Lib Couldn't be found error while installing FOD Schema

One of my future goals include to learn JDeveloper and ADF. So I started with Oracle by Example series (I think the best thing to learn a tool on OTN documentation). In article that I started out there was a requirement to install FOD schema. I checked and to my disappointment was unable to find this in default installation 11g. So I had to install it. I followed the link provided in the article and to my surprise it was not a simple SQL script that I required to run rather was an application that I had to run by first opening it in JDeveloper.

So I opened it up and did the necessary steps mentioned and than ran the project. The output was not good at all. It gave me the error that path to lib folder is missing. It was pointing to the root folder where I unzipped the application despite the fact that I gave the correct JDeveloper home path where necessary. I cannot believe it took three hours to fix this problem. And to my anger the error was the same that I had experienced a couple of days ago. Use of \ instead of / while giving folder paths to apache. So please use / instead of \ while giving paths in Oracle configuration (No, I know you are using Windows). 

Oracle Database Firewall

Oracle has recently released a new product named Oracle Database Firewall. Essentially the concept is same and that is to monitor and possibly block the unwanted connections to database (rather than OS here). However it does not block connections because it is not on network level but what it does is block invalid SQL statements. Now what is the definition of invalid SQL considering that any syntactical errors are detected by DBMS already.


Here invalid SQL does not mean the SQL that produces wrong results but here it means an SQL that is suspected to be one created from SQL injection techniques. SQL injections are pretty common and in most cases if not all they are unavoidable. There are techniques to prevent code from inadvertently executing injected statements but someway or the other they all fail to protect the data fully. But now you have database firewall. And the best thing about it is that it only works with Oracle Database but also on SQL Server, Sybase, IBM's DB2 etc. 


For more information you can see this podcast from Director Security at Oracle Corp.

Apache path error on Windows

I can almost remember this correctly. I have made this mistake three times. The mistake is to use \ instead of / while setting paths for apache on Windows. Whether it was setting report path parameter in configuration of Oracle AS services, or setting images path while installing APEX I have made this mistake again and again, only to waste a couple of hours of my life. The exception can be in case of report configuration because it was then when I made this mistake for the first time. The reason it happens to me only on Windows is because I copy paste the addresses from path bar of Windows explorer and we all know that Windows uses \ instead of / in paths but apache does not.


So be very very very careful (can't stress anymore) every time you configure something in apache which is installed on Windows. Even if it is necessary to copy paste address from address bar make sure to remove \ and replace it with /. The error it caused usually states that required directory or file cannot be found. So every time you see an error like this don't stress too much and do this change first. :)