Article tagué monitoring

Twitter has been making a lot of fuss around for a few months. In not any particular order : Google might be on the track for a potential acquisition ; Twitter has been gaining traditional media focus ; some people forgot that Twitter is not so private and that may lead to hazardous work-related situations for your own career… Not so lately, showbiz people have found an additional celebrity key indicator with an unofficial highest followers owner contest. Well, you got it. It does not seem to pace down.

And you may think yourself : everything Twitter-related is a bit too hyped out ? You are likely to be right but computer geek people never desperate to find an odd way with trendy web products and to extend its basic feature.

In our case, a DBA guy wanted to use Tweeter with an Oracle Database. You may wondering what would be the point for doing that ? I guess this question should be merely ignored if you are already using Twitter and to be honest there is no point. Let’s pretend that we just want have fun. So no production should be involved. As mentionned by the author, in a corporate environment, this would not be recommended. First, most of database servers should not be internet access enabled from the corporate firewall. Moreover, addressing publicly the database status is also not the best security option.

Basically, a PL/SQL package (here named ora_tweet) is created to initiate calls to the Twitter API with the help of UTL_HTTP package. It enables a database to proceed HTTP requests. A Twitter account is needed so you would rather sign up for an additionnal one. Thanks to this setup, long processes once accomplished, will notify you with a 140 characters Twitter message.

If you want to give a try, follow the original post on database-geek.com (uh… we are not related FYI) with the whole instructions.