Learning is not a spectator sport

Recently, I was creating an IOT from an existing table via, and wanted to achieve it without logging. You cannot do this in two steps (ie, create table, followed by insert-append) because it will still be logged (see the addenda at the end of this post) So you need to do it with a CTAS,… Read more

Starts tomorrow everyone… Its about the biggest list of international names Perth has ever seen at the conference: Tom Kyte (of asktom fame) Graham Wood (ever used Statspack, ASH ?, …. well, this is the guy you should be sending a “Thank you” card to) Melanie Caffrey (regular inside Oracle magazine) the list goes one.… Read more

Thanks to all those people that attended my session last week at OpenWorld. A number of people have asked for copies of the slides.  I will post them here as soon as I get back home to Perth. Thanks for your patience. ….Posted from yet-another-airport-kiosk 🙂 Update: Slides below OOW slides Read more

Its the penultimate day at openworld First up was Gwen Shapira’s (http://www.pythian.com/news/author/shapira/) talk on Big Data and its integration into the "enterprise" and database.  This was perhaps the most relevant of big data talks this week, because I imagine anyone at an Oracle conference already has some (significant) investment in what could be called "conventional"… Read more

Yesterday was another day of good quality sessions at OpenWorld.  Yes its true that there are many sessions that could only be described as pure marketing, but with a little effort, there are gems in the agenda ! It started with partitioning facilities that are coming in 12c. Interval/Reference partitions will be supported, although no… Read more

Yesterday I went to a presentation on histograms in 12c.  A number of good improvements made there by Oracle coming in 12c. Particular emphasis seems to be placed on some of the short comings of height balanced histograms.  In 12c, we will have TOP-N histograms (where the "top scorers" get their own frequency bucket, and… Read more

The ACE director briefings are over and Oracle Open World has kicked into full swing.  The scale of the event is staggering and its a challenge just finding sessions to go to.  This is not due to insufficient sessions – just the challenge of sifting through 100+ concurrent sessions, spread across multiple locations and timeslots…… Read more

When it comes to hardware, the Fusion Apps installation guide is surprisingly non-committal: 4.2.1 Hardware Requirements Consult an Oracle Fusion Applications sizing-certified representative to obtain specific, customized system hardware requirements Some googling suggests that Fusion Apps is going plonk the following on your system: – several databases – many many WebLogic servers and the general… Read more

Lots of goodies in 11gR2 GoldenGate. The big one seems to be “Integrated Capture”, which seems to be a moving of the capture processing closer to the database (did anyone say “Streams” :-)) The benefit of that is that lots of the boutique data types and compression etc, are all now supported by Goldengate. More… Read more

A thoroughly enjoyable day at the first day of ACE director briefings. Of course, all of this stuff is Non-Disclosure so I cant really reveal any of the content, but as soon as OpenWorld is complete, then many of those restrictions will be lifted and we can all bask in the features that are coming.… Read more

….is going to be the next release. [which is about all I can say at the moment] How cool is that …     Read more

Check out the execution plan differences here. The fully qualified date (2nd one) gets it right, and note that the optimizer gains the partition start / stop information. SQL> select fds.fin_account_num, 2 sum(fds.sales) as sales from whs.fin_day_summary fds 3 where activity_date >= to_date(’30-08-12′,’dd-mm-yy’) – 390 4 and activity_date <= to_date('30-08-12','dd-mm-yy') 5 and fds.fin_account_num is not… Read more