Oracle 10g XML file formatting Oracle Database Tips by Burleson Consulting

Tagging flat files is the wave of the future and being able to manage Oracle log files with XML is an exciting new Oracle10g feature.  For complete details, see Oracle 10g new features.

We also see the Oracle 10 release 2 new XQuery feature, and starting in 11g, you can store XML either as a CLOB or a binary data type, adding flexibility. Oracle11g will support query mechanisms for XML including XQuery and SQL XML, emerging standards for querying XML data stored inside tables.

XML in ApEx (HTML-DB)

There is a distinct difference between Importing XML data and the other imports. The user will not be asked if they would like to import into an existing table or a new table as in the other import wizards. The XML Import requires there be an existing table into which to import.

The XML Import is a transactional operation meaning it is all-or-nothing. If one record fails, the entire transaction is rolled back and none of the data will be imported.

It is important to note that APEX itself is written with APEX. The XML Import wizard is performing the following tasks:

• Uploading an XML file
• Storing the XML file in the database
• Inserting the data from the XML file into the selected table

If APEX is doing this, so can you. With the growing popularity of XML formatted files, it may be necessary to write a few web pages to perform this very same function in your own applications.

XML for analytic workspaces

• validate - This function verifies that the XML provided by the user is well-formed and is ready for execution. It checks that all the implicit AW constraints are met.

• interpret - This function interprets the input and makes changes to the AW named ?awname?. If there is no AW named awname, one is created by this function. INTERPRET accepts the users XML and calls the aw_create olap dml package to create the AW and perform the specific calculations

• describe - This function allows the users to examine the contents of the AW. It takes the awname as the input and outputs the information as XMLType. If the input is provided, it outputs the information about all AW objects.

See here for details on using the Oracle XML export wizard.

Oracle audit logs in XML

One of the foremost issues with Oracle auditing is the management of the huge volumes of audit data (for "select auditing", the daily log size could exceed the entire database size, every day).  Oracle 10g now has XML formatting for the audit logs, facilitating the display of the audit details in web pages.

You need to set two init.ora parms to enable XML audit trail formatting:

audit_trail=xml

audit_file_dest='directorypath'

Best of all, even though the audit logs are stored outside of the database, they can still be queried as external tables, and you can also use the v$xml_audit_trail view to query audit log details.

 

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