Monday 25 February 2008

Further tidying

Had a bit of a blitz on the CSS file, removing all unused entries. Also, I made some changes to the main page, making it easier to change the layout in future. You shouldn't see any changes, although some of the spacing between menu items has decreased by a few pixels.

I also added a link to the excellent 11g new features series by Arup Nanda on oracle.com, as well as removing some dead links.

Saturday 2 February 2008

A long time and a tidy up

Well, to say it's been a long time since I did anything on oratechinfo.co.uk would be an understatement. To be perfectly honest, it's been a busy few months with one thing or another, so I simply haven't found the time. Anyway... enough of the excuses.

The recent changes have been mostly tidying up of dead links and slight wording changes. The main page has had a couple of the links to technical articles removed, one of which was a link to Howard Rogers' excellent article on index clustering factors. This was removed because Howard has taken the decision to remove public access to dizwell.com, which is a shame, but his reasons are his own, I guess. I'm not privy to what happened to warrant this change.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, I've modified the message queueing, NULLs and FGAC pages, removing a few dead links. I've also expanded on the handling of multiple namespaces within XML documents via SQL/XML, removing a few dead links while doing so. The main thrust of the SQL/XML change is the difficulty in extracting information from XML documents where there are two or more namespaces defined. I've shown an example of doing this using the XPath local-name() function, but, as I explain in the section, there's no way of doing this which is logically correct, you have to introduce mechanisms for "ignoring" the namespace at some point, which is what
local-name() does.

I've also changed the XHTML / CSS and firefox links on the front page, removing the thunderbird
logo as well. The main reason for this was that I think they look better (especially the firefox one), and I don't really use Mozilla Thunderbird anymore, plus who am I to dictate what email client you use? ;-)