Category: Howto
June 25

Quering RSS Feeds The XMLDB Way

Actually this is old stuff (2006), but it got lost in a comment section. I think this can still be useful to some and I also post this here for prosperity.

Somewhere in 2006 my colleague Lucas Jellema wrote a post on the AMIS Technology site about querying rss feeds from the database. My colleague Anton Scheffer and I commented on that article with our XMLDB functionality mindset. Later on in 2007 Lucas wrote another useful post called “Querying RSS feeds in SQL…“. Peter Wolf commented that he had also written a very nice blog post about using XMLDB functionality while Integrating Yahoo Pipes into APEX.

I think this is still useful stuff to a lot of us, although you should keep in mind that the table(xmlsequence(extract())) construct will be, in time, out lived by the XMLTABLE function. Also XMLTABLE supports XPath V2, the table(xmlsequence(extract())) doesn’t. The XMLTABLE function is available from Oracle database version 10.2.

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May 19

First Experiences with Ubuntu 8.0.4 DE (Hardy)

While being in Greece (2, 3 weeks ago), my nephew asked if I could install Ubuntu on his desktop. His desktop already contained Windows Vista Home Edition and I was not so sure if it would work to install a dual boot environment. I had ordered, a while ago, via the Ubuntu web site 2 CD’s of Ubuntu 7.10 via their “ShipIt” service. One for me and one for my nephew. So, after pointing out the re-partitioning risks involved, I tried my luck installing the Ubuntu 7.10 version. We de-fragmented the disk and split up the disk in two partitions via the build-in partitioner program.

A guided tour can be found here (not that you need it with this release):

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April 18

About the XML(DB) W3C DateTime format while converting Java DateTime

Triggered by a post from Eddie Awad about Current Date in an Oracle database called “Give Me The Current Date Please”, I thought about a XMLDB Forum discussion that ended up in a discussion about JavaDateTime. This discussion focussed me also on XML date time formats. Those XML (W3C) date time formats are explained on their website under the section “XML Schema Part 2 – Datatypes Second Edition“.

Two questions came to my mind:

  1. What is a java date time?
  2. What is the official XML format date time mask that should be used?

After some searching and asking my developer AMIS colleagues some questions, it came down to the following answer regarding a definition for java date time:

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