26 January 2012

Comparing Schemas: Red Gate Schema Compare for Oracle

This week I attended a webinar by Cary Millsap, organized by Red Gate. It was called "Real Developers DO use Tools" and was focussed on, well, tools. At the end of Cary's talk, James Murtagh showed a demo of their Schema Compare tool. The demo wasn't flawless, but he recovered nicely :) (note to self: don't do live demo's). And this - the demo, not the occuring error - triggered a memory that I wanted to write a blog on the Schema Compare tool. If you missed the webinar you can find it on the website of Red Gate here: http://www.red-gate.com/products/oracle-development/deployment-suite-for-oracle/webinars/webinar-archive I had the pleasure of meeting James Murtagh during the UKOUG annual conference at the end of last year. James also hosts the All Things Oracle site. While we were discussing different topics (even non-oracle) he asked me which tool is my "development tool of choice". The tool I use predominantly is PL/SQL Developer by Allround Automations. "We have a plugin for that",... time to take a closer look at the tool.

11 January 2012

Upgrade Oracle XE from 10 to 11: A word of caution

Finally I had some time to upgrade my Oracle XE database from version 10 to version 11, something I wanted to try out but could never find the time to do it. I wanted to try it out, to see if it all worked as advertised, usually it does. This time however I ran into some problems with the export and import of the APEX applications, good thing it was just on my sandbox database.

03 January 2012

APEX: Friendlier exception message from AJAX call

While it is very easy to create a "Form and a Report" on a single table (or view), just follow the wizard, for end users it is not always intuitive that they should navigate to the form page to remove the record. A nicer solution is the one described by Anthony Rayner in this demo page. This solution uses a number of -very simple- dynamic actions to include a little trashcan on the report page.

02 January 2012

Generate multiple rows

For the first post of the year, one of my New Year's resolutions is to write more posts than last year which shouldn't be too hard, I wanted to collect some different ways of generating multiple records. Sometimes I need, for whatever reason, generate multiple records. These are a few different ways of doing so.