Learning is not a spectator sport

Complete listing of posts

  • The full stack developer….is BACK for 2018!

    The full stack developer….is BACK for 2018!

    Last year, I flexed my technology muscles by building on the fine ground work of Lucas Jellema in using some Node, some REST, and some JSON to extract the full Oracle Openworld speaker catalogue, and then added some JSON parsing in the database, some SQL and slapped a nice helping on Application Express on top… Read more

  • Modifying tables without losing materialized views

    Whilst the ever increasing speed of storage and servers, and features likes In-memory are decreasing the need for large numbers of materialized views in databases, there are still plenty of use cases where they can be a useful performance or integrity tool. But what if that materialized view takes minutes or hours to build? Then… Read more

  • Complex materialized views? Try a table first

    Just a quick post today that arose from an AskTOM question a little while back. Over the years and across the evolution of various versions of the Oracle database, the amount of “power” you could pack into a CREATE TABLE statement as grown. For example, I can do a CREATE-TABLE-AS-SELECT, along with a partitioning clause,… Read more

  • 18c database creation on Windows

    Hopefully you’ve followed my very simple and easy guide to downloading the 18c database software for Windows. But of course, software on its own is not much use – we need a database! So let’s get cracking and create one. Using the Start menu like I’ve done below, or using the Windows panels, locate the… Read more

  • 18c Database installation on Windows

    If you’re a Windows enterprise, or you want to run your 18c database on your Windows laptop/desktop for research and education, then there has been some good news this week.  The software is now available to you on the OTN network page.  Here’s a walk through of the software installation process Head to the standard… Read more

  • Take care with regular expressions

    Take care with regular expressions

    In an Office Hours session a couple of months back, I covered an important change that comes to regular expressions once you upgrade to 12c Release 2. You can see the video covering the issue here: but for the TL;DR brigade reading this post: Regular expressions are not deterministic when you take NLS settings into… Read more

  • Gooey GUIDs

    Gooey GUIDs

    Do a quick Google search and you’ll find plenty of blog posts about why GUIDs are superior to integers for a unique identifier, and of course, an equal number of posts about why integers are superior to GUIDs. In the Oracle world, most people have been using sequence numbers since they were pretty much the… Read more

  • Let’s talk about Techiquette

    Let’s talk about Techiquette

    I’m typing this at about 38,000 feet in the air. I’m travelling home from the Oracle Latin America tour – it was a great event, but I’ll save the details for another blog post. In reality, I should be sleeping, but as luck would have it one of the lights on our plane is malfunctioning.… Read more

  • Building community via the speaker community

    Building community via the speaker community

    I recently participated in the Oracle Developer Community Yatra tour throughout India. It is a hectic event with 7 cities covered in a mere 9 days, so you can imagine how frantic the pace was. A typical day would be: 7am – breakfast 8am – check out of hotel and leave for the venue 9am… Read more

  • Humble pie made with NULL strings

    I was helping out a client a while back with an issue where a panicked email came into my inbox along the lines of “SELECT IS BROKEN IN ORACLE!!!”, which seemed perhaps a little extreme . So I pursued it further asking for some concrete details, and I must concede it had me a little… Read more

  • Hyper-partitioned index avoidance

    Hyper-partitioned index avoidance

    As you can tell, I have no idea on a name for what I am about to describe. So let me start from the beginning, and set the scene for an idea I have to utilize a cool new 18c feature. Often in a transactional-style system the busiest table (let us call it SALES for… Read more

  • 18.3 As easy as 1…2…3

    18.3 As easy as 1…2…3

    Well, finally it’s here! 18c for on-premise installation so the world can all get stuck into the cool new features of the latest release on their own laptops   At least that is what I’ll be doing! Naturally as soon as I heard the news, I downloaded the software and got ready to set aside… Read more