Assume you are a system administrator and you have forgotten your username or password so you have no longer access to your database. You don't have any other access to your database, you cannot reset the SYSDBA user's password because other people or applications are using it and you don't have access to them either but you really need access to certain records quickly. How annoying is that? Luckily, there is a solution for this problem but we also have to assume that we can shut down the database server for a short time.
Few years ago I wrote a simple bash script to generate employee codes for future project management systems. Now, that the time has come to create a system that must be able to generate employee codes automatically, I realized that it is more elegant to generate employee codes directly with PL/SQL functions so the script has become completely useless. I was going to delete it permanently from my filesystem, but then checked the code and decided to post it here because it is a simple but perfect example of how fast problems can be solved using Linux bash only. Experts can skip this post because probably it will show nothing new for them.
Most PostgreSQL database and web developers, who want to make sure their program is completely cross-platform, might have encouthered the problem: PostgreSQL simply does not want to work on Windows 7. Well, it works but installing it properly is not that matter of course what we first thought to be but it is also not that hard to make it work. In this post, we will cover how PostgreSQL with web components can be installed on a Windows 7 Professional system.
This post will cover how you can create a relatively safe, Windows 7 - Ubuntu dualboot system where Windows partition is encrypted with the free and opensource DiskCryptor program. Since Microsoft does not provide BitLocker on Windows 7 Professional our choice is this 3rd party software.
