Your Favorite Posts from 2018

Happy New Year folks! I hope everyone had a good 2018 and that 2019 will be an even better year for everyone.

I posted 72 stories here last year, and here are the 10 that you read the most. I’m not sure if that means they were the ‘best’ – but pageviews are an easy metric to count, and most folks understand it.

10. Right Align Keywords

A new formatting preference – make all the code align to the right of my SELECT, FROM, WHERE, ORDER BY…

I’ve found myself become quite fond of this format, but I do understand why it might make others cringe.

9. New VirtualBox Appliance (18c)

With the release of Oracle Database 18c, we also updated our public and free copy of our VirtualBox appliance.

I’m running it right now on my new Mac mini – and it gives me a database (with sample schemas!), APEX, and ORDS configured out-of-the-box.

I do end up installing ORDS, SQLcl, and SQL Developer on my host machine, and then configure them to run on the db in my Linux VM. I suppose I could switch to Docker, but I haven’t gotten there YET.

8. Sell Me on SQLcl in 50 Seconds

My elevator pitch on why you should give SQLcl a try.

You can skip clicking to this post unless you want access to even more videos.

7. Announcing SQL Developer Web

SQL Developer in your browser! It became available in the Oracle Cloud (OCI-C) last year. It’s scheduled to become available in OCI this year, and also for your Autonomous Database Cloud Services.

I know your big question – when can we run this for our on-premises database installs? Hopefully I’ll have another big announcement in this arena sometime later this year.

6. Multiple Tables, Single Excel File

It’s the cart, again! Drag your tables to a cart, and then export it.

5. 18.2 Release Announcements

While you’re waiting for the 18.4’s (soon!), don’t forget about all the new stuff we added in the last 12 months. You could go read this post, the 18.1 and 18.3 posts, or JUST catch up on EVERYTHING in this video.

4. Proxy Connections

You want to login to the database by piggy-backing someone else’s account. It’s called a Proxy Connection.

3. Easier Connections (18.1)

This was the big 18.1 post, but I highlighted our new Welcome Screen. The idea here was to make things easier for folks BRAND NEW to not only SQL Developer, but also brand new to Oracle Database.

You can also use this screen to quickly connect to a recently used DB, or setup your TNS file.

It’s hard to get started if you don’t have a database, or don’t even know HOW to get a database.

2. My SQLDev Look & Feel

This is the WAY I have setup my copy of SQL Developer. You can read this post if you like it enough that you want to try it out too.

1. Scripts and Spooling Output

I reckon this post more than any other from last year, fell into the ‘people googling, furiously’ category.

So the query ran, we continued to fetch the results, we just didn’t print them to the screen.

Last Year Was More than just Blogs!

I also had the opportunity to get out there, and meet and talk to you folks in real life! Thanks to everyone who come out to the conferences, Open World, Meet Ups, and other random places I found myself. I look forward to getting out there in 2019, including some new places like Belgium!

Cheers!