Oracle 10g instroduced a new way to quote strings to prevent ​those strings with single apostrophes from causing errors. For example:

insert into myaddress (name, address) values ('Jim O'Brien', '10 Elm St.');

would fail because of the single apostrophe in O'Brien.

Using Oracle 10g or later, you can change the quoted string to be:

Sometimes is just pays to read the doc. I was expirementing with mdlcgi today and I discovered a problem with my code in that the returned string was not being interpreted as XML as I wished. In other words, my xmlhttp.responseXML object was returning NULL each time even though my xmlhttp.responseText had the correct xml looking string value. Everything I could find on the web pointed me to not having the correct Content…

Today I needed to find a gap within a series of numbers located in a table. So for instance I have a table with a series of mslink values:

MSLINK

1

2

3

5

In the above table, I want to find the number 4. The solution is to use the "minus" query operator available from Oracle. Basically the minus operator takes the results of one query and gives you the values that do not exist in…

I ran into an interesting situation with Oracle's to_number function. First let me setup what I was trying to do. Bentley Comms has a table named mapindex that contains a column named mapname. This column typically contains names of maps used by the user. It can also contain what I would call "coded" values such as "x-<MSLINK #> where the <MSLINK #> is an actual mslink value contained within one of the other maps. The…

mdlDB_findLinks is a great api function used to find elements in models that have a database link to a given mslink and entity number. Today I discovered slight problem that causes the function to return an error even though the element should be found in the given model. I'll spare you from the details and just say that the integer passed by reference in the second parameter MUST be initialized to zero else you'll…

I'm a relative novice at writing ASP.NET applications so this post may seem silly or trivial to the more experienced but I noticed that when I use the default Web Server (WebDev.WebServer.EXE in the Process list), it never seems to clean up after itself after I close the browser. In fact I even notice that the this webserver has a mind of its own when restarting the application after a previous debug session. Here is…

Yesterday I needed to install Oracle 10g client on my desktop to talk to a 10g server located within a VM. I did something wrong during the installation and needed to re-install (twice in fact!). Once I installed correctly (so I thought), I attempted to connect to the server but was faced with an obscure NLS error. I believe the error was ORA-12705 - invalid or unknown NLS parameter value specified. I could find very…