Learning is not a spectator sport
Connor McDonald on SQL and the Oracle Database
Tag: dba
Automatic sequences not being dropped
One of the nice new things in 12c was the concept of identity columns. In terms of the functionality they provide (an automatic number default) it is really no different from anything we’ve had for years in the database via sequences, but native support…
The phantom tablespace
(Cueing my deep baritone Morpheus voice…) What if I told you that you can reference non-existent tablespaces in your DDL? OK, it sounds like a gimmick but there is a real issue that I’ll get to shortly. But first the gimmick I’ve created a…
18c and the ignoring of hints
One of the new features in 18c is the ability to ignore any optimizer hints in a session or across the entire database. A motivation for this feature is obviously our own Autonomous Data Warehouse, where we want to optimize queries without the…
Add ORDER BY to make ANY query faster
Yes it’s SCBT day here in Perth! SCBT = Silly Click Bait Title This post is just a cautionary tale that it is easy to get caught up judging SQL performance solely on a few metrics rather than taking a more common sense approach…
Interval versus Range partitions
One of the nice things about partitioning in the database is that partition pruning can quickly eliminate the requirement to read large amounts of data when the partitioning key(s) are appropriately provided in your queries (and DML). This also extends to queries where the…
18c XE–running locally
There’s already a few blog posts out there, showing people (easily) getting their 18c XE instance downloaded, installed and running, so I won’t rehash that here. For the majority of people, I’d imagine they’ll have their XE instance running on a small box and…
18c XE is live!
Just a quick post because this is perhaps what I think is one of the biggest game changers for the Oracle Database. 18c Express Edition (18x XE) is now available for general use. For those people with experience with 11g XE, this might not…
Compressed LOB–my table got bigger?
We had an interesting question on AskTOM the other day about LOB compression. Someone was very concerned that after applying compression to the LOBS in the column of their table, the table actually got larger! Cue much confusion and panic, but after a little…
LOBs vs Data – when compression occurs
Just a quick tip for SECUREFILE lobs. You may be familiar with basic compression on data in tables. It is a dictionary attribute of the table, which is then taken into account when you perform: a SQL Loader direct load, or an INSERT with…
Partial Indexes–Take Care With Truncate
Partial indexes are a very cool feature that came along with Oracle 12c. The capability at partition level to control index existence allows for a couple of obvious use cases: 1) You index the data in recent partitions only, because small amounts of data…
Correcting datatypes with minimal downtime
Just a quick post here by request of an attendee of the September Office Hours. I had a demo converting the data type of a primary key without losing data and with minimal impact to the availability of the database using DBMS_REDEFINITION. You can…
Another little 12c improvement
You’ve got a huge table right? Massive! Immense! And then something bad happens. You get asked to remove one of the columns from that table. “No problem” you think. “I won’t run the ‘drop column’ command because that will visit every block and take…
