Sources about Streams

Streams is one of the least documented Oracle features. I’m used to start my research into a new area by reading few examples of how others used this feature. In the case of streams, very few examples were found and I had to work directly from Oracle documentation (the horrors!).

Here are the sources I’ve used while studying streams:

Lewis C. has the only useful example of streams I was able to find. In two parts. It was a good start but very soon I learned that streams is so customizable, that my use case is going to be very different than his.

Oracle’s Stream Replication Administrator Guide – Also known as “Everything you ever wanted to know about streams replication”. I found myself spending more time with this document than I did with my husband. At this point in the project I can cite entire sections verbatim. This is the streams replication Bible.

Oracle’s Streams Concepts and Administration Guide – Thats the second most important document. I started my project by reading the concepts part of it, and then referred to the administration part during the implementation stage. The chapter about monitoring was especially useful.

PL/SQL Packages Reference, DBMS_STREAMS_ADM – Documents the actual functions I’ve used. Of course, you can’t live without it – because you’ll always want to do things a bit differently from the examples in the administration guide.

If I were doing this project on 11g, I’d probably also try reading Oracle Database 2 Day + Data Replication and Integration Guide. But I only found out about this one today.

I’ll publish my own streams example in a day or two, so there will be at least one more example to work with.