Learning is not a spectator sport

Complete listing of posts

  • Hack-a-Mongo

    I was reading an article today about how 10,000+ Mongo installations that are/were openly accessible on the internet have now been captured by ransomware, with nearly 100,000 other instances potentially vulnerable to the same issue. Now, since I’m an Oracle blogger, you may be inclined to think the post is going to jump on the… Read more

  • AskTom takes another step forward

    For over 16 years, AskTom has been one of the most valuable resources available to developers and database administrators working with the Oracle Database.  With over 20,000 questions tackled and answered, along with over 120,000 follow up’s to additional queries, it remains an outstanding knowledgebase of Oracle assistance. And today, AskTom just got a whole… Read more

  • What you "liked" last year…

    Well…when I say “liked”, what I mean is “the stuff you all clicked on a lot” last year. Whether you liked it or not will remain one of those great mysteries The top 6 posts from 2016 were: https://connormcdonald.wordpress.com/2015/11/25/ora-14758-last-partition-cannot-be-dropped/ https://connormcdonald.wordpress.com/2013/01/20/exchange-partition-those-pesky-columns/ https://connormcdonald.wordpress.com/2013/08/26/compressed-partitions-are-not-compressed-tables/ https://connormcdonald.wordpress.com/2014/04/12/pluggable-database-and-restricted-sessions/ https://connormcdonald.wordpress.com/2016/06/09/parsing-no-big-deal-eh/ https://connormcdonald.wordpress.com/2016/03/26/are-your-sql-plus-scripts-going-to-ell/ Nice to see a 12c post in there – 2017 is… Read more

  • When local partitions….aren’t

    Let’s say I’ve got a partitioned table, and because New Year’s eve is coming around, I certainly don’t want to be called out at 12:01am because I forgot to add the required partition for the upcoming year . Since 11g, I can sleep easy at night by using the INTERVAL partition scheme. Here’s my table… Read more

  • UKOUG 2016

    Just a little video montage of the fun and learning from UKOUG.  A great conference every year. I was fortunate enough to receive a Best Speaker award (from a 12c features talk given at the 2015 conference). I gave three talks, one of which was the Database Keynote for 2016 – I felt very privileged… Read more

  • Multi-table insert

    An interesting question came through on AskTom recently.  The requirement was to perform a single pass through a source table, and load the data into three target tables. Now that’s trivially achieved with a multi-table insert, but there was a subtle “twist” on this requirement.  Each of the three target tables may already contain some,… Read more

  • A 12.2 treat for the festive season

    We’re being asked to store more and more data, yet keep backup windows, query performance and the like unchanged, no matter how much we store. As a result, more and more database shops are needing to partition their data. The problem is – partitioning data is a significant restructure of the data, which thus incurs… Read more

  • Advanced Replication

    Long before Streams, long before Goldengate, if you want to keep data between sites synchronised in some fashion, or even allow sites to independently update their data, there was the Advanced Replication facility in Oracle.  An “extension” of the concept of simple materialized views (or snapshots as they were called then), you could design complete… Read more

  • max_enabled_roles – nice touch

    Some people get very excited with roles, and quickly the number of roles proliferates to huge numbers…Until this happens ORA-28031: maximum of 148 enabled roles exceeded But in helping someone out on AskTom, I just found a nice touch in 11.2.0.4.  I had granted my account 200 roles (since the max_enabled_roles parameter is capped at… Read more

  • Simple demo of message propagation

    If you’re using AQ, then it’s simple to setup simple enqueue and dequeue facilities on your local database to provide all sorts of asynchronous style processing in your applications.  As long as you’re applications are designed and built to handle it, the “fire and forget” model to keep user applications responsive, and all of the… Read more

  • Just one more week

    I’m off to UKOUG again this year.  It’s an awesome conference, and I’ll be doing three talks there. On Monday at 3:30 it’s my first keynote talk   “12 Things You’ll Love About the Oracle Database 12.2”, followed up at 6pm by “AskTom – One Year On”. On Tuesday, at 3:30 I’ll be doing a… Read more

  • Attribute clustering (part 3)

    Attribute clustering (part 3)

    So in part1 and part2, we looked at creating tables with clustered data.  If you’re ready to climb aboard the attribute clustering heading toward Fastville you might want to take an existing table and cluster it.  In part 2 we saw how we had to be extra careful with syntax.  The same rule applies with… Read more