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Upgrading…Its Time!
Gough Whitlam was an Australian politician who rose to power in the 1970s with the campaign slogan “It’s Time!”. Politics aside, it loosely ran on the premise that not to have the occasional dramatic change ultimately leads to stagnation in social and economic progress. The same analogy applies to the Oracle database. Of course, it… Read more
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How to generate random unique values
When sequences won’t do In an Oracle database if someone comes to you and says “I need to generate unique numbers” then anyone with any experience of Oracle will more likely than not suggest a sequence. And that is good advice because a sequence is incredibly fast, scales well with multiple users, is very easy… Read more
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Why relying on default DATE formats is a bug
Today’s quick but important message is…don’t be lazy! Look….I get it If given the choice of typing: ’01-JUL-20′ or typing this: to_date(’01-JUL-20′,’DD-MON-RR’) then more often than not, we all are going to opt for the first alternative because we all can get lazy. But that reliance on the default date format mask in a session… Read more
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A better way of calculating Database space usage
It seems easy enough. An email pops through from your manager and he’s concerned about the space utilization in the database. Then comes the question: “So what exactly is using up most of the space?” For the sake of simplicity, lets assume that you already know that most of the space comes from a single… Read more
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MAX_STRING_SIZE and the data dictionary
This post cycles back too some other historical posts of mine related to max_string_size and the fact that the data dictionary uses LONG data type columns because of historical reasons related to backward compatibility. Most of us probably have existing databases that have gone through the standard upgrade through various versions of the Oracle Database,… Read more
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How to migrate to SECUREFILE with DataPump
These tweets somewhat befuddle me. Because to be honest, if I no matter if I say “Yes” or “No” , and then for someone to take that response at face value…well…whilst I’m flattered in the level of trust, I’m also a little saddened because I think our community is best served by everyone always insisting… Read more
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Take care with Read-Only partitions in 18c
The ability for part of a table to be read-only and other parts of the same table to allow full DML is a cool feature in the Oracle Partitioning option. Perhaps the most common example you will typically see for this is range-based partitioning on a date/timestamp column. As data “ages”, setting older partitions to… Read more
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Upgrading from 19.6 to 19.7 on Windows
I must say this Release Update (RU) was probably the smoothest I’ve ever done. Obviously you should always read the patch notes carefully before proceeding on your own systems, but for me, it was a simple exercise. I’m posting this just to cover a couple of things that the patch notes “assume” and don’t explicitly… Read more
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Getting a dog improved my productivity
Today’s blog post is somewhat of a different one. You could perhaps argue that it is even non-technical but bear with me, there is a strong relationship to technical work on the topic of productivity. One of the things we often read about in blog posts, see in YouTube videos or any other form of… Read more
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MAX_IDLE_BLOCKER_TIME to stop locking problems
We’ve all been there … You’re trying to save some changes to the database, and no matter what you try, your application just hangs. After some to-and-fro with the DBA, or perhaps you are the DBA, you stumble across that uncommitted transaction that “Joe from marketing” commenced at 11:55am. You pop around to Joe’s desk,… Read more
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Code re-use in PL/SQL might just need SQL
I was doing some code review today of a PL/SQL package, and came across a routine to generate a list of employees for a department. Truth be told, it wasn’t employees and departments but some anonymity is called for here. SQL> create or replace 2 function emp_list(p_dept varchar2) return varchar2 is 3 l_emps varchar2(4000) :=… Read more
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Patching APEX 20 with patch 30990551
I’ve been debugging an issue within an APEX application and wanted to make sure that my local installation was at the same version as apex.oracle.com. So I logged on to my workspace and ran queries on APEX_RELEASE and APEX_PATCHES and discovered that there was a patch available for 20.1. That patch is 30990551 and you… Read more
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