Learning is not a spectator sport

Complete listing of posts

  • Slides from OakTableWorld and OpenWorld

    Thanks to anyone that came along to my sessions at OpenWorld. You can review the slides via the links below: OakTable World Sep14 clonedb from Connor McDonald OpenWorld Sep14 12c for_developers from Connor McDonald   Read more

  • Openworld day minus 3

    Its day minus 3, or day +1 depending on your point of view at Openworld 2014. I’m here a few days early for the Ace Director briefings, where a selection of product managers provide an insight into what is coming in the Oracle world, either at Openworld or in the coming year. I must admit,… Read more

  • Openworld bound..

    I’ll be in Openworld again this year, and have a couple of speaking slots… I’ll talk about new features for developers in 12c on Sunday, Sep 28, 2:30 Moscone South 303 https://oracleus.activeevents.com/2014/connect/sessionDetail.ww?SESSION_ID=2244 and of course, at the awesome Oaktable world.. http://www.oraclerealworld.com/oaktable-world/agenda/ Drop in, learn some cool things, or just pop up and say Hello! Read more

  • MERGE and IOT’s ….. unhappy bedfellows

    Anyone who has used Oracle for a while will be familiar with the Parent/Child locking “issue” when it comes to tables and indexes on foreign keys. For many years you’d hear people crying “bug” etc but thankfully most now know the reason, and accept it as sensible behaviour. But lets take a look at a… Read more

  • 12c – Nested tables vs Associative arrays

    This was going to the be the immediate follow up to my previous post, but 12.1.0.2 came out and I got all excited about that and forgot to post this one 🙂 Anyway, the previous post showed how easy it is to convert between nested tables and associative arrays. The nice thing in 12c is… Read more

  • 12.1.0.2 security grrr…

    One of my favourite security “tricks” used to be the following: SQL> [create|alter] user MY_USER identified by values ‘impossible’; Looks odd, but by setting the encrypted value of someone’s password to something that it is impossible to encrypt to, means you’ll never be able to connect as that account. (Think schema’s owning objects etc). I… Read more

  • Associative arrays and Nested tables

    A common criticism of PLSQL is that the “original” array datatype, now called associative arrays are perfect for passing stuff back and forth to 3GL environments (for example .Net), but canno be used within SQL natively, for example: SQL> create or replace 2 package BLAH is 3 type num_list is table of number index by… Read more

  • No Hakan factor for IOT

    Sadly there seems to be no concept of the Hakan factor for an IOT. I have an application which merges into an IOT, the merge incrementally populating a swag of initially null columns, hence growing the rows in size. Some simple benchmarking shows the overhead of this versus merging into a table with pre-populated values:… Read more

  • 12c nasty with remote query optimization

    We have a fairly common query process, where we run a MERGE command to compare a remote table to a local copy of it, as “poor mans” Golden Gate to bring that table up to date on a regular basis. [Editors note: Writing MERGE’s is more complicated but a lot cheaper than Golden Gate :-)]… Read more

  • Testing…the surgeon’s approach

    I played a lot of volleyball in a bygone life 🙂 and subsequently ruined my knees to the extent that I needed surgery. I got a shock when the surgeon (after a series of x-rays and checks) said to me: “Of course, we’ll only know once we’re in there”. So here’s a body part (a… Read more

  • Upgrade to 12c … credentials

    We did a “real” upgrade to 12c this weekend, where “real” means a production system, as opposed to my laptop, a play VM etc etc 🙂 It all went relatively smoothly except for one interesting thing, that I can’t 100% say was caused by the upgrade, but it would appear to be the case. After… Read more

  • Dumb triggers part 2 – session level control

    In the previous post, I pontificated about triggers that “lock you in” to having them fire, which can create dramas when it comes to doing data patching. Maybe you can design your application around this, but if you cant, the last thing you want to be doing is having to take an outage so that… Read more