venerdì 14 dicembre 2012

Tip: APEX Virtual Environment

I am trying to learn APEX and I was looking for a way to install it on my laptop.
No need to do that. Oracle allows you to create your own APEX workspace.
At the following URL, you can request your own workspace and start getting familiar with APEX fast and easily.
http://apex.oracle.com/i/index.html
Just provide your email and you will be given a login, a test database schema and... enjoy developing! ;)
 

giovedì 15 novembre 2012

Tip: How to get Today Date using Sunopsis Memory Engine

Today I needed to retrieve today's date in 'YYYYMMDD' using SUNOPSIS Memory Engine.
That would have been much easier to do the following:

SELECT TO_CHAR(sysdate,'YYYYMMDD')
FROM dual

but I wanted to be able to get a date in a string format without relying on any Oracle database schema. To get today's date using In-Memory Engine is quite tricky.
First, you have to create a procedure and make sure you add the following steps:



0 - Drop_Dual_Table
Simply drops a table named dual (which does not exist by default in the SUNOPSIS database)



10 - Create DUAL table



20 - Insert Values



Then you can assign today's date to a variable (and you can format it as you wish) and use it in your interfaces/packages.



P.D. Originally I wanted to get yesterday's date directly in SUNOPSIS MEMORY ENGINE, but I could not find a way to assign -1 offset to CURDATE(). Any ideas?