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Showing posts from September, 2015

Compiling Oracle code from Atom text editor

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Just yesterday I was watching a webinar titled: "Fill the Glass: Measuring Software Performance" which featured Jorge Rimblas. You can check out the video on Vimeo at the following URL:  https://vimeo.com/140068961 . It's just giving an insight into a project Jorge is working on, giving various tips here and there - so if you have a minute (rather, an hour) to spare, go and check it out. One of the sections that particularly caught my attention was the fact Jorge was able to compile packages from his editor of choice (which is Sublime text editor) (this happens at around the 18:20 mark). Because I like free (and open source) software, I actually use Atom text editor. Being centred around a plugin ecosystem, I was curious how he was able to do this - and if in fact I'd be able to accomplish the same, in Atom. So, first of all I did some hunting to see how it was done in Sublime. This led me to this great post by Tim St. Hilaire -  http://wphilltech.com/sublime-text

Making connections to the Oracle Database from Golang

I posted the other day about getting going with Golang[ 1 ], and as mentioned am planning to do a series of posts on various aspects of the language - as a means to help with the learning process. Being an Oracle developer, it seemed logical I would want to be able to make connections to the Oracle database. Built into the language core is an SQL interface (for issuing queries and statements) which is through the module "database/sql". The other side of it is that you need a valid driver. A list of available drivers is on the go wiki[ 2 ]. You will see that there are 2 listed for Oracle. How do I judge which project to use? First I see that one has considerably more stars and for another, the online commentary I see also seems to suggest that same package. And that is  https://github.com/mattn/go-oci8 . Driver setup Before we get to the driver, you need to make sure you have an Oracle client and the SDK installed on your system. For, this I followed the steps as per the

Oracle developer choice awards

From June 21, Oracle opened up nominations for what they have dubbed Oracle developer choice awards, in 5 broad categories: SQL PL/SQL ORDS APEX Database Design There has been a panel that has narrowed down the nominations from each category, and now the voting has opened up - until the 15th October.  You are able to vote for more than one person in each category, the rules don't specify how many votes in each category, but I would encourage selecting a few of the people you think are most deserving in the community and giving them an up-vote.  Please choose wisely, because the system doesn't allow you to undo your upvote - the only way to undo that vote, is to then down vote. So unless you feel very strongly that that person shouldn't be awarded and wish to down-vote them, I emplore you to choose wisely. The APEX candidates Jari Laine Very active of the OTN APEX forum, from well before I even started working with APEX. The time he has spent as

Prototyping usage of an OAUTH API

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There are many services out there that offer an OAUTH2 API - whereby you get an access token, associated to your account, and you use that with requests rather than logging in each request. It's a solid design, because for one, you as a user can opt to grant permission to parts of the system, and for another you can easily revoke access to individual applications. One problem? It is fairly unlikely there is a client library built for PL/SQL or APEX use. For instance, Google provides libraries for[ 1 ]: Java JavaScript .NET PHP Python Objective-C Another example, Instagram provides[ 2 ]: Python Ruby It's not too hard to build it in PL/SQL once you understand the flow of OAUTH. I started working on one for Google services, which is hosted over on my GitHub profile. Before you get too far with that though, you may like to test the requests you are attempting to work with. The one's I have seen tend to provide an API test tool, however you may like to create

My experience as an Oracle developer running Ubuntu

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If you have been following my blog, you may have noticed the desktop environment I use is the Ubuntu distribution of Linux. Growing up, I always tried Linux here and there, but never stuck with it - it was more just to try out. As with anything, if you are going to use something new, you really have to commit to it - pick a period of time you are willing to use it for, and see how you go. If you still don't like it at the end, go back into your old ways. (I will add that I did once upon a time own a Mac. Actually, I purchased a Powerbook right before Apple made the switch to the Intel CPU architecture. I know Mac OS X seems quite popular in the development community nowadays, however I still prefer to be able to select my hardware, and I believe I get that freedom and also get a bit of Software freedom by running Linux.) At around 2008 - actually, soon after I started working with APEX - I had a couple of colleagues that were running Ubuntu. Since I started developing with Or