Ars Technica has published a good article touching on everything from collapsed network cores and Spanning Tree design to email bagging and the economics of clustering and service redundancy.
Author: Piers C
Oracle SQLDeveloper 2.1 vs Quest TOAD
This past week I’ve been seeing whether I can wean myself off TOAD to the new SQLDeveloper 2.1 that was officially released last month. SQLDeveloper is a Java based IDE and so, unlike TOAD, it can be used on OS X and Ubuntu. SQLDeveloper is not open source, but it is licenced for free, whereas TOAD costs almost a thousand dollars per developer for the entry level version.
Version 2.1 of SQLDeveloper shows considerable improvement compared to the original release, but there are still some rough edges. TOAD presents database connections (connection configuration) and sessions (active connections) clearly and separately, with schema browsers and worksheets for each session in separate windows, and highlighting of windows that share the same session. SQLDeveloper has a single connection navigator, perhaps more familiar to users of other IDEs, but each connection may have only one session: you have to duplicate and rename a connection if you want to establish another session using the same connection parameters. Working with TOAD there is nearly always a default current session context, so it was annoying with SQLDeveloper reports to be prompted repeatedly for the connection to use to run a report.
One of the features of SQLDeveloper that first interested me was Subversion support. Again, this is similar to other Java IDEs. I’ve used Team Coding with TOAD in the past but the integration with CVS or PVCS was not as seamless as one would like. Now I just use TortoiseSVN and make sure I open the local source file whenever I want to edit a stored procedure and never edit the stored procedure source in the database directly. Oracle provides a tutorial on Subversion with SQLDeveloper but in my opinion it completely misses the point by failing to explain how to maintain stored procedures.
In general TOAD still appears a little more polished: for example favorites support in the File Open dialog, and a popup calendar control for setting date bind variables when executing a query. TOAD provides better feedback: for example it automatically displays the row count in a status line for every worksheet query, but with SQLDeveloper you have to select a popup menu option. For long running procedure execs TOAD provides a script runner with animated graphics and a timer, but the default behavior for SQLDeveloper is to exec the procedure like sqlplus in a small log window that is not immediately obvious. On the other hand the dockable tabs of SQLDeveloper are easier to manage than the more dated MDI design of TOAD.
Perhaps the biggest surprise, however, was when I clicked Tools/Monitor SQL and got ‘The use of this feature requires that the Oracle Tuning Pack be licensed.’ Oracle is not giving everything away for free after all, and it looks like for more advanced features I may still be going back to TOAD for a little while.
Oracle Completes Sun Acquisition
On the day that Apple announced iPad the bigger news for corporate developers was the completion of Oracle’s acquisition of Sun. The announcement was accompanied by a five hour press briefing and claims the company will be hiring two thousand more employees. Personally, however, I am inclined to agree with this downbeat assessment made when the acquisition was first announced last year.
Technorati Tags: Oracle
Windows 7 is doing phenomenally well
According to this article on Ars Technica even if Windows is slowly losing share, Windows 7 is doing phenomenally well.
Installing Oracle XE on Ubuntu
Oracle XE is available for 32-bit architecture (i386) Linux only, although it may be possible to force installation on a 64-bit host. It will run in 512KB RAM but requires a 1GB swap space. Add:
deb http://oss.oracle.com/debian unstable main non-free
to /etc/apt/sources.list and then as root:
wget http://oss.oracle.com/el4/RPM-GPG-KEY-oracle -O- | sudo apt-key add - apt-get update apt-get install oracle-xe
‘libaio’ and ‘bc’ are in the repository, so dependencies will pull them in if the user doesn’t have them.
Incanto
After months of delay I’ve finally switched all my database creation scripts to Incanto. The most obvious benefit is that my Ant build scripts are now more portable, as I am no longer exec’ing a shell script wrapper to sqlplus, and I no longer need Cygwin to run the build scripts on my Windows workstation. One of the nice features about Incanto is that it allows you to pass in an Ant propertyset which is used to define SQL*Plus variables for the invoked scripts. I find this useful for overriding schema names and allowing multiple sets of application schemas to be created in the same developer database, for example when researching support issues alongside new development. The Incanto website has a page of best practices including a <macrodef> which I placed in a shared build file and <import>ed into my various Ant scripts.
Incanto requires sqlplus to be on the PATH, so I handle that and setting login parameters in .antrc. One strange issue I encountered on SLES while making this transition was that even although sqlplus was on my PATH and executable from my shell scripts, when I used Incanto I got
java.io.IOException: java.io.IOException: sqlplus: not found
Changing the permissions on sqlplus from 750 to 755 resolved the issue, even though the executable already belonged to a secondary group of which I was a member. Note that if you don’t need the advanced features of sqlplus you can still execute PL/SQL with Ant’s sql task.
Google Officially Launches Chrome Extensions
With support for Xmarks, AdThwart and IE Tab I’m finally considering it as an alternative to Firefox. Chrome is fast, this video explains DNS pre-resolution.
Subversion on Ubuntu – Multiple Repositories
Eighteen months have passed since I setup Subversion on Ubuntu and I’ve found multiple repositories are valuable for providing finer grained access control and easier storage management. Here is a revised incantation:
su -
adduser --system --home /srv/svnrepos --gecos "System account to run svnserve" svn
apt-get install subversion xinetd
cat >> /etc/xinetd.d/svn << "EOF"
service svn
{
port = 3690
socket_type = stream
protocol = tcp
wait = no
user = svn
server = /usr/bin/svnserve
server_args = -i -r /srv/svnrepos
}
EOF
/etc/init.d/xinetd restart
# for each repository, eg. myrepo1
$repo=myrepo1
svnadmin create /srv/svnrepos/$repo
chown -R svn:nogroup /srv/svnrepos
# uncomment line to use default password file
vi ~svn/$repo/conf/svnserve.conf
cat >> ~svn/$repo/conf/passwd << "EOF"
[users]
fred = *****
...
Renaming a Linux Host
Renaming a Linux host I found this command useful:
grep -r -l $(hostname) /etc
Windows 7 Backup & Restore
I had my first disk failure this week of my Windows 7 laptop hard drive. Fortunately I’ve been using Windows 7 Backup, and all I had to do was plug in the external USB drive with my backups to another machine, boot off the Windows 7 installation CD, and select ‘Repair…’ using the latest system image from the USB drive. Even restoring a system image from a Dell Latitude to a Toshiba Tecra (with the same sized drive and dual core x64 CPU) was painless, all the necessary drivers were changed automatically with no fuss. The only problem was reestablishing trust with a Windows domain, which was worked around by changing the computer name and re-adding to the domain. The default Windows 7 Backup configuration is to create a system image and backup all files in Libraries, which works just fine for me.