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

• An implementation of the NTLM protocol for PL/SQL, which you can use to call web services on servers with Integrated Windows Authentication
• NTLM Single Sign-On in Oracle Application Express (Apex), how to set up your Apex applications so that users will automatically be logged in without having to enter their usernames and passwords, useful for intranet sites

Oracle Data Provider for .NET (ODP.NET)

• Minimal, non-intrusive install of ODP.NET, or how to make ODP.NET "just work" without interfering with other software on the machine, with the smallest possible footprint

Oracle Application Express (Apex) and IIS

• Using the Thoth Gateway to run Apex on Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS), a freely available, easy-to-install, high-performance port of mod_plsql that runs on Microsoft's web server, including IIS 6 and IIS 7
• Using Oracle Proxy Authentication with the Thoth Gateway, or how to pass your Windows credentials from the the web server on to the database server

Microsoft Office and Office Open XML (OOXML)

• PL/SQL package for working with the OOXML file format, or how to read and write OOXML documents (Word, Excel, Powerpoint) from PL/SQL

Microsoft Exchange (Email, Calendar and Contacts)

• PL/SQL package for working with Microsoft Exchange, or how to read and write email, attachments, calendar events and contact information from PL/SQL

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... ?