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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
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Tip: Expanding a SQL statement
In all recent versions of the database you can call DBMS_UTILITY.EXPAND_SQL_TEXT to get the “true” version of a SQL that the database will run. It takes your SQL as input and returns a CLOB, which means its all a bit fiddly if you have a SQL statement already sitting in your SQLcl/SQLPlus buffer. Using a… Read more
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WITH clause gets a 26ai boost!
By way of background, a while back I did video called “My New Favourite Join” on the LATERAL clause. The reason I like it is that it lets you solve a problem by composing little pieces together rather than writing one enormous query. Now this post is not about LATERAL, but I’ll show a quick… Read more
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The Goldilocks problem – Materialized Views
I’m sure you’ve all heard the tale of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, but I’d like to apply the Goldilocks principle to a database object-namely, a materialized view. You might be thinking, how does that apply to database objects when it comes to things like not too cold, not too hot, or not too heavy,… Read more
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Blue Sky Programming – The Optimism Trap
Many years ago, before I joined Oracle, I was working on a major modernisation project. We were replacing an existing non-Oracle system with an entirely new Oracle database application written from scratch. Not long after deploying a new version into our test environment, the results came back and a large number of tests had failed.… Read more
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Keeping your tech ego in check
In my usual twitter doom scrolling, I came across this post the other day Now it’s pretty obvious to me that this is one of the standard “engagement bait” posts that are commonplace nowadays. It’s designed to polarize opinions and thus the resultant “discussion” becomes a lot more inflammatory and thus succeeds the goal of… Read more
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First dabblings with APEXlang
Obviously there are plenty of folks in the Oracle APEX team with waaaayy more experience in APEXlang than I have, so this isn’t an in-depth expose into all of the nuts and bolts of APEXlang. For that, I recommend you check out the AskTOM Live sessions where the APEX team are holding regular deep-dives on… Read more
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Vanishing objects; hello ORA-08103
In the previous post we saw that even though we had done an exchange partition mid-flights through a query execution, the query kept on running to successful completion. The database managed to find the data from the exchanged partition and keep on executing. The logical next question is – is that always the case? What… Read more
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A very robust query
Some times I’m blown away by how the database will try very hard to save you from yourself :-). Consider the following example: I’ve got a table called T. It’s got two columns, X and Y, and it’s partitioned into four partitions, the values being based on X, 1, 2, 3 and 4 for the… Read more
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The secret APEX performance hack
Here’s a little secret APEX performance hack if you are running on the Autonomous database. As background, I’m running an Autonomous database with six CPUs and a terabyte of storage. Let me grab a good sized chunk of that terabyte with a single table. I just kept duplicating copies of DBA_OBJECTS until my table got… Read more