PERL,INGRES,PROGRAMMING

  Companies like PlanetScale and Oracle are providing curated libraries of Skills that allow AI coding assistants, such as Claude Code or Cursor, to interact directly with databases. Skills, Skills, Skills...the latest buzzword in this era of AI induced coding practices. This time they come for the Database to enable agents to perform complex tasks like automated schema optimization, security audits and CSV data ingestion with higher precision and lower token consumption. https://www.i-programmer.info/news/90-tools/18846-agentic-skills-for-the-database-.html

  Oracle adds MCP support to two of its flagship tools, SQLcl and  SQL Developer for VS Code, in an attempt to simplify user interaction with the database. https://www.i-programmer.info/news/84-database/18289-oracle-database-adds-mcp-tooling-support.html

  To celebrate 30 years of MySQL, Oracle has launched a promotional initiative that grants free training and certifications. The offer runs from April 20 to July 31, 2025. https://www.i-programmer.info/news/150-training-a-education/18015-study-and-get-certified-for-mysql-with-oracle-university-for-free-.html

  Oracle is getting into the coding assistants game. The aptly named "Oracle Code Assist" is going to be optimized for Java, SQL, and Oracle Cloud-based applications. https://www.i-programmer.info/news/80-java/17285-let-oracles-coding-assistant-do-the-grunt-work.html

  The Empire strikes back with the most advanced  Oracle version to date. The focus of this new version is surprise, surprise, AI , which is so embedded into the new product that Oracle found prudent to change its name from 23c to 23ai to make the point. Let's find out what's on offer. https://www.i-programmer.info/news/84-database/17215-oracle-database-23ai-feel-the-difference.html

  Select AI is a new feature of the Oracle Autonomous Database that transforms your mother language to SQL. This is a big boon for non-developers in extracting value out of their data silos. https://www.i-programmer.info/news/84-database/17132-query-your-oracle-autonomous-database-with-natural-language.html

  Oracle has recently introduced some goodies for developers working with VS Code. This is an extension that integrates the venerable SQL Developer within VS Code. https://www.i-programmer.info/news/90-tools/17000-oracle-sql-developer-for-vs-code.html

  v2.0 of the driver has been upgraded to support asynchronous operations from Python code. This is a major boon for Python developers. https://www.i-programmer.info/news/216-python/16901-python-driver-for-oracle-database-goes-asynchronous.html

  Until now getting hold of a free Oracle database was a struggle - requiring account registration, negotiating pages full of legalese and safeguarded downloading bays. Does this "Free For Developers" product change that, or is it a rebranding of Oracle XE to make its use case clearer. https://www.i-programmer.info/news/84-database/16375-oracle-database-23c-free-for-developers-how-free.html

 Helidon, the open source microservices framework by Oracle, has been updated to version 3. At the same time a new side project, Helidon Nima, introduces virtual thread support. Helidon sprang up back in 2018 from the lack of agility of Java/Jakarta EE in building microservices. Sure you could do that, but not in the most efficient way. Thus at Oracle they thought of a framework designed from the ground up for building microservices would be more efficient. In order to stay close to the Java EE spirit, Helidon was made to implement the Microprofile standard, widely used in Java EE environments. full article on i-programmer: https://www.i-programmer.info/news/80-java/15782-helidon-for-microservices-flies-high.html

 New NodeJS Database Driver for Oracle Released Version 5.4 of node-oracledb, the Node.js and TypeScript module for accessing the Oracle Database, has been released and is available from npm. The node-oracledb add-on for Node.js allows applications to be written in TypeScript, or directly in JavaScript. Version 5.4 connects Node.js 14, or later, to an Oracle Database. Last month in "New Database Drivers for Oracle and PostgreSQL Released" w looked at another recent driver release for the Oracle database, but for another language - Python. That driver had a major name change from cx_Oracle to python-oracledb to signal the change that the new driver is a thin driver and therefore makes no use of the Oracle Client libraries. As such it was aligned with the rest of the language*-oracledb naming schemes as node-oracledb does. full article on i-programmer: https://www.i-programmer.info/news/84-database/15606-new-nodejs-database-driver-for-oracle-released.html

