Learning is not a spectator sport

Complete listing of posts

  • Bringing Multimedia back into 19c!

    Bringing Multimedia back into 19c!

    Many people were not super impressed when the following announcement came out in Oracle 19C Rest assured it is not as if we are sitting here at Oracle thinking “Hey let’s come up with ways to make life more difficult for people” 😀. There were a number of issues with continuing the support of the Read more

  • Some "must-have" ideas for your next meetup

    Some "must-have" ideas for your next meetup

    In these post-COVID times where airlines, trying to make a quick buck after the troublesome times of the past few years, are charging you the price of a small apartment, plus your first born child, plus your left arm to travel to even the closest of destinations 😀 , I have been exceptionally fortunate to Read more

  • Adding APEX 23.1 to your Database Free VM

    Adding APEX 23.1 to your Database Free VM

    With so much excitement about the release 23ai Database Free, there is a good chance you have raced out, downloaded the Database Developer VM that delivers you a full virtual machine with the database, Application Express (APEX), SQL Developer, ORDS and all the goodies you need to kickstart your learning of the new release and Read more

  • Is "fragmentation" still a dirty word?

    Is "fragmentation" still a dirty word?

    There was a time in the past where whenever anyone used the term “fragmentation” they would draw the ire of the more experienced members of the Oracle community because the usage of the term “fragmentation” was commonly associated with a mistaken belief in how the Oracle database works. This would come from countless forum posts, Read more

  • Can you pass the EMPTY SCHEMA test?

    Can you pass the EMPTY SCHEMA test?

    I had a question come in recently on AskTom and (paraphrasing) it ran like this: “Why isn’t my materialized view being used to speed up my data warehouse query?” Now before you think “Here we go, Connor is going to bitch about the question not having a test case”, this is not the case (well…sort Read more

  • Sample schemas are now easier than ever

    Sample schemas are now easier than ever

    A couple of years back I wrote a post talking about how we wanted to publish the sample scripts in a git repo so they were not bound to database release cycles, but that this led to us being caught between a rock and hard place when it came to the layout of the scripts, Read more

  • Better error messages means less errors

    Better error messages means less errors

    Although not strictly attached to the 23ai release of the database, one of the projects that is ongoing inside Oracle is improving the database error messages. People often make light of error messages, but they typically the first port of call when diagnosing an issue. I’ve lost track of the number of times my first Read more

  • 23c for Developers is HERE

    23c for Developers is HERE

    23c is HERE and for the first time, Oracle is delivering before anything else, a free developers version. Truth be told this post is simply so that I can easily refer back to it for the important links which I’ll list below.  For all the official information, please refer to the official blog post: https://blogs.oracle.com/database/post/oracle-database-23c-free Read more

  • Avoiding INSERT glitches with SQL*Plus and SQLcl

    Avoiding INSERT glitches with SQL*Plus and SQLcl

    Sometimes in data centric applications, we want to store metadata (such as HTML or CSS or other such text) in a CLOB in a database table. For example, I might have a HTML file called “demo.html” that I want to later serve up to clients via APEX. If I want to simply change that to Read more

  • A key difference between TP and TPURGENT

    A key difference between TP and TPURGENT

    When you are using Autonomous Transaction Processing database, as well as the LOW, MEDIUM and HIGH services that are also present on the Autonomous Data Warehouse offering, there are TP and TPURGENT services that you can use. I got asked by a customer how they differ, and while TPURGENT gets a little more slice of Read more

  • When EZCONNECT is not so easy

    When EZCONNECT is not so easy

    Pop over to AskTom and you’ll see two entries that commonly pop up on our top 20 most viewed questions list. Because people new to Oracle can sometimes be a little overwhelmed with TNSNAMES file configuration and even for those experienced with it, it still becomes another configuration file that needs to be managed, deployed, Read more

  • The new forums

    The new forums

    New year and I knew you want some new news about new forums!  (That’s a lot of “new” 😀) I’ll be the first to admit that there were some frustrations with our existing forum platform which didn’t help reinforce the strong community spirit that was always there on the forums over the years. For those Read more