According to the Enterprise System Spectator's website Oracle is busy laying off a large number of employees. According to the article, 8000 people or 10-15% of the company's workforce will lose their jobs today. Apparently similar layoffs are happening at SAP, Infor and possibly several other companies.

Several Oracle employees confirmed these layoffs at LayoffBlog.com.

Answer: Although this may be a undervalued question, I got many a search for my blog with this question. This is where I wanted to address this question elaborately or rather in multiple ways.

I've been working on way to capture changed rows using ora_rowscn for part of an ETL routine. Here are some details of what I've tested and found.

By default, the ora_rowscn pseudo column reports the scn at block level. This means that rows sharing the same block will have the same ora_rowscn, and if one row were to be changed, then scn would be altered for both blocks.

Pro Oracle Spatial for Oracle Database 11g shows how to take advantage of Oracle Databases built–in feature set for working with location–based data. A great deal of the information used in business today is associated with location in some way, and analysis of that data is becoming ever more important in todays mobile and highly connected world. In Pro Oracle Spatial for Oracle Database 11g, authors Ravi Kothuri and Albert Godfrind address

It’s sometimes said that the true job of an Oracle database administrator can be summed up in one, essential skill: to be able to recover your database.

There’s much wisdom in that statement. Of all the things you are responsible for as a database administrator, nothing is more important than the data itself. Like it or not, the fearsome responsibility of protecting your organizations most critical data falls squarely upon your shoulders:

• Lose that data and your company could fail.
• Lose that data and you could be out of a job.

Oracle Database 11g : New Features for DBAs and Developers is a comprehensive, example–laden review of the most significant new features and improvements offered by the latest release of Oracle Corporation’s flagship database product.

Oracle DBA Automation Scripts shows you how to build the scripts that automate the daily operations of Oracle database management. These scripts will work in a variety of environments, including the Windows NT, Sun Solaris 2.x, Sun OS 5.x, HP-UX 11.x, and AIX 4.x operating systems. You'll learn the command differences between these operating systems and how to write scripts to integrate SQL with your OS.