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26ai Quick Tip for Database Links
It seems an odd thing that so many facilities on the cloud environment take advantage of the concept of stored database credentials when it comes to authenticating/authorising access to those facilities, but a database link on your on-premise database typically will still require the username and password hard-coded as part of the DDL in the Read more
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Datatype Discipline – Even more so in 26ai
I know … I know … I probably sound like a broken record. As I scroll back through my blog archives, I see myself continuously bleating on about using data types carefully in the database. But rest assured – I ain’t done! Yes, I’m back with another warning about taking care when mixing and matching Read more
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The new Boolean … What about existing apps?
Yes you can throw some shade Oracle’s way for taking so long, but we now finally have a Boolean datatype arriving in the latest version of the database. SQL> create table person ( 2 pid int, 3 married boolean); Table created. SQL> insert into person values (1,true); 1 row created. SQL> insert into person values Read more
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What grabbed your attention in 2025
A quick summary of the things you seemed to enjoy most last year Top 3 blog posts The AI World download We’ve all been there… You head over to the Session Catalog for AI World and you want to download the files for all of the sessions you have been to, and all of the Read more
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Software quality – Grok and my friend’s boat
You might be wondering how a friend’s boat has any relation to the topic of software quality, but bear with me – we’ll get there in a second. But first, if you’ve got a Twitter account, you’ve probably had the unfortunate experience over the past few days of people using Grok to turn people’s pictures Read more
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2025 … wrapped
Just a brief selection of memories from conferences and events throughout 2025. It’s been wonderfully rewarding to share my knowledge on the Oracle database to so many people this year. 2026 will bring new things with Oracle Database, which will continue to amaze! Read more
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Transaction Priorities in 26ai – open season on locking
One of the cool features in Oracle AI Database 26ai is the ability for sessions to have different levels of priority for their transaction locks. I’ve covered how the feature works in the video below In a nutshell, a session can nominate whether their locking priority is LOW, MEDIUM or HIGH. When a session tries Read more
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An AI generated SQL for Christmas
A couple of years back I posted a simple SQL to draw a Christmas tree, complete with colours and randomly placed lights using the Windows terminal colour codes to. My SQL ended up like this: with codes as (select ‘[1;’ s1, ‘[0m’ e1 , rpad(‘X’,40,’X’) s, rpad(‘T’,40,’T’) t from dual) select replace( replace( replace(r,’X’,chr(27)||'[42m’||chr(27)||s1||to_char(32)||’m’||’X’||chr(27)||e1), ‘T’,chr(27)||'[43m’||chr(27)||s1||to_char(33)||’m’||’T’||chr(27)||e1), Read more
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The Christmas database
With Oracle AI Database 26ai finally ready for on-prem release, it means we can all celebrate a little something at Christmas time 🙂 On the first day of Christmas, my DB gave to me… A VECTOR for similarity.  On the second day of Christmas, my DB gave to me… Two duality views, And a Read more
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Virtualbox 7.2.4 upgrade … grrr
I upgraded my VirtualBox install from 7.2.2 to 7.2.4 yesterday and any VM that was using Host Based Networking suddenly failed to start. Toggling the Network Adapter on and off for the affected virtual machine(s) settings did not help. If I removed the Host-only networking, then the machines were fine, but I needed that so Read more
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Tuning SQL without any access
Wherever our database resides, it is often the case that we want our developer to have access to performance tools in order to ensure that the SQL they write will not cause any issues when it arrives in Production. However, this can present a few challenges when it comes to a database that might not Read more
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APAC conferences wrap up
Conferences ARE BACK in APAC – Perth, Melbourne, and New Zealand! After not having conferences last year, it was fantastic to see a full APAC conference circuit this year. This season took me to Perth, Melbourne, and Wellington – each with a nice buzz in the community, reminding me of why these events are so Read more
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