Custom applications play a vital role in all kinds of organizations, including education, government, healthcare, IT, and more. In order to adapt to the latest technologies, there are many changes businesses must make, especially the method they use to reach out to their customers. Most interactions between the customer/client and the organization takes place via tailor-made […]
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The issue of whether allowing SQL to do automatic conversion of datatypes is a good practice or not has arguments on either side. On one hand, this practice considerably simplifies and reduces the functions necessary to make a SELECT statement work. On the other hand, if your assumption about what will be in the column […]
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If your applications use only two-digit values for years, you may encounter problems related to years around 2000. If you only specify two digits of a year (such as “98” for “1998”), you are relying on the database to specify the century value (the “19”) when the record is inserted. If you are putting in […]
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Group-value functions in Oracle treat NULL values differently than single-value functions do. Group functions (other than COUNT(*)) ignore NULL values and calculate a result without considering them. Take AVG as an example. Suppose you have a list of 100 friends and their ages. If you picked 20 of them at random and averaged their ages, […]
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It is worthwhile to sum up in a single place all the major issues in designing Oracle database applications—thus “The Commandments” (or perhaps “The Suggestions”). Their presentation does not assume that you need to be told what to do, but rather that you are capable of making rational judgments and can benefit from the experience […]
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One of the often-neglected steps in building software is understanding the end user’s job—the tasks that computer automation is intended to support. Occasionally, this is because the application itself is quite specialized; more often, it is because the approach to design tends to be data oriented. Frequently, these are the major questions asked in the […]
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Many of us look forward to the day when we can simply type a “natural” language query in English, and have the answer back, on our screen, in seconds. We are closer to this goal than most of us realize. The limiting factor is no longer technology, but rather the rigor of thought in our […]
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