Raptor is out of the cage

Oracle have released Raptor (a freely available GUI SQL query tool) which may be of interest to those of you who use Toad or are frustrated with the terseness of the SQL*Plus interface. Raptor is primarily a cross platform, PL/SQL developer tool, written in Java (60 MB download). The SQL output is a scrollable grid (like Toad) and there is the standard schema browser, PL/SQL debugger, SQL pretty printer, DDL generator and a graphical interface to explain plan for query tuning. ...

January 3, 2006

Tom Kyte makes mistake shock

London, near England - Wednesday 2 November 2005 The Oracle community was reeling yesterday from the revelation that the universally respected, internationally renown technical expert and long standing Oracle employee, Thomas Kyte, had made a mistake. The error was discovered by a Senior Oracle DBA based in Solihull in the UK, Mr. N. Brightside who explained: “I was dearly looking forward to attending the UK Oracle User Group in Birmingham and hoped to get my copy of Tom Kyte’s latest book, (Expert Oracle - Database Architecture) signed by Tom personally. However, at the last minute, my manager told me that the end of Q3 was imminent and there was no budget available for the daily 4.50GBP return rail fare. So, I decided to ‘work from home’ and sit down to savour Tom’s excellent book. Imagine my surprise when I found what appeared, at first sight, to be a typographical error on page 38. In a paragraph discussing other relational database systems, Tom incorrectly refers to ‘Ingress’ instead of ‘Ingres’. Then to my horror, a quick search on AskTom revealed that Tom makes this identical misspelling elsewhere. It was not a typo, it was a genuine mistake.” ...

November 4, 2005

Oracle newbies, wizards and gurus

I recently stumbled upon Lisa Dobson’s Oracle Newbies blog. Firstly, although I have never met Lisa, I admire her for two reasons. Firstly, she is about to give a presentation at the UK Oracle User Group in Birmingham. I am a good deal older than Lisa and the prospect of presenting to a large number of ‘grumpy old men’ would fill me with absolute dread. Secondly, I really like Lisa’s rather self deprecating, modest statement on her profile ...

October 29, 2005