Wednesday, January 16, 2013

PL/SQL and Microsoft technology

Many companies tend to have mixed environments, with Oracle databases (and PL/SQL) running business-critical back-office systems, as well as Microsoft products for front-office applications such as email, word processing and collaboration/file sharing (ie Outlook, Office and Sharepoint), and of course the desktop operating system itself (Windows, with Internet Explorer, Internet Information Server, all integrated via Active Directory).



Working in these mixed environments means that you, as an Oracle PL/SQL developer, frequently need to work/integrate with various Microsoft technologies from PL/SQL.

Over the last couple of years, I've written a number of blog posts on this topic. This post is just a convenient collection of links to these previous posts:


PL/SQL and NTLM





Oracle Data Provider for .NET (ODP.NET)





Oracle Application Express (Apex) and IIS




Microsoft Office and Office Open XML (OOXML)




Microsoft Exchange (Email, Calendar and Contacts)



Microsoft Sharepoint

  • I have not yet had the need (or the desire...) to work with Sharepoint from PL/SQL, but it would be quite easy to create a PL/SQL library package to interface with the Sharepoint web services, similar to the Exchange package listed above. Perhaps I will revisit this topic sometime in the future... ? 


2 comments:

Unknown said...

Dear Mr Braten,

I am following with interest the development of the alexandria library, and especially the flex_ws_api. I have done some testing and it is indeed very simple to call a soap service with this package. However, while I am no expert in using soap services, I have to call a soap service that expects a certificate for authentication. I have succeeded to get data by using soapui by setting this .p12 certificate as keystore. However, I am not able to import this certificate via the wallet manager. When I call the service with make_request I get an access denied message. Do you, as an expert, know what the cause can be or give me some hints?

Thanks in advance,

Piotr Chabot Stadhouders

Morten Braten said...

@Piotr: Note that the FLEX_WS_API (written by Jason Straub) was the basis for the APEX_WEB_SERVICE package included with Apex, so if you have at least Apex 4 then I recommend you use APEX_WEB_SERVICE to call web services.

You say that you are "not able to import this certificate via the wallet manager", why not? Do you get an error message?

"When I call the service with make_request I get an access denied message" -- please provide the exact error message.

Also, what is your Oracle version and what is the operating system it runs on?

- Morten