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…
