Oracle Pro Tips, Trends & Technology eNewsletter Pinnacle Publishing http://www.pinnaclepublishing.com Issue 2.15 July 24, 2001 TABLE OF CONTENTS 1) Pop Quiz 2) Did You Know... 3) Oracle Strategy for Java 4) Oracle News 5) Answer to the Pop Quiz --------------------------------------------------------- 1) POP QUIZ (answer at the end) --------------------------------------------------------- Q1. What determines how much memory to allocate to an Oracle instance? Q2. How does an Oracle instance determine which physical database to mount? --------------------------------------------------------- 2) DID YOU KNOW... --------------------------------------------------------- * that Oracle has over 2 million database customers worldwide? * that Oracle was first commercially available in 1979? * that Oracle recently submitted Oracle9i for benchmark tests at Transaction Processing Performance Council (http://www.tpc.org/)? Find out more at the following links: http://www.oracle.com/customers/index.html?oradbfacts.html http://www.oracle.com/ireport/index.html?firsts.html http://www.oracle.com/ip/deploy/database/oracle9i/index.html?sp_tpc.html http://www.tpc.org/tpcc/results/tpcc_results.asp?orderby=dbms --------------------------------------------------------- 3) ORACLE STRATEGY FOR JAVA --------------------------------------------------------- Contributor: Jim Skehill Jim's biography: Jim Skehill has a BSc in Computer Science from the University of Toronto, Canada. He's been programming in C/C++ for 11 years and in Java for four years, mostly in the financial services field. You can reach him at mailto:JSkehill@ProcaseConsulting.com. * * * * * Recently, Oracle has been making a lot of noise on the application server front. In case you don't know, JavaSoft has defined a framework for enterprise computing known as the Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE). This framework provides an infrastructure to take care of the database "plumbing" so you can devote your time to coding the business rules in the form of Enterprise JavaBeans (EJBs). As mentioned before in this column, this technology, in a sense, competes with BC4J. Many companies have produced implementations of the J2EE framework. There are offerings from IBM, BEA Weblogic, and, of course, Oracle. But Oracle's implementation had not exactly been setting the world on fire. It tended to lag a few minor versions behind the most recent J2EE standards, and the performance wasn't great. But all that changed at this year's JavaOne conference where Larry Ellison announced that Oracle was rebuilding its application server from the ground up. Actually, what Oracle had done was acquire an application server named Orion from a small Swedish company called IronFlare. Orion had been getting a lot of press on its own because of its very up-to-date implementation of J2EE, its very small size, and, most importantly, its blinding speed. In fact, Orion seems to be everything that Oracle's current application server was not, which probably explains why Oracle decided to license Orion and replace its existing application server with it. Oracle has renamed Orion to Oracle9iAS Containers for J2EE (OC4J), and you can read all about it at http://otn.oracle.com/tech/java/oc4j/content.html. Ellison, in typical combative fashion, has issued a challenge to the leaders in the application server field to try and match OC4J's performance, and this has resulted in the usual tit-for-tat arguments that invariably generate more heat than light. So when you cut through the hype, what's left? Well, I haven't had much of a chance to work with OC4J, but what I've seen has been impressive. It seems to do particularly well when the traffic increases -- that is, you can go from five concurrent users to 50 concurrent users with very little degradation in performance. It's also very small and very easy to configure. If you are really interested, you can download it yourself and try it out. You can also download the JavaSoft's PetStore application which Oracle has reworked for OC4J (In case you're wondering, the bulk of the code remains the same, as befitting any J2EE-compliant application. The main changes are in the database configuration). In fact, to encourage interest in OC4J, Oracle is running a "Deployathon" too. Check it out at http://otn.oracle.com/sample_code/tech/java/oc4j/htdocs/j2ee_petstore_readme.html. So where does that leave BC4J? Oracle is maintaining the company line: that BC4J is evolving towards EJB. And they have said that in the next release of JDeveloper the wizard that allows you to point at a database schema and instantly generate representative BC4J classes will be able to generate EJB classes as well. --------------------------------------------------------- 4) ORACLE NEWS --------------------------------------------------------- The Fifth Annual Webby Awards (http://www.webbyawards.com/main/index.html) ceremony was held recently in San Francisco. The awards -- "the dot- com world's version of the Oscars" -- were given by the Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, whose membership included "David Bowie, musician Beck, and actress Susan Sarandon." Winners included Google (http://www.google.com/), which was handed the Best Practices award, and craiglist (http://www.craigslist.org/), which won the community award. For more information, check out the following sites: http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nf/20010719/tc/12140_1.html http://www.webbyawards.com/ --------------------------------------------------------- 5) ANSWER TO THE POP QUIZ --------------------------------------------------------- Q1. The database initialization file, init.ora, contains memory allocation parameters -- for example, DB_BLOCK_SIZE and DB_BLOCK_BUFFERS, etc., which determine how much memory to allocate to an Oracle instance. Q2. The init.ora file contains a couple of relevant parameters, namely, DB_NAME and CONTROL_FILE. The DB_NAME parameter specifies the name of the database, whereas the CONTROL_FILE parameter specifies the location of the control file. The control file contains the directory location and file name of each of the data files and log files that belong to the database. Using this information, the instance will be able to be mounted on a physical database. --------------------------------------------------------- Well, that's it for this week. I welcome your feedback, input, tips, suggestions, Web sites, and other Oracle- related news. If you send me something, please let me know whether I can use your name with your comments. I apologize in advance if I don't respond personally to each of your questions or suggestions, but I'll get to as many as I can in the eNewsletter if not personally. Garry Chan, Editor Database Architect mailto:GChan@ProcaseConsulting.com This eNewsletter is brought to you compliments of Pinnacle Publishing, Inc. Copyright(c) 2001 http://www.pinnaclepublishing.com All rights reserved.