I hope this is the right forum for this.  If not, please point me elsewhere.
I'm a newbie with Oracle administration and I'm tasked with cloning our
production database and starting it up as a development database.
I have a few books on Oracle and have read enouhg (I hope) to ...

In Oracle 8i, I believe that if you have a column defined at NUMBER,
you can still create an insert statement with the number enclosed in
quotes, and it will insert correctly.
INSERT INTO table_a '50';

I am trying to create a function based index to speed up a query, but
the index doesn't seem to be used.  The user defined function is based
on a java stored procedure, I'm not sure if that could be the problem?
Also, the function is not owned by the user creating the index, but the

A simple silly question from a beginner - I cannot find related info
explicitly explained in the textbook.
Is iSQL*PLUS bind variable limited to anonymous block?  My personal
interpretation is that named block could be called by any host environments,

I'm running Oracle 10g on redhat es3 and want to access the database from my
windows XP (no sp2) machine on which the 10g client software has been
installed.
However, starting sqlplus (or other tools) I get the TNS:no listerner error.

I have found several solutions close to what I want, but I haven't been
able to figure this out yet.  We have a table ("Documents") that we
want to group by Sender, order by the count of the documents in
descending order and then return only the top 10 rows - basically the

I am an experience Systems DBA (Informix and DB2/UDB).  I would like
to pick up some knowlege of Oracle, and have found that the Oracle
website has some wonderful information.   I would also like to pick up
some Peoplesoft skills, particularly from an Admin standpoint.

I have a little silly problem in spooling data from sqlplus to a file in
the exact format I want. To demonstrate it, here is a simple test-case.
In sqlplus under unix I run those commands:
set linesize 9999

I have a Win2000 SP4 PC and I am unable to print from my application. It will
go to the printer window and you can select how many copies you want but then
it just kicks you out of the application.  I also get this error message:
ifrun60.exe - Application Error - The instruction at ...

When I execute the statistic package: SYS.DBMS_STATS, on my database whith
more 9.000.000 records
   My scrip with system/manager
   exec

I often hear that for long txn, we should commit occasionally rather than
having a long outstanding txn.  But in Expert one-on-one Oracle, the author
suggest we should commit when required rather than manually inserting commit
i.e. if our logic is to commit at end of the long txn, ...

I am attempting to use RMAN under 9.2.0.4 to back up dbs under both
9.2.0.4 and 8.1.7.4. At this point, the two dbs are on the same
physical server (AIX 5.2), but the intent is to do this across the
network with one central catalog. Working across versions like this may

I am trying to invoke a function stored on Oracle
using Pro*C. However, the precompiler does not
compile through. I have attached the code below:
EXEC SQL EXECUTE

My company is considering use of ASM for some upgraded 10g instances. Does
anyone have any experiences (good or bad) with using this product with the
initial 10g release and/or the 10.1.0.4 patch set?  

First of all, my apologies, because I know that this post is going to be
somewhat vague.  The situation is that I'm try to help out a friend,
who's trying to get Oracle OID installed on Solaris.  I spent some time
with him, and just took some quick notes, so some of the info in this