Oracle Tips - December 2006

Here are my Oracle Tips columns published at TechRepublic.com during December, 2006.

Enable Change Tracking in Oracle for Faster Incremental Backups - December 5, 2006.
DBAs can do incremental backups made via Recovery Manager significantly faster by enabling a new Oracle 10g feature called Change Tracking. Bob Watkins explains how to enable the feature.

Consider Oracle 10gR2's Instant Client Light for Application Deployment - December 12, 2006.
In 10g Release 2 (10gR2), a new Oracle Client option can save disk and memory requirements when accessing Oracle from a custom application. Consider whether Instant Client and Instant Client Light can do what you need instead of the full Oracle Client.

How to Order Siblings in Oracle Hierarchy Queries - December 19, 2006.
Developers can use the ORDER SIBLINGS BY feature of Oracle 10g and later to sort the records in a hierarchy created by the START WITH and CONNECT BY clauses in a SELECT statement.