posted by kevin systrom, product marketing manager

i've been traveling a bunch in the past few days, and the one thing i've noticed is the variety of newspapers you're offered on every flight in europe. in london, where i am now, my hotel has between 10 and 15 newspapers in the lobby from around the world in different languages. so i started thinking about how news plays an increasingly important role across the world.

of course, blogs have also become an international phenomenon. they're not constrained by language or nationality — in fact, blogs have become an important way to bring rise to independent reporters and writers. and there are more and more people who wish to read blogs in other languages. up until now, our blog and news site service, google reader, was only available in english. as of today, it supports these languages: french, italian, german, spanish, english (uk), chinese (traditional and simplified), japanese, and korean.

with this announcement (you might enjoy this take from the reader blog), i'm also happy to tell you that we're removing the "labs" label from google reader. it's a small textual change, but we believe it solidifies our commitment to make reading blogs and news sites easier than ever. so try google reader and get all your blogs and news sites in one place.

scenario: i have a database named blobs_db which has a table (reports) containing a primary key (pk) column, a blob column (blob_col) , and a clob column (clob_col). i have html db (predecessor to oracle application express) running in another database named app_db. (the names of the databases and objects have been changed to protect the innocent;) i want to be able to upload and download either lob columns into the blobs_db database from within an html db application running on the app_db database.

problem: for downloading you cannot issue a select of a lob column over a database link. you get the "ora-22992: cannot use lob locators selected from remote tables" error message.

the trick: you can get lobs over a database link using an insert statement.

upload trick: the html db form inserts into a global temporary table (upload_reports) in the app_db with an instead-of trigger on it which moves a copy of the lobs to the report_db database via a insert into/select from statement:

insert into reports@blobs_db
(pk, blob_col, clob_col)
values
(:new.pk, :new.blob_col, :new.clob_col);


download work around: when the user selects a lob to download, i move a copy of the row in the blobs_db database to the app_db database with an insert into/select from statement:

insert into download_reports
select * from reports@blobs_db;

since the upload_reports and download_reports tables are a global temporary tables in the app_db database when the html db access to the app_db database is finished, the global temporary tables are emptied.

i’ve been doing a bit of research on the history of oracle’s bi tools, for the keynote i’m doing at the biwa event next month, and in particular i’ve been taking a look back at the history of what is now oracle bi suite enterprise edition, previously known as siebel analytics. here’s what i’ve found [...]

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