Learning is not a spectator sport

Complete listing of posts

  • Blockchain tables in 21c? A word of warning

    Blockchain tables in 21c? A word of warning

    As I write this, the moment you do a browser search for “blockchain”, the last thing you will get a match on is the technology elements. Instead, my results are flooded with hedge funds, short selling, Gamestop and bitcoin. A friend has been sending me messages along the lines of “Is it true Satoshi Nakamoto Read more

  • Datatype conversions – strange internal function

    Datatype conversions – strange internal function

    Perhaps the most famous (or infamous) performance tuning problem you’ll find spanning decades of blog posts when it comes to Oracle and SQL is the “mystery” of why Oracle is not using an index when it is totally obvious to us as the developer that it should be.  The demo code is always along the Read more

  • New Year … new idea … new channel

    New Year … new idea … new channel

    I’ve done a lot of presentations over the years, written a ton of blog posts, and over the past  5 years cranked out hundreds of tech videos of my YouTube channel. But with the current state of the world, I also know that over the last year we’ve been awash with tech content that now Read more

  • PL/SQL in 21c gets amazing new loop iterators

    PL/SQL in 21c gets amazing new loop iterators

    “It’s a dead language” people said. “There’s never anything new” people said. Well, let me serve those people a slice of humble pie as we take a look at huge suite of enhancements to iteration handling in PL/SQL in 21c. In particular, there is one thing that I really find nice about these new changes. Read more

  • How long will the script take to run?

    How long will the script take to run?

    In a world where databases are now the norm, whereas distributing data via a CSV file used to be commonplace, nowadays we often see the ubiquitous INSERT script being offered as a means to seed data. This is perfectly fine for those requirements where we are populating a finite list of reference data that is Read more

  • "Big Mac and Size"..Handling large SQL Macros

    "Big Mac and Size"..Handling large SQL Macros

    Happy 2021 everyone! And what better way to start than a cheesy pun to make you groan and already to start looking forward to a better 2022 This post is just a quick one to kick off 2021 because officially I’m still on Christmas holidays. I had a question come in regarding the cool SQL Read more

  • The APEX PSE christmas present!

    The APEX PSE christmas present!

    Its always nice to get fixes to bug just in time for christmas. A while ago I posted an example of using external tables to act as mechanism to check for patches on My Oracle Support. Using this table, I run a simple query every few days to see if new APEX patches are available, Read more

  • 2020 in review

    2020 in review

    Well…its been quite a year!  I downloaded the Oxford “Words of the Year” report which came out with gems such as Bushfires Impeachment Coronavirus Lockdown Social Distancing Zoom Bombing Mask Shaming Black Lives Matter Cancel Culture Superspreader amongst others. “Covidiot” cracked a mention and remains a personal favourite , although reading the list above could Read more

  • Solving a John Conway puzzle with SQL

    Solving a John Conway puzzle with SQL

    A cool little conundrum came across my email Inbox this week which I thought I’d share. Back in 2016, Pizza Hut ran a promotional competition with famous mathematician John Conway on Pi day. Sadly John Conway passed away this year from COVID19 – another great mind lost to the pandemic . His puzzle involved the Read more

  • The invisible restore point

    The invisible restore point

    I regularly create and drop tablespace on my databases here at home, mainly because they are obviously not used in a “Production-like” manner.  Typically I’m tinkering with tablespaces to help answer customer questions on AskTOM about space allocation, reclaiming space and the like, so tablespaces come and go frequently. (Sidebar: If you’re regularly dropping/creating tablespaces Read more

  • The AskTOM multimedia experience!

    The AskTOM multimedia experience!

    Most people know AskTOM as the go-to resource for getting answers to the most common and sometimes the most tricky questions on the Oracle Database. AskTOM runs on the robust Application Express architecture, which is a large part of the reason that it has been in operation for over 20 years without any problems in Read more

  • The power of SQL macros

    The power of SQL macros

    Here is another example of what I’m sure will just become a plethora of such examples from the community on how the flexibility of SQL macros can solve problems that would normally take a lot of code in the form of DBMS_SQL and/or object types and/or pipelined functions and/or …well, you get the idea A Read more