Learning is not a spectator sport
Connor McDonald on SQL and the Oracle Database
Tag: techtip
From file names to directory hierarchy
I had a fun request come in from a colleague the other day. They had a simple list of fully qualified file names and they needed to present that data in the familiar hierarchical tree layout. To demonstrate, I took a little trip down…
Those pesky LONG columns
There was a time, many moons ago when CLOB, BLOB and BFILE did not exist as data types. So if you had anything longer than a few kilobytes of data to store, you had to use a LONG or a LONG RAW. But those…
Dealing with IP addresses
Kris Rice made mention on Twitter about the free (but limited lifetime) IP address to Country mappings that you can get from Maxmind. If you ever need to deal with IP addresses, you might find the following utility package I wrote a while back…
iASH–my “infinite ASH” routine
I love Active Session History (ASH) data because a lot of the work I’ve done in my consulting life was “after the fact” diagnosis. By this I mean that many of us have been in a similar circumstance where the customer will contact you…
Parsing freeform data in flat files
SQL loader is a very cool utility that has existed for a long time within Oracle to load flat files into the database. However sometimes people find the control file syntax quite cryptic, and when it comes to passing very complicated structures, this can…
Buzzword Bingo
Looking for that catchy title for your next presentation ? I took the first word from the title of 1000 Oracle OpenWorld presentations, and looked for patterns . I omitted some obvious terms that are either products or definite/indefinite articles: Oracle Peoplesoft The How …
AskTOM TV–episode 11
Just a quick note to give the supporting collateral to the latest episode of AskTOM TV. The question I tackled is this one: https://asktom.oracle.com/pls/apex/asktom.search?tag=want-to-retrive-numbers-in-words which was a fun one to answer because it showcases several useful SQL techniques: Using CONNECT to synthesize rows, Using…
OpenWorld 2017–where is the tech content ?
I can’t actually remember how many OpenWorld conferences I have attended. At a guess it would be around 7 or 8. Every year there is a criticism that there is “not enough technical content”. Well I’m calling “fake news” on that. I can’t remember…
AskTOM–more experts to help you!
I’m thrilled to announce the “formal” addition of globalization and characterset guru Sergiusz Wolicki to the AskTOM team. I say “formal” addition because the team was already getting guidance from Sergiusz whenever we had tough question on charactersets, but just like his enthusiasm to…
Quick tip–identity columns
Lets say I’ve been reading about schema separation, and thus I am going to have a schema which owns all of my objects, which I’ll call APP_OWNER, which will have no connection privilege and a separate schema called APP_ADMIN which will take care of…
SUM is better than DISTINCT
There is a good chance that (based on this blog post title) that you’re expecting a post on SQL, and that’s understandable. But I’ll come clean nice and early – that was just to lure you in The post is about SUM and DISTINCT,…
The SQL Loader log file … as data
I had an interesting AskTom question recently where the poster was using SQL Loader to load in tables, but wanted to be able to analyze the resultant log file after execution. And of course, what better way to analyze..well…anything…than with a database and some…
