Learning is not a spectator sport
Connor McDonald on SQL and the Oracle Database
Tag: sql
A refreshing look at PIVOT
We had an AskTOM question come in recently where our customer was very excited about the PIVOT operator in SQL which lets you transpose rows to columns. This is a very common requirement in applications that want to take data that has been modelled…
Extending in-lists
A well known “limitation” of Oracle is that you can only have 1000 elements within an IN-LIST style expression in your SQL predicates. I use the quotes because I’ve always found that if you are heading into the territory where you need more than…
With and without WITH_PLSQL within a WITH SQL statement
OK, let’s be honest right up front. The motivation for this post is solely to be able to roll out a tongue twisting blog post title . But hopefully there’s some value as well in here for you if you’re hitting the error: ORA-32034:…
Being generous to the optimizer
In a perfect world, the optimizer would reach out from the server room, say to us: “Hey, lets grab a coffee and have a chat about that query of yours”. Because ultimately, that is the task we are bestowing on the optimizer – to…
Hacking together faster INSERTs
Most developers tools out there have some mechanism to unload a table into a flat file, either as CSV, or Excel, and some even allow you to unload the data as INSERT statements. The latter is pretty cool because it’s a nice way of…
External table preprocessor on Windows
There are plenty of blog posts about using the pre-processor facility in external tables to get OS level information available from inside the database. Here’s a simple example of getting a directory listing: run_os.bat ========== @echo off cd \oracle dir /b SQL> create table…
Less slamming V$SQL
It’s a holiday here today in Perth, so a very brief blog post because I’ve been busy doing other things today When I’m contacted by customers or friends and asked to help out with tuning their applications, probably the two most common issues are…