 The PostgreSQL JDBC Team team has announced the release 42.4.0 of the JDBC driver for PostgreSQL. Meanwhile Oracle has released a Python-based driver for Oracle. Python and Java users rejoice! full article on i-programmer: https://www.i-programmer.info/news/84-database/15510-new-database-drivers-for-oracle-and-postgresql-released-.html

 At a very high level, GraalVM is a runtime that can compile bytecode into native self-contained executables as well as run programs in languages other than Java. This detailed look at it attempts to put a highly technical and difficult subject into perspective. The starting point for this article was "Exploring Aspects of Polyglot High-Performance Virtual Machine GraalVM", a paper by M. Šipek, B. Mihaljević and A. Radovan of Rochester Institute of Technology Croatia, Zagreb, Croatia. The presents GraalVM's architecture, its features and examines how it resolves common interoperability and performance problems when having to support multiple programming languages. I've extended it in order to provide a high level overview in simple terms. Virtual Machines were invented in order to run programs in an independent way regardless of the platform and the underlying hardware. Examples are the . NET CLR, MoarVM the modern virtual machine built for the Rakudo compiler impleme...

  This survey comes from the Eclipse Foundation and provides technical insights into enterprise Java that give answers to questions like which Java based framework is on the rise, whether Java is used for Cloud native development and much more.   Jakarta EE provides a way to modernize infrastructure and reuse the developer pool of the aging(?) Enterprise Java developers in a new setting. We saw something like that in   Vaadin Reaches Version 21 , about the Vaadin framework which supports using the Java stack for writing both the back and front ends of Web applications, without having to learn Javascript or another client framework like Vue or Angular. This is an obvious advantage for those working with long-established code which albeit reliable, is that agile compared to lighter and more modern software development shops. full article on i-programmer.info

  OtterTune is a tool powered by self-driving DBMS technology out of R&D at Carnegie Mellon University that aims to alleviate the fundamental difficulties of tuning a DBMS. full article on i-programmer.info

  Introducing a free, self-paced, quick and official course, one of of Oracle's Dev Gym quizzes, about the concepts and syntax behind SQL's Analytic functions. Oracle's Dev Gym quizzes, a collection of workouts and classes, offer a form of "active learning" recognizing the idea that to get better at writing code, you actually need to write code - and also read and understand code.So these quizzes are a mix of video and code tutorials that incorporate an interactive playground where you can tweak and run the tutorial's attached code in order to strengthen your code comprehension skills and learn in depth the subject at hand.To join you just need an Oracle account, which is free too. full article on i-programmer.info

Given Oracle's attempts to regulate Java's use, it's no wonder that the debate between JDK and OpenJDK has led to doubt, that for some that even meant considering to jump the ship. Fortunately, the Java Champion Community, guardians of all things Java, has reacted to this awkard situation. Its attempt to clear up the uncertainty is by publishing a statement with the unambiguous title  Java Is Still Free . The document is work in progress getting updated as developments evolve, and comes in two versions; the short one that jumps straight to the takeaways, and the longer that gets behind the scenes before making any recommendations. full article on i-programmer.info

It shouldn't be that difficult to build a standalone Weblogic WS-Security enabled client for invoking JAX Web Services, but the reality is that it is. Let's find out why. What is recurring in the above passages is 'classpath' and the need for the Weblogic Server libraries to be available to it.Thing is I don't want to go through setting up a WebLogic instance just to get  to those libraries, or build a client that depends on the classpath as well as the machine's or host OS's intricacies.Furthermore, any setup would have to be multiplied by 10, the number of machines looking to access the same web service. In any case my Java client should always call into a Weblogic, well, 'client' library in order to consume the necessary functionality.Turns out that choosing the appropriate one is convoluted: Do I need wlfullclient.jar, wlthint3client.jar, wlclient.jar, wljmsclient.jar, wlclient.jar , or maybe wlsafclient.jar ? Also, don't for...