Learning is not a spectator sport

Complete listing of posts

  • Seasons greetings from the AskTOM team

    Seasons greetings from the AskTOM team

    This year we’ve answered over 2800 of your questions and followed up on 3500 reviews. It’s been a great and busy year! We’ll see you all in 2018 Read more

  • iASH–my “infinite ASH” routine

    iASH–my “infinite ASH” routine

    I love Active Session History (ASH) data because a lot of the work I’ve done in my consulting life was “after the fact” diagnosis.  By this I mean that many of us have been in a similar circumstance where the customer will contact you not when a problem is occurring, but only when you contact Read more

  • LOBs from afar

    This has always been a nuisance.  There you are – getting all the bells and whistles with LOBs…until a database link enters the room — — Database: DB11 — SQL> create table t ( id int, c clob ); Table created. SQL> insert into t values (1,rpad(‘x’,32000,’x’)); 1 row created. SQL> select * 2 from Read more

  • So good … it’s scary

    So good … it’s scary

    Well…this isn’t a horror movie, it’s something awesome Read more

  • Buffer cache hit ratio–blast from the past

    Buffer cache hit ratio–blast from the past

    I was perusing some old content during a hard drive “spring clean” the other day, and I found an old gem from way back in 2001.  A time when the database community were trying to dispel the myth that all database performance issues could be tracked back to,  and solved via, the database buffer cache Read more

  • UKOUG is coming

    Yes it is just a few more weeks until the UKOUG conference swings by. This has been one of my favourite conferences for years – dating back to my first one in 2002 !!.  You can see from the picture at the tail of this post – whilst times have changed in those 15 years, Read more

  • Parsing freeform data in flat files

    Parsing freeform data in flat files

    SQL loader is a very cool utility that has existed for a long time within Oracle to load flat files into the database. However sometimes people find the control file syntax quite cryptic, and when it comes to passing very complicated structures, this can mean control files which are hard to maintain. For me the Read more

  • “Oh…another language is too hard”

    We had a request on AskTOM a few days ago asking for an implementation of the XIRR function in PL/SQL. I didn’t really know much about what that function was, or what it did, but a quick web search yielded plenty of examples in Excel, where it is a pre-delivered function, as described here: “Returns Read more

  • Why being wrong can be awesome

    OK, Now that I’ve started the post with a nice click-bait heading, let’s get down to the business of being wrong. I did a lot of conference presentations last year, and the great thing about that for me was that I got to meet a lot of new people in the Oracle community in the Read more

  • Idle banter

    Idle banter

    When your car gets a flat tyre, it’s always handy to have a spare.  We do the same with the database SQL> select 2 x.ksppinm name 3 from 4 sys.x$ksppi x, 5 sys.x$ksppcv2 y 6 where 7 x.inst_id = userenv(‘Instance’) and 8 y.inst_id = userenv(‘Instance’) and 9 x.indx+1 = y.kspftctxpn and 10 x.ksppinm like ‘%spare%parameter%’; Read more

  • Buzzword Bingo

    Buzzword Bingo

    Looking for that catchy title for your next presentation ? I took the first word from the title of 1000 Oracle OpenWorld presentations, and looked for patterns .  I omitted some obvious terms that are either products or definite/indefinite articles: Oracle Peoplesoft  The How  OAUG General MySQL And here is what we end up with: Read more

  • OpenWorld 2017–grab ALL of the content

    OpenWorld 2017–grab ALL of the content

    Some people use the session catalog to grab just the presentations that they either attended, or could not attend. Other people want a download of every available presentation so they can peruse the entire catalog offline at a later date. I am one of the latter people. So using some node, javascript, awk, sed, grep Read more