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Why I blog – redux
A while back I wrote a post called “Why I blog” which spoke about how interaction with the community is part of the free reward you get from putting your ideas out there on the interwebs. People make comments on what works for them, what doesn’t, how your code might be better etc etc. It’s… Read more
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Safeguard your APEX workspaces and applications
Here’s a quick APEX tip. There are heaps of cool things within APEX to ensure you never lose or accidentally overwrite your applications, such as automatic backups and working copies. But if you share my levels of paranoia 😁when it comes to worrying about the loss of code, data or anything else, here’s a simple… Read more
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23ai – where your vector indexes are stored
The new vector datatype and associated vector indexes are two of the big features in Oracle Database 23ai. The ability to use machine learning models to do quick and efficient semantic searches I feel will really change the concept of searching through data in your database. No more of those embarrassing conversations we used… Read more
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SQL*Loader rows vanish!
Just a quick heads up on the importance of testing thoroughly especially when exploring niche sets of operating conditions with the database (or any software for that matter). Here’s one that came up recently when direct load SQL*Loader was combined with In-Database archiving. First I’ll create an empty DEPT table in my schema. SQL>… Read more
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Quick Tip – Vector Indexes in 23ai
Here’s a quick tip for anyone tinkering with vectors and vector indexes in 23ai. Let’s say you have just created a vector index on your table as per below SQL> create vector index DOC_CHUNKS_VEC_IX on DOC_CHUNKS(piece_embed) 2 organization INMEMORY NEIGHBOR GRAPH 3 distance COSINE 4 with target accuracy 95; Index created. and now you would… Read more
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Got Issues Running an Installer / Assistant on Windows ?
I tweeted today that Oracle Database 23ai Free is now available on Windows. You should go check it out 🙂 The installation of the “Free” suite of database versions on Windows is fully automated, with just a simple click on setup.exe. However, on other products on Windows, we often go through a… Read more
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Schema level grant in 23ai
Even with smart use of roles to manage privileges, one of the frustrations for DBAs with security privileges has been the disconnect between privileges and typical usage hierarchy. Object privileges have always worked on two tiers only, namely, you get access a single object (eg GRANT SELECT), or you get access to every object (GRANT… Read more
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Flashback Query – an important warning
One of the very cool technologies that Oracle Database has is the concept of Flashback Query, the ability to look “into the past” at the state of some data in a table. It is part of a whole suite of Flashback technologies. If you’re interested in an overview of all of them, check out my… Read more
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A recommendation for ENUMERATION DOMAINS
Use case domains is one the very cool features in Oracle Database 23ai. When this release was still in the Beta phase, I did a video covering the basics which you can see below. But now that we are at production, one enhancement that has come along for the ride is the concept of enumeration… Read more
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Tracking SQL macro dependencies
SQL macros are ridiculously powerful and I think as time goes on, we are going to see more and more innovative usages of this super cool tech. It may seem a strange analogy, but I liken them to analytic window functions from way back in version 8.1.6, in that the syntax arrives, people scratch their… Read more
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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
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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