Learning is not a spectator sport

Complete listing of posts

  • LOBs vs Data – when compression occurs

    LOBs vs Data – when compression occurs

    Just a quick tip for SECUREFILE lobs. You may be familiar with basic compression on data in tables. It is a dictionary attribute of the table, which is then taken into account when you perform: a SQL Loader direct load, or an INSERT with the APPEND hint, or a bulk bind INSERT in PLSQL using… Read more

  • ODC Appreciation Day–LOB compression

    ODC Appreciation Day–LOB compression

    LOBs tend to be large. Well duh…it’s right there in the name! “Large Object”. So one of the cool things I like with the SECUREFILE option in recent releases of Oracle Database is the ability to compress LOBs. Here’s a quick demo of that in action: SQL> create table t1 2 ( x int, 3… Read more

  • OpenWorld Tuesday … yep, still screwed

    OpenWorld Tuesday … yep, still screwed

    Well…I’m only planning day 2 of OpenWorld and already I’ve pretty much given up on being able to see all the talks that I want to see The challenge for me will be trying to coax those people that are inside Oracle to give me a synopsis of their talk after the event. That is… Read more

  • Partial Indexes–Take Care With Truncate

    Partial Indexes–Take Care With Truncate

    Partial indexes are a very cool feature that came along with Oracle 12c. The capability at partition level to control index existence allows for a couple of obvious use cases: 1) You index the data in recent partitions only, because small amounts of data are aggressively searched by applications and/or users, but not the older… Read more

  • Easy as pi…. hole.

    A slight digression from my normal database-focussed content today In internet bandwidth and latency strapped Perth (Western Australia), every last drop of internet counts. Recently I stumbled upon this blog post by Troy Hunt about using a Raspberry Pi to serve as a local DNS to filter out unnecessary content. Personally, I don’t care about… Read more

  • My APEX 18.2 upgrade in a nutshell

    My APEX 18.2 upgrade in a nutshell

    As always, you should read the Installation/Upgrade manual from top to bottom before upgrading any piece of software, and be aware of all of the pre-requisites and processes.  But for me, my Application Express 18.2 upgrade was as simple as: Download Application Express Unzip to my target location sqlplus / as sysdba SQL> @apexins.sql SYSAUX… Read more

  • OpenWorld Monday…I’m so screwed

    OpenWorld Monday…I’m so screwed

    As I mentioned in a previous blog post, I whipped up a small Application Express application to let me plan out my Openworld activities. But there’s a small problem with being able to quickly and easily find thing based on the schedule…. There is too much to see!!! I had a quick glance through the… Read more

  • Correcting datatypes with minimal downtime

    Just a quick post here by request of an attendee of the September Office Hours. I had a demo converting the data type of a primary key without losing data and with minimal impact to the availability of the database using DBMS_REDEFINITION.  You can see that video here but here is the script used to… Read more

  • Datatype conversion laziness … yet another reason

    Datatype conversion laziness … yet another reason

    I’ve got two words to describe my thoughts on being lazy with data types …. JUST DON’T! There’s been many blog posts, videos, AskTOM questions etc over the years with numerous examples of how the optimizer gets confused, how the SQL engine gets confused…and even how developers will ultimately get confused if you do not… Read more

  • Another little 12c improvement

    Another little 12c improvement

    You’ve got a huge table right? Massive! Immense! And then something bad happens. You get asked to remove one of the columns from that table. “No problem” you think. “I won’t run the ‘drop column’ command because that will visit every block and take forever!” So you settle on the perfect tool for such a… Read more

  • Partial indexing – get the dictionary definitions right

    Partial indexing – get the dictionary definitions right

    Just a quick post to clear up some confusion that can be seen on the partial indexing capabilities in Oracle Database 12c and above. I was at an event in the Oracle Perth office last week, and an attendee mentioned that they thought the feature was not working or was not enabled on their database,… Read more

  • Connor and Chris at OpenWorld

    Chris and I will be at OpenWorld next month, so our session details are below, but you can also click on the links below to add entries to your calendar to make sure you don’t miss us. Don’t forget to use the official Schedule Builder to make sure you have booked your spot at our… Read more