This one is a little wily, so John suggested we post it. Removing a label/value from a dropdown should be super-simple. In Oracle Forms, however, you ought to know the shortcut key:

CTRL + SHIFT + ,

Why that combination? Well, it might look strange in writing, but when you type it, you will notice that “SHIFT + ,” makes a less-than symbol “<”. I won’t go as far as to say this is completely intuitive, but I hope this helps someone.

At M&S, we are going virtual all the way. We have delivered a number of virtualized environments for customers. Some have been for Oracle Middleware solutions, some for complete Microsoft domains. Some for open source system. And many for development instances.

We have tinkered with going totally virtual for own infrastructure over the years, but decided to avoid biting the bullet for a number of reasons: migration time/effort has typically been at the top of the list. But with the improvements in virtualization technology, advantages proven now over years, apparent “stickiness” of the leading players, our own maturity in this space, and general adoption by the community at large (more clearly read, “readily available support”), we are diving in.

Over the next few weeks and months, each component of the M&S infrastructure will be moved to virtual machines. Certain details of our infrastructure will not be posted on this blog for security reasons, but there are team members working on this who will try to keep the blog up-to-date. If you are interested in how things are going, feel free to contact us. We are excited about this ride.

I recently downloaded the new 10.x version of TOAD and could not connect to my databases. Still running TOAD 9.x, no problem. This really threw me off for a minute, so I thought I would share the resolution.

You are likely running a 64-bit Windows OS and have installed TOAD into C:\Program Files (x86)\....

I simply copied over my entire Quest Software directory from C:\Program Files (x86)\... to C:\Program Files\..., and restarted the TOAD.exe. Everything is working great, without having to reinstall anything.

PS: Not sure who to blame here. Vendors (like Oracle and TOAD) should know Microsoft is capable of doing strange things with important directory names (using spaces and, in this case, “strange” characters like parentheses)…and of course, Microsoft should simply stop perpetuating the use of these characters in important directories.

I just had a discussion with an M&S SOA Architect about the advantages and disadvantages of BPEL vs ESB, and more importantly, where to use which in practical business scenarios.

This article is part of the recent work short blurb series.

I had the age-old requirement today to build a data-driven, dynamic form…only this time with my RIA written in Adobe Flex. It was just as fun as normal, and this time it looks very nice with the RIA feel.

This article is part of the recent work short blurb series.

A few of us have got some writer’s cramp (is there such a thing when typing?) from writing an excellent WebCenter 11g book.

We have a family tree. Some people have children, while others do not. We want to sort results by alphabetically listing individuals with children in an initial group, and then those without children in a second group — also alphabetically. Let’s assume there is not an isParent column (nor the equivalent) on the table, but there is a way to determine how many children each individual has.

Following is a sortable table of the most common Linux commands we use on a day-to-day basis while implementing and maintaining Oracle Fusion Middleware environments.

I have just had a heck of a time with installing BPA (Architect) Evaluation on a Windows Server 2003 machine. There were no inherent issues with the product itself, but some gotchas that I thought I might point out. For the following, I assumed you are installing on a single machine for testing/evaluation purposes like I was.

For one, if you were familiar with BPA 10.1.3.3, there is no longer an auto-installable olite database option. You must use Oracle XE Universal (or better) and you should have it installed locally prior to installing BPA. Note: You should use XE Universal specifically so you get the AL32UTF8 character set that is expected by the BPA install.

After I got the character set squared away, I continued to receive a database connection error

It’s a well known and established fact that one of the only constants in life is change

It wasn’t that long ago (it seems) that I was asked to look at Oracle APEX and Oracle XE for work, and devise a tutorial for it’s installation and beginner use. It has been almost a year since then, and I find myself revisiting it after my last project. In that short amount of time there have been a few rather large changes. While Oracle XE is still at 10g, where it was originally, the APEX system itself has undergone 2 fairly large updates, going from the 3.0.1 version I orginally was working with to, 3.1, and now 3.2 being the current version.

Upgrading from 3.0.1 to 3.2 is supposed to be smooth, but we shall test and see for ourselves.

After all, if I can’t change with the times, the times won’t stop changing for me.