Learning is not a spectator sport

Complete listing of posts

  • Data Centric Apps are better when they do NOT work

    Data Centric Apps are better when they do NOT work

    OK, that title sounds a bit weird, so let me explain. If you live in Australia you may have seen that the national airline Qantas had a little stumble last week. I would log on to the mobile phone app, and normally it shows a brief summary of your frequent flyer membership The problem there… Read more

  • A SQL conundrum

    A SQL conundrum

    I had an AskTOM question recently about finding occurrences of a set of words within sentences stored in a table. For example, if you have two sentences, The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog Never trust a fox. Looks like a dog, behaves like a cat. and I were given the phrase “fox,dog,cat”… Read more

  • Backup Paranoia

    Backup Paranoia

    By now you have probably seen or heard about the Google SNAFU, surmised nicely by this tweet. Now you’re probably thinking “Oh here we go. Someone from not-Google is going to take the opportunity to dunk on Google” , but rest assured this is not my intention. As anyone who has been in IT for… Read more

  • The One SQL Thing You Should Never Use

    The One SQL Thing You Should Never Use

    …is every single damn blog post out there that says “You should never use” ! I read another one of these such blog posts today, and like always, it really got my goat. Every few months, there’s another piece of nonsense out there “You should never use OUTER JOIN” “You should never use DISTINCT” “You… Read more

  • 23ai – Leave Your Wallet at Home

    23ai – Leave Your Wallet at Home

    “The simple things are also the most extraordinary things, and only the wise can see them.” – Paulo Coelho There is a scary amount of amazing stuff in Oracle Database 23ai, but for me, you could take all of that away and leave me with just one particular feature that is in 23ai and I… Read more

  • Will I lose my existing AUDIT settings in 23ai?

    Will I lose my existing AUDIT settings in 23ai?

    A few days back I posted a video how Unified Auditing is now the only support auditing option in 23ai, and gave you some easy steps on how to migrate your existing traditional audit settings to the equivalent audit policies under Unified Audit. As the video also reassures – when you upgrade your database, your… Read more

  • Switching services on Autonomous now easier

    Switching services on Autonomous now easier

    I’ve posted before on a few occasions about the importance of understanding the different services provided when you connect to the autonomous database. For example, the difference between TP and TP_URGENT is not just a difference in priority in terms of resource consumption – it also impacts the allowed usage of parallel facilities. Even more… Read more

  • I wrote a TERRIBLE app

    I wrote a TERRIBLE app

    Yeah, it was a hideous bug-ridden piece of junk, and best thing was … it didn’t really matter. First let me explain what led to my terrible app. Good mate Dom Giles posted this message on our internal Slack channel the other day. “I need to give myself a goal, and I noticed that Cancer… Read more

  • Bitten by the leap year?

    Bitten by the leap year?

    Leap years are those things that for the most part go unnoticed, but occasionally in niche circumstances they can bite you when you least expect it. Consider the following example that popped up on an AskTom question recently. I’ll start with a simple requirement: For a user provided date, show me the total sales for… Read more

  • Scalar SQL Macros – cherry pick the best features

    Scalar SQL Macros – cherry pick the best features

    On my last Office Hours session, I handled a question from someone comparing Oracle to SQL Server, and they pointed out (paraphrasing) “SQL Server has a ton of date related functions to make dealing with dates or date components easy. How come Oracle doesn’t do that?” That’s probably a fair point, because a quick look… Read more

  • One Billion Rows – Gerald’s Challenge

    One Billion Rows – Gerald’s Challenge

    At the start of the year, Twitter become all a flutter when people started posting their results for the 1 billion row challenge. The challenge was thrown out to the community as an exercise in Java processing (because as we know, people love dumping on Java performance) 😀. My Java interest (and skills) are low… Read more

  • You can’t partition by time zone, but maybe you can!

    You can’t partition by time zone, but maybe you can!

    The internet heralded a very common evolution in databases. You started with a database that backed a physical store front, or the data was created/entered by human beings who sat in a location near to the data centre because that was governed by the network technology of the time. Even so, you had a lot… Read more