Category: 11gR1, 11gR2
July 15

Setting Up an XMLDB Performance “Baseline” Environment

I just read Thomas Kyte’ s blog post “Read This“, which is dealing with the content of the blog post of Cary Millsap. As Tom phrased it:

I liked what Cary Millsap just said:

I don’t mean “show and tell,” where someone claims he has improved performance at hundreds of customer sites by hundreds of percentage points [sic], so therefore he’s an expert.

I mean show your work, which means documenting a relevant baseline measurement, conducting a controlled experiment, documenting a second relevant measurement, and then showing your results openly and transparently so that your reader can follow along and even reproduce your test if he wants to.

This is more or less funny, because I read Cary’s post, be apparently I didn’t read it… I can really relate to it now.

I am in the middle of setting up a XMLDB test environment to test, among others, load times while using different kinds off XMLType storage based upon CLOB, Object Relational and Binary XML (using Basicfile / Securefile options). And although I am working on a VMware environment, I noticed that it isn’t that easy to setup a “controlled experiment“. What makes it harder is, that I am using the Mediawiki XML English dumpfile, that contains roundabout 7 million records (17 Gb of ASCII data). This makes it more interesting, and the effects more clearer, but it also takes much more time to do stuff.

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July 8

HOWTO: Create a Native Database Web Service

I noticed that when I wanted to do some tests with the 11g Native Database Web Service (again), NDWS for short, that I had to gather the information from all over the place on my site. Which was not so very handy. So here a short intro how to set it up, configure and deploy it, also based on the OTN XMLDB Forum example from Mark Drake.

Overview

In short you will have to do the following steps:

  1. Install Oracle XMLDB
  2. Enable the Protocol Server for HTTP access
  3. Enable the orawsv entry points in xdbconfig.xml
  4. Create an example to test the NDWS service
  5. Test the NDWS service by calling the WSDL entry point
  6. Troubleshooting

Sounds very complex, doesn’t it? But be assured, it isn’t at all. As pointed out, most of it is described in posts on this site.

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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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