Learning is not a spectator sport

Complete listing of posts

  • 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

  • Oracle Developer Community Appreciation Day

    OK, time for some controversy My ODC appreciation post is about support.oracle.com Now I’m sure there will people in the community just itching to lose their proverbial about how they lost years of their lives waiting on the support response or similar complaint, and since I work for Oracle, they will be just as keen… Read more

  • Snapshots from OpenWorld so far

    Bridge Run on Saturday       Swim in the bay on Monday     And the technical content begins !     Read more

  • My OpenWorld theme song

    My OpenWorld theme song

    (With apologies to any Simon & Garfunkel fans out there) Hello jetlag my old friend,You’ve come to mess with me again.The bedside clock is stuck on 10 to 4And my eyes are just so bloody sore. The decision to get on that frickin’ plane.Was just insane. Suffering …. my jetlag in silence   A few… Read more

  • The devastating death PC emoji of doom

    The devastating death PC emoji of doom

    So there I am.  Sitting at Perth airport.  My flight from Perth to Sydney, the first leg on my trip to OpenWorld 2017 is delayed.  Of course, delays are not unusual and do not normally bother me.  Because I can just flip open my laptop, knock off a few AskTOM questions while I wait. But… Read more

  • AskTOM TV–episode 11

    AskTOM TV–episode 11

    Just a quick note to give the supporting collateral to the latest episode of AskTOM TV. The question I tackled is this one: https://asktom.oracle.com/pls/apex/asktom.search?tag=want-to-retrive-numbers-in-words which was a fun one to answer because it showcases several useful SQL techniques: Using CONNECT to synthesize rows, Using regular expressions to parse text , Using MULTICAST in Oracle 10g… Read more