Learning is not a spectator sport

Complete listing of posts

  • When WHEN went faster

    When WHEN went faster

    Yeah…try saying that blog post title 10 times in a row as fast as you can But since we’re talking about doing things fast, this is just a quick post about a conversation I had a twitter yesterday about the WHEN clause in a trigger.   That is an easy benchmark to whip up – Read more

  • Juicing up UTL_FILE

    Juicing up UTL_FILE

    Think about your rubbish bin for a second. Because, clearly this is going to be an oh so obvious metaphor leading into UTL_FILE right?  OK, maybe a little explanation is needed. I have a basket next to my desk into which I throw any waste paper. It is where I throw my stupid ideas and Read more

  • The simplest things….can be risky

    Java and Oracle expert Lukas Eder tweeted yesterday about a potential optimization that could be done when reviewing database SQL code. This looks to be a logical thing to do.  Why scan the table T twice to perform an update, when the same job could be done in a single pass.  The benefits seem obvious: Read more

  • The AskTOM data model

    I popped out a tweet yesterday in Throwback Thursday style showing the date of the first question we took AskTOM – 18 years ago! Many entire computer systems don’t even last that long, and AskTOM hasn’t really needed to change that much in those 18 years. We’ve added a new skin, added the ability to Read more

  • “Call me!” Many many times!

    Some readers might recall that classic Blondie track “Call me”.  Of course, some readers might be wishing that I wouldn’t harp on about great songs from the 80’s. But bear with me, there is a (very tenuous) link to this post. If you haven’t heard the song, you can jump to the chorus right here.  Read more

  • Attribute clustering….super cool

    I’ve spoken about attribute clustering before here, here and here. So from that you can probably glean that I’m a fan. I recently spoke about an example of this as well during my AskTOM Office Hours session which you can watch below: After posting that video, I had a follow-up question which I thought would Read more

  • You need scaling huh? Maybe it’s just ego

    I’ve just come back from OracleCode Singapore.  It was a great event – the venue was awesome and the attendees were engaged and interested in the content. But there was one thing that I found amusing (disturbing perhaps?) is the number of times I had people approach me on the topic of scaling.  Conversation would Read more

  • From file names to directory hierarchy

    I had a fun request come in from a colleague the other day.  They had a simple list of fully qualified file names and they needed to present that data in the familiar hierarchical tree layout.  To demonstrate, I took a little trip down memory lane and grabbed a subset of presentations I’ve done over Read more

  • 18.2 patch… painless for me

    18.2 was released a few days ago, so I thought I’d throw it against my 18c instance and see how things played out.  This was just a single instance database, running with a single pluggable. Step 1 for me was to download the latest OPatch.  To be honest, I don’t even check whether I already Read more

  • When you screw up … make it positive for your users

    Yesterday I was caught up in an interesting SNAFU at my local Supermarket.  All of the checkout registers shut down, thus making it impossible to pay for groceries.  Later on Twitter, the company apologized as we discovered it was actually a nationwide outage!   News of the outage spread like wildfire through the media: http://www.news.com.au/finance/business/retail/woolworths-checkouts-hit-by-national-outage/news-story/5611943156249d4ecc6427ef0b447c18 Read more

  • Concurrency … the path to success and the path the failure

    Let’s face it. Concurrency is a good thing when it comes to database applications. After all, if there is only a single user of your application, then chances are, it is not a successful application .  Of course there are exceptions to this rule, but by and large, most of the applications we build are Read more

  • TO_DOG_YEAR

    Some members of the Oracle community got well and truly into the April Fools Day spirit this year. There were plenty of very earnest looking blog posts about a new 18c function – “TO_DOG_YEAR”.  You can read their posts here http://www.oralytics.com/2018/04/predicting-ibs-in-dogs-using-oracle-18c.html  https://blog.dbi-services.com/after-iot-iop-makes-its-way-to-the-database/ http://berxblog.blogspot.ie/2018/04/more-fun-with-ages.html http://vanpupi.stepi.net/2018/04/01/exploring-18c-exadata-functions/ They even enlisted the help of the team here at AskTOM Read more