Learning is not a spectator sport

Complete listing of posts

  • Transaction Priorities in 26ai – open season on locking

    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

  • An AI generated SQL for Christmas

    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

  • The Christmas database

    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

  • Virtualbox 7.2.4 upgrade … grrr

    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

  • Tuning SQL without any access

    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

  • APAC conferences wrap up

    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

  • South Africa Oracle User Group conference was a blast!

    South Africa Oracle User Group conference was a blast!

    I was very fortunate to attend the South African User Group Conference last month. It was my first time in the country and, as with all places you’ve never visited before, checking your own government’s travel website never talks about the good, it always highlights a litany of potential risks 🙂 However, I found the Read more

  • Turbo boost your LOBs and JSON

    Turbo boost your LOBs and JSON

    Go back a few decades before XML and JSON and you could easily categorise data into (roughly) two categories: small data, like names, addresses, descriptions, numbers, dates, etc big data, like documents, videos, images, etc That was pretty much “it” when it came to storing data in your database. As such, in Oracle we had Read more

  • XMLTYPE on Autonomous

    XMLTYPE on Autonomous

    Yes it’s true. People are still using XML. I know that many of us have leapt aboard the JSON hype train, but good old XML still has its place in the IT world. We’ve had XML in the database for decades now, and as such, we also support it on the Autonomous database. In the Read more

  • SQL trace on Autonomous

    SQL trace on Autonomous

    I’ve blogged before about activating SQL trace on autonomous database, but here’s a little addenda that you might appreciate. Lets assume I’ve done the setup as described in the blog and now I’m going to do some tracing on a long running SQL statement SQL> alter session set sql_trace = true; Session altered. SQL> select Read more

  • The AI World 2025 mega download!

    The AI World 2025 mega 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 sessions you have missed. Then you discover… you need to click on each session to see the file name to download…. Read more

  • Wrapping up Oracle AI World

    Wrapping up Oracle AI World

    Its been a great few days at Oracle AI World! Of course, there  is lots of buzz around AI but it was great to still see the high level of interest in the core database tech. A huge thank you to everyone who came to my session — or dropped in at the database booth Read more