMS_XDB.CFG_GET()
  7                  COLUMNS DAD varchar2(15) PATH '/servlet/servlet-name/text()'
  8                 ) u
  9  ;

PL/SQL DAD List
---------------
APEX

1 row selected.

SQL>  EXECUTE dbms_epg.create_dad('MARCO','/XFiles/*');

PL/SQL procedure successfully completed.

SQL> SELECT u.dad as "PL/SQL DAD List"
  2  FROM   XMLTable(XMLNAMESPACES (
  3                                  default 'http://xmlns.oracle.com/xdb/xdbconfig.xsd'
  4                                ),
  5                  '//servlet-list/*[servlet-language="PL/SQL"]'
  6                  PASSING DBMS_XDB.CFG_GET()
  7                  COLUMNS DAD varchar2(15) PATH '/servlet/servlet-name/text()'
  8                 ) u
  9  ;

PL/SQL DAD List
---------------
APEX
MARCO

2 rows selected.
December 7

Its already Saturday again. UKOUG is over. The weather here in Holland isn’t much better than it was in Birmingham but somehow I miss the X-mas atmosphere. So what did I enjoy or dislike during this years UKOUG conference? The wifi was a minor bummer, but the rest was up on high standard as always. Good quality presentations as should be expected.

On Monday, I really liked James Morle’s Virtual Insanity presentation and realized that I should investigate some more regarding the internal workings and stuff going within virtual machines and the part they play when running Oracle inside it. I hope I can pick up the presentation slides from somewhere. There were a lot of items/topics in that presentation that I will have to look up regarding internal hypervisor methodology.

Mark Drake’s presentation Overview of Oracle XML DB in Oracle Database 11g
run out of time, which could be a bit expected due to the fact that he tried to give a general overview on Oracle XMLDB architecture and its history. Apparently he prepared thoroughly, I really enjoyed it, but he had approximately 80 slides. The XMLDB Developers Guide nowadays counts for more than 900 pages of material and it is undo-able to touch all those topics. For a non-native speaker this probably would not even doable… Would have liked a small demo in there somehow… Afterward Mark told me that they were thinking about posting the XFiles app onto the apex.oracle.com website, but were a bit scary what would happen if anyone could upload files as the wanted (ehhh stuff like viagra, etc, spam…). I thought a bit about it. Maybe it is easy to prevent by allowing only certain MIME types, like “txt” files…although…