Learning is not a spectator sport

If you’re at OpenWorld…then get some awesome additional content AND beer AND real life stories   ALL FOR FREE !   http://oaktableworld.com/ Read more

When you see this SQL> with xyz 2 ( 3 select 1 my_alias from dual 4 ) 5 select * from xyz; ( * ERROR at line 2: ORA-32033: unsupported column aliasing your first thought might be that there is something wrong with the column alias “my_alias”. In fact, it got nothing to do with… Read more

If you are in Melbourne this week, hopefully you’ve registered for the InSync conference (www.insync12.com.au), which is the main user group conference in Australia. I’d love you to come share in my year long journey with Oracle clusterware and RAC upgrades on Tuesday afternoon. Pop in and say hi… Read more

A client has been seeing this error when holding sessions open over HS for lengthy periods of time (greater than an hour or so). Some workarounds that have worked are: when possible, issue, alter session close database link, and re-open it for subsequent queries   Set INBOUND_CONNECT_TIMEOUT_<listener_name>=0 in listener.ora Set SQLNET.INBOUND_CONNECT_TIMEOUT=0 in sqlnet.ora Read more

“Back in the day”, bitmap indexes on tables meant any kind of DML was going kill you either for the concurrency, or the performance. The concurrency issue still applies, but with each version of Oracle, the cost of maintaining bitmaps is still significant but might still be acceptable for you We can see some simple… Read more

This is a package that you can call, that does not exist in the database. I found this out after reading about its usage, and then running a DESCRIBE, and of course, finding nothing. Then I hunted through the familiar $ORACLE_HOME/rdbms/admin directory, looking for it….alas to no avail. Why is it not there ? Because… Read more

I think this feature came around ages ago (10.2?) but I’m still always impressed by it every time I use it. You can run EXPLAIN on a CREATE INDEX command SQL> explain plan for create index IX on MY_TABLE ( bet_account_num ); Explained. ————————————————————————————– | Id | Operation | Name | Rows | Bytes |… Read more

I have a large partitioned table called TXN and I want to find the most recent transaction recorded, where the transaction timestamp column (TXN_TIMESTAMP) is the partition key.  This table also happens to be sub-partitioned as well, but that’s not particular important for this example: So we look at the execution plan and at first… Read more

Recently when trying to drop a user, I got an error that seemed unrelated to the act of dropping the user. SQL> drop user demo cascade; drop user demo cascade * ERROR at line 1: ORA-29972: user does not have privilege to change/ create registration It turns out, that this user account was being used… Read more

RIP. A fine Oracle man. Read more

This is a bug encountered at a client site, and the test script was carefully prepared by Mark Hoxey (http://markhoxey.wordpress.com/) but it just shows how seemingly independent features in Oracle sometimes collide. Some of the elements of the script have been omitted for brevity, but if you’d like a copy, drop me a line. We… Read more

21 kilometers …. all up hill.  Just up…and up….and up All on a bicycle Read more