Learning is not a spectator sport

Complete listing of posts

  • APEX upgrade – don’t forget your CDN

    APEX upgrade – don’t forget your CDN

    I haven’t dug too deep into this one, so what follows may be just coincidental but I thought I would blog it out just in case it happens to anyone else. While testing AskTOM as part of our Application Express upgrade to version 20.1, I got a bit of a shock when I fired up… Read more

  • Arbitrary length addition and subtraction

    Arbitrary length addition and subtraction

    This one just for fun today. An AskTOM question came in about arbitrary length arithmetic because “NUMBER(38) was not enough”. After some back-and-forth discussions it turned out that the business need under the requirement was managing bit strings. The implementation was currently converting the bits to decimals, hence the need for potentially very large number… Read more

  • Free In-memory in Oracle Database 19c

    Free In-memory in Oracle Database 19c

    There has always been a bit of a Catch-22 with some of the really cool options in the Oracle Database. You want to explore the value of them, but you don’t want to draw the ire of any licensing implications of doing so. Of course, you can use XE or a trial version of the… Read more

  • Why you might add columns to external tables

    Why you might add columns to external tables

    Let me start with the idiotic part first. That part would be…. me! I’ll create an external table which reads some customer sales data from a flat file. SQL> create table sales_ext 2 ( 3 cust_id varchar2(10) not null, 4 product_id int not null, 5 amt number, 6 dte date 7 ) 8 organization external… Read more

  • SQL Plus and the ROWPREFETCH parameter

    SQL Plus and the ROWPREFETCH parameter

    Need to get a bunch from rows out of the database? Most people are aware of the ARRAYSIZE parameter to improve the fetch performance back to the client, but many people are not aware of the newer ROWPREFETCH parameter. Let’s take a look at each to see how quickly we can drag data back to… Read more

  • Expertise might not be the way forward

    Expertise might not be the way forward

    I caught up with friend Rob Lockhard who is doing interviews with community members. He asked me about the future of IT and what is in store for the the budding IT professional coming out of college/university. Read more

  • PGA memory consumption with BLOBs

    PGA memory consumption with BLOBs

    Probably the most common usage for large objects (CLOBs and BLOBs) is to store them in a database table. In this circumstance, it feels intuitive that you won’t have a lot of concerns about memory, because the database will simply store those objects in datafiles like it would any other kind of data. But BLOBs… Read more

  • Active Data Guard – limitations on ROWTYPE

    Active Data Guard – limitations on ROWTYPE

    I had an AskTOM question come in with an issue trying to PL/SQL on an Active Data Guard (ADG) database (which of course is running in read-only mode). The PL/SQL block seems innocuous; it does not DML and yet refuses to run: SQL> DECLARE 2 tst_row dual%ROWTYPE; 3 BEGIN 4 null; 5 END; 6 /… Read more

  • Combinations and consequences

    Combinations and consequences

    Fellow Perth techie Scott Wesley sent me this interesting puzzle recently. He was using the long awaited feature of being (finally) able to assign a sequence value via the DEFAULT clause in a table definition. The problem was … the sequence was NOT being assigned. And since that column was defined as NOT NULL, his… Read more

  • LOBs are larger in multibyte databases

    LOBs are larger in multibyte databases

    Most customers I encounter nowadays are generally sticking to the defaults when creating their databases from 12c onwards. This means that they’ll be using the UTF8 class of charactersets when configuring their database. As a quick segue from the topic at hand, I think this is a good thing. Having a UTF8 characterset avoids a… Read more

  • Tightened security in 20c for Oracle maintained accounts

    Tightened security in 20c for Oracle maintained accounts

    If you cannot wait for a fully autonomous offering, and you’ve jumped into the 20c preview release on Oracle Cloud, obviously the first thing you will probably be installing is Oracle Application Express. Unlike autonomous, you’ll be installing it manually, which is a quick and easy process, and either in that installation or when adding… Read more

  • Working from home… Welcome!

    Working from home… Welcome!

    Let me start by saying that by no means am I a working from home expert; I do not have a degree in ergonomics or human resources or time management. I am just your normal IT worker that happens to have been working from home for a number of years now. If you have just… Read more