In this issue:

• Using XML With Oracle: A Valuable Overview
• Get Certified!
• Myths and Lore of Oracle
• Oracle Maintenance and Troubleshooting Tips
• DBA Bootcamp: Led by Oracle Masters

Don’t miss out on a worthwhile white paper on XML by Database Specialists’ president and Oracle expert, Roger Schrag. His paper is a quick read that will get you started on understanding XML and how to go about incorporating it into an Oracle environment.

XML, short for “extensible markup language,” is emerging as a new standard for information exchange, and there are numerous benefits to using it with Oracle. Although it has similarities to HTML, XML has powerful extensibility built into the standard that enables easy exchange of complex structured data between disparate systems.

Many content providers (such as Reuters) use XML to publish their content so that subscribers can easily present the content to their end-users as HTML, WML, or using just about any file format.

You can download this white paper by visiting the Database Specialists web site at http://www.dbspecialists.com/4dbas/present.html.

Get Certified!

Want to become an Oracle Certified Professional? Check out http://www.oraclenotes.com. It’s a community for the aspiring Oracle Certified Professional. You’ll find a listing of FAQs, overviews of certification tests, study briefs and exam facts.

You might also check out the following site for Oracle certification cram sessions: http://cramsession.brainbuzz.com/cramsession/oracle.

Myths and Lore of Oracle

Read about some of the myths and lore of Oracle as observed by Oracle DBA and author John Lewis, who wrote Practical Oracle 8i - Designing Efficient Databases. In the folklore and fairy tales section of his website, Lewis covers topics such as buffer cache hit ratios and tables and indexing. Read his entertaining write-up at http://www.jlcomp.demon.co.uk/myths.html.

Oracle Maintenance and Troubleshooting Tips

Looking for another resource for preventative maintenance and troubleshooting tips related to Oracle technology? Check out http://www.fors.com/orasupp. This website includes references to over 300 technical documents and bulletins that contain useful technical information, alerts, sample scripts and other sample files.

Here are just a few of the topics covered:

• Preventive maintenance on the Solaris platform
• Oracle database problem solving
• Troubleshooting connectivity issues
• Oracle precompilers

DBA Bootcamp: Led by Oracle Masters

This is a different kind of bootcamp. It’s part of the IOUG-A University Master Class in Vancouver, BC starting July 22. Four scheduled seminars are specifically designed to give attendees practical tips and techniques on the most critical aspects of Oracle database and development technology in just two days. UMCs are hands-on, two-day seminars taught by faculty members who are recognized Oracle authorities.

Database Specialists’ president Roger Schrag is an instructor for the iDBA track. Don’t miss a great learning opportunity. Check out http://www.ioug.org/umc.