It's been a while since my last blog post but as I'm now looking for my next Oracle contract (hopefully Apex again purrrlease) I've a little time on my hands.  So I thought I would share with you my latest creation.  It's a variation on the Treadputer which is basically a treadmill adapted for use as a standup desk - you simply work and walk at the same time.  Yes I know it seems a little crazy but here's a picture of mine.

If you write a lot of PL/SQL code, sooner or later you will be faced with a requirement to count the number of occurrences of a substring in a string. In that case you may use this example to help yourself:

http://apex.oracle.com/pls/apex/f?p=31517:282

It will search not only for a single character withing a string but also for a substring of any length up to 4000 characters.

Did you know that an authentication function in APEX is not used the way a function actually should be used. Normaly, this function has two input parameters and it will return TRUE or FALSE. However, you will name this function in your authentication schema by typing it into a box, without providing any parameters. I have never looked into that but my assumtion is that APEX will probably create a kind of a dynamic function call by prividing the parameters using login items (:p101_username, :p101_password) from your login page (101).

(First off, sorry Mike, I'm hoping this will break my writer's block...)

On Friday I was asked to look at a report that wasn't returning all of the data. Sample:

Year/Month  Total Sales Total Sales (YAGO)
------------------------------------------
01/31/2013   $1,000,000           $900,000                
03/31/2013                        $950,000

For reference, YAGO is "Year Ago."

Notice anything funny there?