Hotsos Profiler Extension for SQL Developer

Hotsos has released its Profiler extension for SQL Developer. The extension is free but you must have a license for the profiler for the extension to do you any good.

The profiler works almost like the Explain Plan tool in SQL Developer. Enter the text you want to profile, press a key and then view the output.

You do need access to the trace files that are generated. The page linked above had instructions on how to enable access and what permissions you need.

A neat feature is that you can save profiling sessions for historical access. That can be a life saver if you are trying to tune and are trying out different approaches. Instead of keeping your own backups, use the history. You can also share that history so that all of you developers have the same baseline. Nice.

Hotsos also provides a discussion group for questions relating to the extension. If you are a Hotsos profiler user, you should check out this extension.

oracle hotsos

CUNY Chooses Oracle

City University of New York (CUNY) has standardized on PeopleSoft Financials, Human Capital and Campus Solutions. Of course, all of this will be running on Oracle 11g and, eventually, Fusion.

"We chose Oracle to provide the highest quality service and advanced solutions to accommodate our institutions' various sizes and non-traditional programs," said Brian Cohen, CUNY's chief information officer and co-project leader for CUNY FIRST. "We chose Oracle's PeopleSoft Enterprise Campus Solutions 9.0 for the new capabilities this version offered and look forward to leveraging it to transform our student information system."

CUNY selected Oracle due to the functionality and scalability of its applications - vital factors considering CUNY's unique composition of senior and community colleges and other programs and institutions - and the number of PeopleSoft implementations within higher education institutions in the U.S. Oracle's application solutions and database will enable CUNY to implement a single database instance for the entire university in a true multi-institution configuration.

"We chose Oracle to provide the highest quality service and advanced solutions to accommodate our institutions' various sizes and non-traditional programs," said Brian Cohen, CUNY's chief information officer and co-project leader for CUNY FIRST. "We chose Oracle's PeopleSoft Enterprise Campus Solutions 9.0 for the new capabilities this version offered and look forward to leveraging it to transform our student information system."

CUNY selected Oracle due to the functionality and scalability of its applications - vital factors considering CUNY's unique composition of senior and community colleges and other programs and institutions - and the number of PeopleSoft implementations within higher education institutions in the U.S. Oracle's application solutions and database will enable CUNY to implement a single database instance for the entire university in a true multi-institution configuration.

Ron Spalter, deputy chief operating officer and co-project Leader for CUNY FIRST stated, "It was significant to us that Oracle offered CUNY the Oracle Insight program, which we refined to focus on a high profile area for CUNY students - financial aid. We are working with Oracle to frame, analyze and resolve a number of outstanding opportunities in this area."

The City University of New York is the nation's largest urban public university. CUNY comprises 23 institutions: 11 senior colleges, six community colleges, the William E. Macaulay Honors College at CUNY, the Graduate School and University Center, the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, the CUNY School of Law at Queens College, the CUNY School of Professional Studies and the Sophie Davis School of Biomedical Education. The University serves more than 231,000 degree-credit students and 230,000 adult, continuing, and professional education students. College Now, the University's academic enrichment program for 32,500 high school students, is offered at CUNY campuses and more than 300 high schools throughout the five boroughs of the City of New York.

oracle peoplesoft

Oracle's Letter to Bea

Oracle tried to buy Bea, Bea slapped them down, Oracle responds:

October 12, 2007
Board of Directors
BEA Systems, Inc.
2315 North First Street
San Jose, CA 95131

Dear Members of the Board of Directors:
As discussed with your management team, Oracle remains available to discuss and complete a transaction quickly and efficiently.

We believe that it is important to clarify the sequence of activities that have transpired over the past few days. Upon receipt of Bill Klein's letter dated October 11, I contacted him to address any process concerns. Bill and I agreed on an accelerated process that would be, by anyone's standard, "short in duration" and not "open-ended" and that would permit BEA to not "divulge competitively sensitive information."

BEA's management agreed to meet this morning at 10:00am Pacific time to commence a process intended to result in the execution of definitive agreements before the open of business on Monday, October 15. Unfortunately, BEA cancelled the meeting late last night and declined our invitations to reschedule. In my subsequent discussions with Bill earlier today, I asked whether there was any process that BEA would prefer to follow to move towards a friendly transaction and was told that BEA had no such process in mind.

We are available to proceed immediately with a process that would lead to a friendly transaction. In the meantime, we remain committed to our proposed price of $17.00 per share, provided that the BEA Board and management team do not institute any measures which reduce the value of the company or shift value from BEA's shareholders to the management team. Our proposed price is a substantial premium to an already-inflated stock price that reflected speculation of the potential sale of BEA and represents a more than 40% premium to BEA's stock price before the appearance of activist shareholders in mid-August of this year.

Sincerely,
ORACLE CORPORATION
Charles Phillips
President

oracle bea

Oracle Makes PHP Code Open Source (PHP License)

Oracle today announced the contribution and a preview release of an enhanced Oracle Call Interface (OCI8) database driver for PHP. This helps bring breakthrough scalability to PHP applications, further enhancing PHP as a viable development environment for mission-critical applications. The OCI8 database driver for PHP supports important Oracle® Database features such as connection pooling and fast application notification, enabling a single industry-standard server to support tens of thousands of database connections while providing higher availability.

The enhanced OCI8 database driver for PHP provides new, improved integration between PHP and Oracle Database 11g, to allow a server-side connection pool shareable across web servers and languages, significantly enhancing the scalability of web-based systems. Highlights include:

* Breakthrough Scalability -- leveraging Oracle Database 11g's Database Resident Connection Pool (DRCP) feature, a large number of users can be supported with significantly reduced memory consumption. Multiple web servers running on different systems can share a single database connection pool, helping to further reduce consumption of system resources;

* High Availability -- supports advanced Oracle Database features such as fast application notification with Oracle Real Application Clusters and Oracle Data Guard. PHP applications can benefit from reduced downtime and higher levels of availability with this feature;

* Extended Compatibility -- existing PHP applications can take advantage of DRCP and fast application notification without changes in application code, resulting in an immediate boost in scalability, enabling more efficient hardware utilization and lower TCO.

"Oracle continues its long track record of contributions to the open source community, and with this OCI8 database driver for PHP we also help PHP developers leverage the power of the industry-leading Oracle Database 11g," said Ken Jacobs, vice president Product Strategy, Server Technologies, Oracle. "With these new enterprise-class features that Oracle brings to the PHP community, we expect to further strengthen PHP as a tool of choice and expand use of Oracle Database for Web 2.0 and mission-critical enterprise application deployments."

oracle php

Oracle Awarded for Innovation

Oracle won the CMP Channel VARBusiness 2007 Tech Innovator award in the Business Enterprise category for the Oracle SOA Suite. The SOA Suite is part of Oracle Fusion. SOA Suite is Oracle's answer to web services and service oriented architecture.

oracle award

Team Oracle Flies for Fleet Week

Awesome picture over San Fran.

oracle planes