Welcome to the ApplTop Solutions September Newsletter

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Issue 1 - September 2003

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Welcome to issue 1 of the ApplTop Solutions newsletter, we hope you find the content of interest and we are always pleased to hear any feedback you may have regarding its content. To send feedback or to make suggestions for future content the please email to newsletter@appltop.com

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In this issue

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1. ApplTop News

2. Latest Offers

2. Product Updates

3. Product Tips

4. Oracle Tips

5. Oracle News

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ApplTop News

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Assisted Development

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We are pleased to offer our new Assisted Development Service (ADS) to all clients with Premium Support. This unique service allows you to call upon our expertise in using our own products to assist you in developing your CS*Form and CS*Accelerate solutions.

You would normally have to contact your software suppliers “consultancy” department and first get a quote for this kind of service but we include it in Premium Support at no extra charge.

The “typical” support contract would normally only cover you for bug fixes or general problem sorting, you will have often seen the comment “Please contact our consultancy services department as we do not cover custom issues”... well not with ApplTop, we will help you in every way we can to ensure you get the most from your investment is our products.

Business Partners & Alliances

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To help us educate the Oracle community and reach our intended market and to enable other businesses to benefit from our huge potential, we are actively seeking business partnerships and alliances with many kinds of business to help ApplTop grow and prosper worldwide. We are looking for distributors, consultancy services and technology partners across the globe.

Oracle Scene

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Did you see the latest edition of Oracle Scene, the quarterly publication produced by the UK Oracle User Group? It contains an excellent independent review of CS*Form/R2i. Check it out.

Media Coverage

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Helping Oracle out of the Box – From I.T Toolbox

Be sure to checkout our media section for more media coverage.

Product Demonstrations Now Online

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To compliment our Let-Net Demo Service, we are pleased to announce the launch of our Product Demonstration Video Series. The demonstrations are available directly from our website and can be viewed by anyone (Flash Player is required). Please visit our documents section for more details.

There are currently nine videos available and we will be adding more over the coming weeks.

If you would like to see a specific product feature demonstrated or a particular type of solution in action then please email us at info@appltop.com or post your requests to our Public Forum.

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LATEST OFFERS

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Extended Product Trials & Deferred Payments

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We are currently offering extended product trials. You can trial all of our products completely free of charge for up to three months, the product trials all include full Premium Support.

If after three months you decide to purchase the product then you only need pay for product support at this time. 3 months later you only pay 50% of the agreed purchase price with the final 50% becoming due after a further three months.

For example,

1^st September 2003 – Product trial begins

1^st December 2003 – Product Support fees due

1^st March 2004 – 50% of agreed purchase price due

1^st June 2004 – Final 50% of agreed purchase price due

Also note that the support contract will only take effect from the 1^st of December, this gives you the initial 15 months support for the price of 12 months.

We now also offer various easy payment plans to help you spread the cost of ownership: -

1. 6 monthly payments for license spend over £5,000

2. 12 monthly payments for license spend over £10,000

There has never been a better time to give our products a try, you have absolutely nothing to loose and plenty to gain. Please contact us for more details about our product trials at info@appltop.com.

Product Discount

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For clients who purchase CS*Form under the High Usage Licensing (HUL) model, we are currently offering CS*Accelerate with up to 50% discount.

We are also offering double the number of Solution Licenses under the HUL model, so if you purchase 50 HUL Solution Licenses, we give you another 50 for free.

CS*Query is now included with CS*Form free of charge.

Support Discount

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We are offering our comprehensive Premium support services with up to 50% discount for the first year to all clients who spend more that £5,000 on product licenses and with 75% discount for the first year if license spend is more than £10,000.

Pricing/Licensing Guide

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If you would like us to email you a copy of our current Pricing/Licensing Guide then please email us at Send Me Guide.

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PRODUCT UPDATES

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CS*Form

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CS*Form, our first and flagship product goes from strength to strength. We continually improve and develop our product line to ensure we offer the very best solutions we can, to this end, CS*Form is an evolving product, since it’s initial release last year we have released a number of minor upgrades and patches that include minor bug fixes as well as a whole host of new features and enhancements.

The latest releases are as follows: -

R2i – Currently as version 2.2.0 released on the 4^th of August 2003

R1 – Currently at version 1.5.1 released on the 8^th of August 2003

CS*Accelerate

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CS*Accelerate/R2i, for Oracle E-Business Suite 11i was released on the 21^st of July and interest in the product is steadily growing. Like CS*Form, CS*Accelerate is an evolving product and we will continue to improve and add features over the coming months.

CS*Query

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CS*Query, is a simple ad-hoc query tool that is basically a scaled down version of CS*Form. It allows anyone to issue a SQL statement directly into Oracle Applications and see the results displayed as a simplified CS*Form.

