Does Oracle's acquisition of Sun mean a merger of their flagship conferences, Oracle OpenWorld and Sun's JavaOne, into a single co-located show?

A Java technology insider says the future of Java hinges on how Oracle handles the JCP, the Project Harmony certification process, and the OpenJDK project.

At JavaOne 2009, Larry Ellison challenges Sun's OpenOffice and JavaFX groups to innovate and wonders out loud why Sun/Oracle couldn't produce mobile devices based on the JavaFX platform.

Oracle 10g introduced a new feature called ROWDEPENDENCIES, which made every row independent. Learn how to use this feature to improve application concurrency and avoid the dreaded ORA-8177 error.

Oracle expects Sun to contribute to its operating profit right away. To make that happen, Oracle may pull funding and staff from projects such as JavaFX, Project Looking Glass, and Project GlassFish.

Determining which queries will provide the best performance for a given application often comes down to a simple question: Does Query X perform better than Query Y? Learn the tools and methods that can help you compare query response times in Oracle.

If you have ever had to analyze the data in a large Oracle database with no documentation, this integrated-documentation tool is for you. Check out this PL/SQL-generated HTML database dictionary.

Often developers are tasked with not only developing functional code, but also with ensuring that the code they develop scales well and performs in the application environment.

A portal provides users with a unified presentation of portlets generated from disparate data sources. Learn how to develop a JSF portlet with JDeveloper and run it in Oracle's WebCenter Framework.

Developers already familiar with JDBC will quickly become comfortable working with XML through XQJ.

Oracle's XDK 10G extends JAXP to make reading, writing, and querying XML easy.

The same ANSI Standard SQL query can run against identical data on SQL Server and Oracle and return different results. So just because your application issues ANSI standard SQL, don't assume it's portable.

Every Oracle PL/SQL developer concerned about the performance impact of repeated if... then... else calls can use conditional compilation to scrub these calls from production code. And that's just the beginning.

Oracle's XML SQL (XSU) is a Java API that provides XML-to-SQL (and the reverse—SQL-to-XML) mapping services, letting you map XML elements to database table columns so you can store and retrieve XML documents with ease.

While XSLT alone is powerful, extending it with implementation-specific Java functions gives you all the power you could want.

Although not as full-featured as some commercial tools, version 1.0 of SQL Developer, Oracle's free PL/SQL development IDE, is complete enough to use as the development platform for a complex PL/SQL project.

DOM 3.0 validation techniques let you discover which elements and attributes you can add or remove from an XML document, ensuring in advance that planned modifications won't alter the overall validity of the document—all without revalidating the entire document.

Using Oracle's XDK 10g, you can reduce the process of comparing XML documents to a simple set of library calls that let you determine if the documents are the same, see what the differences are, or use the compare information to generate other documents.

Oracle 9i introduced data types and support to handle time zones. Use these data types to make your Oracle code time zone aware.

How can you keep slow extract, transform, and load operations from bogging down your production instance? Oracle 10g's Data Pump API offers a great solution.