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MERGE in 23ai – so much more than RETURNING
Oracle ACE Andrej Pashchenko recently did a blog post covering a nice addition in 23ai, the ability for MERGE to use the RETURNING clause. Check his post for several examples, but as quick TL;DR, here is a simple example of the evolution. My base will be all people in department 10 and 20 from the… Read more
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Low code is dead
I was watching a live stream recently about using AI tools to generate applications, and obviously “vibe coding” is getting a lot of attention nowadays. My interest here was just trying to stay up to date with my skills on the various development platforms that are getting lots of traction. But during the live stream,… Read more
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Mixing and matching
I’ve written some complex software in my years as an Oracle professional, but I’m happy to concede that nothing comes remotely close to the complexity that must be present to run the Oracle database. Such an incredible array of features, so many capabilities and 40+ years of backward compatibility is surely an amazing achievement in… Read more
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Troubleshooting External Scheduler Jobs
One of the cool but often rarely exploited facilties in the Oracle Job Scheduler is the ability to run tasks outside of the database, for example, shell scripts or other programs on the OS. But it does require getting all the relevant ducks in a row, and if you haven’t, then sometimes the errors can… Read more
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AI World and the power of APEX
Don’t get me wrong. There is absolutely nothing wrong with the official AI World session catalog for discovering the plethora of amazing content coming up at this years AI World. The main reason I definitely cannot complain is because my session appears at the top of the list! 🤣 But (this one only… Read more
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Quick tip for OpenAI on APEX
Posting this here simply because I constantly forget it 🤣, and end up wasting hours of my life on a trivial thing! When configuring your APEX workspace to communicate with OpenAI you need to have some credentials. Under Workspace Utilities you’ll see the Credentials option which looks like this: Anyone using APEX is familiar with… Read more
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I got shamed into using AutoUpgrade
Content on Upgrades isn’t my normal thing but the reason I’m talking about AutoUpgrade is a simple one. My good friend Mike Dietrich and I were in India recently for the Yatra tour and he did a talk about patching and AutoUpgrade. And right there, in front of the audience, and he shamed me 🙂… Read more
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Transactions on LiveSQL
Just a quick gotcha that often catches me out on LiveSQL, so posting it here to make sure you also don’t get caught out. (Quick Segue: If you’ve only used LiveSQL in the past, be sure to check it out again – it has been totally re-jigged give a much more modern experience.) LiveSQL allows… Read more
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Pictorial highlights from Yatra 2025
Nothing tech in this post. Just putting it here to hopefully you inspire you as either an attendee or speaker for next years event! Bengaluru/Mysuru Hyderabad Pune Mumbai Delhi Chennai Read more
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First dabblings with SQLcl MCP server
If you watched the launch video from the SQLcl team, you were probably just as excited as I was to give it a whirl. So here’s a quick post showing what I did to get it to run and do a basic test. (Note: A few big GIF’s in this post, so it might take… Read more
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Can you prioritise DDL locks?
Anyone who read Animal Farm as a school student, will remember the famous line: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others” The concept of equality has been the same with database transactions since databases began. We all have equal rights in being able to lock a row for our exclusive… Read more
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Are the Fundamentals Too Much to Ask?
I am submitting (or a better term would be “trying to”) an abstract to a conference that has announced their Call for Papers. Like many conferences, there is a list of tracks/streams that are the focus of the conference, and hence the organizers would like your presentation to fit into one of those categories. For… Read more