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.

The biggest misconception about SQL Server isn't performance-related—it's mental: The fear that going from Oracle to SQL Server requires learning a whole new DBA mindset. We've rounded up a few ways to make longstanding Oracle adherents feel not only comfortable but highly conversant in the new platform.

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.

Oracle provides developers a simple API that enables them to interact with most Microsoft COM objects directly from PL/SQL. Learn how to install the COM option and tap into the functionality of pre-built COM components on your machine right now.

PL/SQL is essential to the process of stored Java class libraries. In this comprehensive book for Oracle developers of all levels, you'll learn how to use PL/SQL as a wrapper, making PL/SQL the gate through which data moves to and from Java stored objects.

Within a year of two major vendor acquisitions in the enterprise software space, Oracle lays out its roadmap for integrating the product lines at its OpenWorld confab.

Date, time, and their variants differ more than any other data types when you compare DB2 and Oracle. Find out more about these differences and why they're important to know.

Got data in a proprietary database such as Microsoft SQL Server or Oracle 9i? The MySQL Migration Suite can help you move it to the MySQL open source database. Find out what's involved in the migration and how well the suite facilitates the transition.

Perform the massive DELETE operation as a swap delete with parallel execution. This technique can offer significant performance gains over a straight or in-place delete operation.