Category: SQL, XML/SQL, XPath, XQuery
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 8

DBMS_XDB.SETLISTENERLOCALACCESS

I noticed an new addition to the DBMS_XDB package a while ago named SETLISTENERLOCALACCESS that, despite it is part of a XMLDB package, was first seen by me on a APEX forum (it is not listed in the Oracle 10g manuals (eg. Oracle® Database PL/SQL Packages and Types Reference).

What does it do?

The manual (Oracle® Database Express Edition Installation Guide !) described it as follows:

4.4 Making Oracle Database XE Server Available to Remote Clients
After you install Oracle Database XE Server, its graphical user interface is only available from the local server, not remotely.

    Security Note:

    With remote HTTP access to Oracle Database XE, all information exchanged between the browser and the database is in clear text—that is, unencrypted—including database user names and passwords. If this is cause for concern, do not enable remote HTTP connection to the database.

Asking for an explanation on the XMLDB forum the following information was given:

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June 6

Tales From The Script (TFTS)