This product is now included for free with CS*Form.

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PRODUCT TIPS

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CS*Form/R2i – Dynamic Title

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Simply prefix the CS*Form description with an asterisk (*) and CS*Form will re-evaluate and re-display the title while you move through the records. This same feature can also be used on the “detail region label”

CS*Form/R1 & R2i Button Hotkey

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If you precede any character in the button label with an ampersand (&),you can then invoke that button by pressing the ALT key and the letter following the &. For example, a button label of,

Ne&xt Form

The button will be pressed if you press ALT-x.

CS*Accelerate/R1 & R2i – Global Zoom

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You can create a global zoom that will be available from any named field by simply ticking the “Global Zoom” checkbox in the CS*Zoom maintenance form, this is a great way to make something available system wide without the need to define several CS*Zooms.

CS*Accelerate/R1 – R2i – Value Passing

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You can alter any data passed to or returned from an CS*Form by using the “Pass SQL” and “Return SQL” features. Simply enter a valid SQL SELECT statement and that value will be used in place of the actual value passed or returned.

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ORACLE TIPS

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Caching Small Tables

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Did you know that you could possibly improve query performance by caching small tables in memory?

Simply issue the following SQL statement: -

ALTER TABLE <table_name> CACHE;

The <table_name> will then be pinned in memory thus potentially improving performance. Note that you should ensure you only cache very small tables and only tables that are very frequently accessed.

Creating your own Session Cache

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A very useful and often overlooked feature of PL/SQL packages is their ability to cache session values.

If you have a PL/SQL program that requires access to many global values for a given session then consider caching them in a package header.

Try the following: -

CREATE OR REPLACE PACKAGE my_cache

G_my_var VARCHAR2(20);

G_my_number NUMBER;

G_my_date DATE;

END;

There is no need to create the package body if you do not intend to actually implement any procedures or functions.

If you want to initialise all these values then make use of the initialisation block of the package body as follows: -

CREATE OR REPLACE PACKAGE BODY my_cache

BEGIN

END;

The first time the package is accessed for a given session then the above code will be executed and your globals will be initialised.

You can then access these package globals as follows: -

MY_CACHE.G_my_var := ‘A string value’;

MY_CACHE.G_my_number := 10;

MY_CACHE.G_my_date := SYSDATE;

This can often improve program efficiency because it saves you halving to redefine and re-initialise your values.

You can easily take this idea to the next level and develop a dynamic caching package that allows you to cache any value, in this case you would probably use a PL/SQL table or collection to store your values and create “SET” and “GET” procedures to set and access the values. The SET procedure would allow you to issue the following kind of statement: -

MY_CACHE.set(‘MY_VALUE’,20);

And the GET would probably be invoked with: -

MY_CACHE.get(‘MY_VALUE’,l_store_my_value_here);

You could overload both the GET and SET to accept and return values of differing data types.

Note that if you choose this kind of advanced dynamic caching technique then increased efficiency should not be your goal but program flexibility and adaptability.

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ORACLE NEWS

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Oracle and PeopleSoft – Let the Battle Commence

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Oracle’s takeover bid for PeopleSoft has dominated the industry press of late but things seemed to have calmed down a little to what they were at the beginning of the summer when Oracle first announced its plans. The cause of this apparent “calming” is likely to be the fact we are in the latter part of summer madness where most people are away trying hard to relax and think of things other than business. The battle is likely to commence again once we reach September and most are back at their desks.

Oracle Database 9i Release 2 XML Security Flaw

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Oracle Corp. recently issued a warning about a security flaw in release 2 of their 9i database. A "knowledgeable and malicious" Oracle user could exploit the vulnerability to launch a denial of service (DoS) attack that disrupts the Database Server's operation, or take control of an active user session on the Database Server, Oracle said.

The flaw is related to specific XML functionality that can cause a “buffer overflow”.

Oracle states that there are no interim workarounds for the problem but they have released a patch to resolve the issue.

Oracle’s Facelift

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For those have not visited oracle.com recently, head over there now and checkout their new and improved website. The new site is less cluttered and much easier to navigate.

Next Month

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We hope you have enjoyed this month’s issue of the ApplTop Solutions newsletter and we look forward to the October issue.

Next months issue will contain more product updates and offers as well and hints and tips with a little industry news. We will be including hints and tips for various Oracle products including, SQL, PL/SQL, Forms, Reports and Oracle E-Business Suite.

For more information about ApplTop Solutions, our products and services please visit us on the web at www.appltop.com.

For general enquiries please email info@appltop.com or telephone +44 (0)1274 620942.

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CS*Form, CS*Accelerate and CS*Query are trademarks of ApplTop Solutions Limited.

Oracle and Oracle E-Business Suite are trademarks or registered trademarks of Oracle Corporation.

Any other names are used for reference and may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.