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Syncing your Oracle AI skill definitions
One of the very cool facilities in more recent versions of SQLcl is the skills command. The reason I like the command is that most of us have tinkered with various different harnesses such as Claude, Codex or any of the other AI related tools, in order to come up with some model/tool preferences for… Read more
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ORA-24369? Required callbacks? Broken binds?
One of the very cool things we’ve had for many years in the Oracle database is the ability to capture values after DML without having to do another trip back to the database. We do this using the returning clause. I’ll whip up a very simple example in SQL plus using SQL plus variables, but… Read more
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The mystery magical pluggable database
Here’s a quick Friday tip for you. This is the story of the Magic Secret Pluggable Database 😂 When we first introduced pluggable database back in 12c, there was pretty much a mixed view. Some people didn’t embrace it and are still running non-CDB today, whilst other people embraced it with open arms. Note that… Read more
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Your insurance policy as a DBA
I have always found it interesting that DBAs that look after databases insist on limiting the privileges available to developers (which is a good thing to protect the data), but quite happily will log on to their database with every single one of the most powerful privilege known to mankind! As a DBA, my preference… Read more
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Deciphering Date Differences with DATEDIFF
(Try saying that 5 times quickly in a row) 🙂 There’s an old saying that’s gone around for years in IT circles which is “If you have a text parsing problem you can use a regular expression…now you have two problems“. I’d like to steal that phrase and manipulate it for the sake of today’s… Read more
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“Where are my patches?!?!”
Anyone that follows me on the socials knows that I’m pretty keen on security. Whilst all those other day-to-day things like performance and uptime etc etc are all important, rest assured; people will generally forgive you for being down for a while; they will forgive you for being slow for a while, but they will… Read more
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More Gooey-ness from GUIDs
I wrote a post a few years back (well, actually it was 2018!) but I’ll paraphrase briefly. There are two common schools of thought when it comes to automatic generation of values for a surrogate key in the Oracle database. The first one is using a SEQUENCE, referencing it either directly in your table definition/SQL,… Read more
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APEX Collections – Taking More Control
I posted recently about the usage of APEX collections, a generic structure in APEX that lets you easily store a set of results without having to create a table in advance. It’s easy to use and useful but I think it may have fallen into overuse. Good friend Jon Dixon replied on my post saying… Read more
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Database Features – The Bullet Point Myth
I have a presentation that I’ve given from time to time over the years and it’s called the “bullet point myth”. The main thrust of the presentation is that if you look at a high enough level then all databases can be considered equal. At the highest and most generic levels, it’s easy to claim… Read more
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The APEX_COLLECTIONS crash puzzler…
What would you do if everything in your environment looked perfectly fine, the data looked correct and yet every time you query a table, the query crashes with some sort of error? Yes, here I am back banging the drum about taking care with your data types 😊. In today’s example I’m going to show… Read more
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Not the post I was expecting
I’m currently here in India for the Sangam conference, and I’m always a fan of coming to India, because there is always an adventure. Coincidentally at breakfast this morning, I was telling one of the first-timer speakers that India is so good for repeat trips, because something is different every time. Now truth be told,… Read more
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The “best” tool
I had a question the other day that constantly pops up on my feed whether it’s on social media or people asking Q&A at a conference etc. And that question is “What is the best tool I should be using for my database management and app development?” And it’s fair to say I generally get… Read more