Learning is not a spectator sport

Complete listing of posts

  • AskTOM–more experts to help you!

    I’m thrilled to announce the “formal” addition of globalization and characterset guru Sergiusz Wolicki to the AskTOM team. I say “formal” addition because the team was already getting guidance from Sergiusz whenever we had tough question on charactersets, but just like his enthusiasm to help customers on the forums, Sergiusz was keen to help our… Read more

  • Oracle Code … Not for database people ?

    Jump over to the Oracle Code home page and you will see the “mission statement” of the Oracle Code conference series: “Learn from technical experts in sessions for developing software in Java, Node.js, and other languages and frameworks.” You might hence be thinking that “old school” stuff like (relational) database technology has no place at… Read more

  • Interval partitioning just got better

    Interval partitioning was a great feature when it arrived in version 11, because we no longer had to worry so much about ensuring partitions were available for new data when it arrived.  Partitions would just be created on the fly as required.  I’m not going to talk about interval partition in detail because there’s plenty… Read more

  • Quick tip–database link passwords

    Quick tip–database link passwords

    If you are relying on database links in your application, think carefully about how you want to manage the accounts that you connect with, in particular, when it comes to password expiry. With a standard connect request to the database, if your password is going to expire soon, you will get some feedback on this:… Read more

  • AskTOM TV episode 8

    AskTOM TV episode 8

    On AskTOM episode 8, I’ve taken a look at locating the SQL Plan Directives used for a particular query.  Here is the script output from the video if you want to use this for your own exploration SQL> SQL> create table t as 2 select * 3 from dba_objects 4 where owner = ‘SYS’ and… Read more

  • Top Ten Travel hints and Tips

    Top Ten Travel hints and Tips

    Well, let me be honest right at the top here.  These are not travel hints   These will not help you in any way. This is me having a whine and a rant about a minority of people that I occasionally encounter when travelling. Yes, this can probably be best described as me and my… Read more

  • DIY parallel task execution

    DIY parallel task execution

    We had a question on AskTOM recently, where a poster wanted to rebuild all of the indexes in his schema that had a status of UNUSABLE.  Running the rebuild’s in serial fashion (one after the other) seemed an inefficient use of the server horsepower, and rebuilding each index with a PARALLEL clause also was not… Read more

  • It’s just bad code or bad design … most of the time

    It’s just bad code or bad design … most of the time

    Some years ago I wrote an article for the UKOUG magazine called “Want a faster database – Take a drive on the M25”.  For those not familiar with the United Kingdom, the M25 is one of its busiest roads (M = “motorway”) and because it moves so much traffic, and runs so close to capacity,… Read more

  • Index compression–quick tip

    Index compression–quick tip

    If you’re appropriately licensed and want to use advanced index compression, you can take advantage of the setting a tablespace to automatically add compression as a default at a nominated level in the database.  From the docs: Here is an example of that in action.   We’ll set our tablespace default accordingly SQL> create tablespace demo… Read more

  • OTN Yathra 2017

    The amazing 6 city set of events is just around the corner, with all of the dates and details available at http://otnyathra.in/ Here are my thoughts on why you should be attending Read more

  • Instrumentation … not just for debugging

    Yeah I know.  You’re probably thinking “Here’s another blog post from someone telling us how important it is to instrument our code, so we can get better debugging, better performance, blah blah blah”. If that is your sentiment, then I’m thrilled because it means the instrumentation message has got through to the extent that it… Read more

  • The village idiot

    If you are not familiar with the term Village Idiot, then Wikipedia provides a sufficient definition from which I can base this blog post. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Village_idiot “The village idiot … is a person known for ignorance or stupidity” Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been flying a bit.  First was OpenWorld and OracleCode in New… Read more