Learning is not a spectator sport

Complete listing of posts

  • Woo hoo … more OpenWorld 17 content

    You bewdy! I managed to score myself a couple more mini-sessions at OpenWorld. These will be in The Exchange, the re-designed venue for vendors and demonstrations at OpenWorld. Come along as say Hi. It will be a whirlwind 20 minutes as I try cram as much information into the short time frame as I can.… Read more

  • OpenWorld 2017–where is the tech content ?

    I can’t actually remember how many OpenWorld conferences I have attended. At a guess it would be around 7 or 8. Every year there is a criticism that there is “not enough technical content”. Well I’m calling “fake news” on that. I can’t remember a time that I’ve struggled to find sessions that I’m interested… Read more

  • Partition-wise join

    So just what is a “partition-wise” join ?  We will use a metaphor to hopefully explain the benefit. Let’s say two people, Logan and Shannon, decide to move in together.  If each of them already have an existing residence, they will both have a lot of the common items that you find in any household. … Read more

  • Updating indexes with partition maintenance

    Updating indexes with partition maintenance

    An index is basically a structure that maps keys (values) in columns to the physical location of their corresponding rows in a table.  So if you move the rows (ie, change the physical location of a row) then the index entries for those rows need to be updated, or the index is no longer usable. … Read more

  • LOBs and tiny typos

    LOBs and tiny typos

    This one caught me out – I was racing around looking for bugs, or parameter files, or hidden settings that stopped SECUREFILE lobs from being created.  Here was my incredibly simple test case – create a securefile LOB, and then make sure it’s a securefile. SQL> create table t1 ( b blob ) lob (… Read more

  • Partitioning Guide updated

    Just a quick note to say I’ve updated our Getting Started With Partitioning Guide! 9 easy to follow demonstrations to get developers up to speed with handling large databases. Check it out here Read more

  • The AskTOM team at OpenWorld 2017

    The AskTOM team at OpenWorld 2017

    The AskTOM team will be out and about at OpenWorld in October, so if you are at the conference as a full attendee, or just with a Discovery pass, please come up and say Hi!  As well as our session talks, we’ll be doing impromptu discussions and mini-sessions during the week either in the Developer… Read more

  • Please keep your foreign keys

    I came across an interesting blog post the other day about whether databases should be (declaratively) enforcing the foreign key relationships between tables.  The blog post discussed the issue of foreign keys being temporarily disabled to perform data loading, and then encountering the problem of what to do when those foreign keys cannot be re-enabled… Read more

  • Upgrade with no effort

    We all know what upgrades mean.  Installation…Configuration…Patching…Testing…Deployment…Change approvals…Meetings…Long hours…Perhaps pulling an “overnighter” but hopefully never having to enact the dreaded “Backout Plan”. Or…. that stuff can “just happen” without you worrying about it at all!  I logged on to my Exadata Cloud Express database on the weekend, and lo and behold, it is not Oracle… Read more

  • Behold the full stack developer

    Well…sort of.  Well…not really This blog post is really about how with just a little bit of knowledge and patience you can bring several cool technologies and tools together to achieve what you want. I’m off to OpenWorld at the start of October which will be an awesome event as usual, and in the last… Read more

  • 12c Statistics on load–special cases

    12c Statistics on load–special cases

    One of the cool features in 12c is the automatic collection of optimizer statistics when a table is either created or loaded via direct path from empty.  This makes a lot of sense because it saves us from what used to be the mandatory second step of gathering statistics whenever we loaded an empty table… Read more

  • Choosing a password scheme for the database

    Choosing a password scheme for the database

    In the Security Guide there is a section to assist you with the decisions about what rules you might want to have in place when users choose passwords, namely attributes like the minimum length of a password, the types of characters it must (and must not) contain, re-use of old passwords etc etc. The documentation… Read more