To all our readers in the USA, we wish you and your loved ones a very Happy Thanksgiving.  To the readers around the world, here is the link from Wikipedia to learn more about this festival:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thanksgiving

We wish all of our readers in the USA a very Happy 4th of July.  Happy Independence Day.

For our readers who are from India, wish all of you guys a very HAPPY HOLI.  At Decipher, we have folks from different parts of the world – US, India, Iran, Mexico and Germany and we celebrate all festivals.

A little history about the festival:

• Wikipedia Entry – here.
• Holiday Spot’s article on Holi – here.
• Holi Festival Site – here.
• India Festivals Site article – here.

We have added a new Page called “Whitepapers” to the blog and have also added a blog roll on the side. We will be posting many more in the weeks to come. Another one to come up next is one on SQL Server 2008 install. Watch this space…

The blog roll has the links that we use a lot for our day to day work and are blogs from experts like Tom Kyte (of the asktom.oracle.com fame) or Chetan Sharma (Wireless Expert who writes the blog named AORTA) or sites like GigaOm and others.

Just wanted to mention that we became Microsoft Certified Partner last week with our specialization area being Data Management Solutions (Database Management and Business Intelligence). We are also aiming for the Gold Certified Status and hope to have that in place soon – once our product has been tested and we get an ID back from Microsoft.

We are going to bring two new offerings to our web-site and the blog:

How to Videos: It has been pointed out by a lot of our readers that it will be good to have videos in addition to the text/transcript when dealing with “How-To” scenarios for technical issues. Seeing it makes it easier to follow and complete the tasks. We perfectly agree with that statement and will be posting How to Videos soon on topics ranging from setting up traces to creating a user, troubleshooting performance issues etc. If you have suggestions or if there are things that you would like us to put out training videos for, please do let us know (you can click on the blog support link in the left pane and send us your invaluable feedback on the topic).

E-Books: This was another request by some of our readers. We will start putting out small e-books (all free) and each e-book will deal with a specific topic and will cover it right from the basics to the detailed level including case studies. We will be posting the upcoming topics on these very soon.

One of the common issues that all of us consultants (and company employees) have faced time and again is that when we search for information on Google or Yahoo or other search engines, the plethora of information that one gets makes it very difficult to go through all those links. And finding the right URL that provides some meaningful help takes some time. With that in mind, we started doing some research and using Google’s Co-op, created our own customized search engine which gets it’s information from selected premier sites where the information provided is to the point. You can search for items in these categories:

• Oracle
• SQL Server
• DB2 LUW
• Windows
• Linux
• Unix
• Performance Tuning
• VMWare
• Hardware related
• .Net Development
• Disaster Recovery
• Exchange
• Data Modeling
• Networking

The search engine link is listed on the widget in the right hand bar as well can be accessed here.

We have posted three new “How-To” articles on our site:

1. How can I view the historical changes made to a table using Flashback versions query?
2. How can I recover a table which is dropped by mistake using the flashback table clause?
3. How can I return a record set from a function in Oracle, MS SQL Server and DB2?

You can access them at this link.

A press release was made yesterday on our partnership with another company that is based out of Atlanta. Here is the link. We believe that this offers a lot of growth opportunities for both the companies and are eagerly looking forward to working with CerkiTek. We will be doing a press release on our site by the end of this week.

Three new “How-To” articles have been posted on our web site:

1. How can I alter a regular column to be an identity column in SQL Server?
2. How can I enable event level tracing in Oracle?
3. How can I reset the sequence value in Oracle and identity current value in MS SQL Server and DB2 LUW?