Sunday, January 23, 2011  Everybody needs a spare database  I've
gotten a little preachy in this blog lately, so I thought this
time I'd give you something useful. Have you ever wished you had
a quicky little set of database tables so you could do some
generally wacky stuff that would likely get you fired if you did
it on your production database? I thought so. In the past, the
only way to do something like this was to build another database
somewhere. Of course, where to put it? Some of us weirdos have
machines at home where we build databases, do virtual machines
or stuff like that. Guilty. But not everyone wants to tie up
their home machine with the multi-gigabyte behemoth that Oracle
11g has become. Well, have I got a deal for you.  Oracle
provides a nifty little free service to show off their Oracle
Application Express product (APEX), which I'm not sure has been
as popular as they'd like it to be. You can register at their
site and get your own little workspace that will allow you to
play around with Ora