Oracle Tips - February 2007

Here are my Oracle Tips columns published at TechRepublic.com during February, 2007:

Hide Sensitive Data with Oracle 10g Column Masking - February 6, 2007
Oracle 10g's Virtual Private Database (VPD) feature has the ability to automatically mask out (set to NULL) certain columns in the results of a query on a row-by-row basis. This tip shows how to create a VPD policy that requests the column masking option.

Trade Risk for Speed with Oracle 10g's Asynchronous Commit - February 13, 2007
A new option to the COMMIT statement in Oracle 10g can defer the writing of committed data to the online redo log files. This involves a risk of data loss, but it speeds up the transaction response time. Find out more details in this tip.

Delete Rows During Updates using Oracle 10g's Merge Statement - February 20, 2007
In Oracle 10g Release 1, the MERGE statement gained the ability to delete rows, as well as update and insert them. This Oracle tip shows you how it works.

Move SQL Tuning Sets between Oracle Instances - February 27, 2007
SQL Tuning Sets (STS) capture the workload of an Oracle instance. Starting in Oracle 10g Release 2, these tuning sets can be transported from one instance to another to facilitate testing.