Learning is not a spectator sport

Complete listing of posts

  • 2022 – the year in review

    2022 – the year in review

    Well, its been quite a year 🙂 Probably the highlight for me, and I’m sure for many others, was the return of face to face events, or just face to face in general. The ability to have regular casual conversations with like minded peers is one of those things that we all took for granted… Read more

  • Faster operations with CLOBs

    Faster operations with CLOBs

    Somewhere around version 9 (maybe before, maybe later…all so long ago 😀) the distinction between CLOB and VARCHAR2 became less defined. This was a good thing because the typical operations you would do with a VARCHAR2, for example, SUBSTR, REPLACE, INSTR and the like, could be used directly against a CLOB datatype without needing to… Read more

  • The cost of DBMS_PARALLEL_EXECUTE

    The cost of DBMS_PARALLEL_EXECUTE

    I had an inquiry about the performance of DBMS_PARALLEL_EXECUTE today from a customer. Whilst the utility (as the name suggests) is designed to break up a large task into smaller chunks and then run those in parallel, the customer asked what was the overall cost in using the utility compared to not using it at… Read more

  • Google-like search for your entire application

    Google-like search for your entire application

    I published a video today showing how to use a Text index to pick up search terms from multiple tables to allow a “Google-like” search across your entire application or even your entire database. The video walks through a lot of background on how Text indexes are flexible and can be customised to meet this… Read more

  • I did not write this blog post

    I did not write this blog post

    In fact…no-one wrote this blog post! Here’s a little bit of fun for you. I was doing my normal doom scrolling through Twitter and came across an advertisement that claimed an AI engine could write my blog posts for me! So I went to the site, typed in some keywords and a topic and hit… Read more

  • From stateful to stateless PL/SQL

    From stateful to stateless PL/SQL

    I’ve done a lot of talks mainly around the tremendous performance benefits you can get just by employing a little bit of PL/SQL in the core parts of your applications. This advice has been valid for as long as PL/SQL has existed. And PL/SQL has been around for a long time, and when I say… Read more

  • A Security Disaster

    A Security Disaster

    There has been a lot of coverage here in Australia recently about one of our popular telco’s getting hacked due to a lapse in security. So I thought I’d share a security horror story that I encountered with a customer recently. I’d love to say that I’m sharing this due to my philanthropic nature but… Read more

  • The Halloween Pumpkins of Terror

    The Halloween Pumpkins of Terror

    For some giggles this Halloween, over on Twitter I tweeted some worst practices each hour during Halloween in the guise of carved pumpkins. Here’s the complete set spanning the 24 hours – hopefully you do not recognise any of these in your data centre! Read more

  • CloudWorld is done!

    CloudWorld is done!

    Just a quick post with a few highlights from CloudWorld, but really this is all about getting you the slides from my presentations, because I know it can be frustrating when they don’t appear for a long time on the official CloudWorld pages. So here’s PDFs of my two talks: SQL Tuning in 45minutes Futuristic… Read more

  • CloudWorld – Thursday Thrills

    CloudWorld – Thursday Thrills

    OK, lets close this week on a strong note with another bunch of awesome tech sessions on the database, APEX and SQL. I’m super excited to see that we’ve done away with the previous format of OpenWorld where we “wound things down” during the last day. This year we’ve got content going all day long… Read more

  • CloudWorld – Wednesday Avawanche

    CloudWorld – Wednesday Avawanche

    Well my alliteration puns might not be so good, but the volume of cool stuff on Wednesday at CloudWorld is a lot better 🙂 Here’s my picks for what any database professional should be considering for Wednesday at CloudWorld. In particular, I’d love to see you at my SQL talk in the afternoon. Stop by… Read more

  • Easy data access from Excel #JoelKallmanDay

    Easy data access from Excel #JoelKallmanDay

    I suspect Joel would have kittens if he knew I would use the appreciation day to talk about Excel instead of APEX but courtesy of an AskTom question I stumbled across this cool little tool for accessing data from your autonomous database via Excel. You might be thinking: “Hold on, we’ve been accessing Oracle databases… Read more