I used to love getting my essays handed back to me from my teacher. I would quickly look for the red ink comments scattered throughout my paper. I was looking for approval – ‘Yes Jeff, you are truly a genius!’ I do not get the impression that developers either enjoy reviewing co-worker’s code, or having their code reviewed. Does your organization perform code reviews? When I poll audiences, it’s pretty rare to get a lot…
It turns out that everyone online isn’t as nice as you. Some people are online to prove how smart and funny they are. Unfortunately, a sizable minority of these people also just happen to be jerks. On Twitter yesterday, Karen suggested it might be because of a lack of women participants or moderators. While I can’t offer evidence to support or reject Karen’s jibe regarding lack of women, I do have some experience with moderators.…
I am noticing a very disturbing trend in the Southeast US – the local Oracle User Groups are withering away. One of the questions I like to end a presentation with is to inquire about the presence of a local Oracle User Group. More frequently than not, the answer is, “Well, we used to have one.” Now before I jump up onto my soapbox, I have a very big confession to make – I have…
How much time to do you spend debugging database application problems? Probably more time than you want. How much of that time is spent capturing the SQL that is being submitted by your application to the database? I’m going to guess that it’s a significant amount. Asssuming you have access to production (or a test environment that adequately replicates production), then you probably want to check out V$SQLTEXT_WITH_NEWLINES. Before I talk about V$SQLTEXT_WITH_NEWLINES, let’s talk…
People are always asking me, ‘Jeff, what’s going to be in the new version of X?’ or ‘Jeff, what’s new in X?’ or ‘Jeff, what’s wrong with you?!?’ If I’m feeling particularly chippy, I’ll reply something along the lines of ‘How well do you think you’ve mastered the current version of X?’ If you haven’t seen something before, that means it’s new for you, right? I think that was a NBC promo ad back in…
Post Updated on November 10, 2011. 11gR2 was supposed to be 12g..or so the story goes. You can read tons of posts on OTN from several years ago where 12g is referenced. Nothing recent though. So… Oracle Open World 2011 is coming soon, and you know the Big Red Machine will want to have a big splash. Will it be a new version of their RDBMS solution? And for all those people who just got…
Wanna keep track of changes to a table, and be able to query different versions of your data? Then check out Oracle’s ‘new’ feature – FLASHBACK ARCHIVE. From Oracle (docs) “…which provides the ability to automatically track and archive transactional data changes to specified database objects.” (BTW Whoopie has yet to portray a DBA, but we can keep our fingers crossed.) Automatically tracking and archiving data changes must have some sort of catch, right? What…
Apologies to Wynonna Judd for borrowing and mangling her lyrics and song title, but I just had a really interesting conversation with a fellow Oracle tools guru. We we’re discussing just how much functionality an end-user really takes advantage of in a software product. He had mentioned that users maybe exercises about 20% of a tool’s feature-set and I countered with 10%. Maybe we’re both wrong, but I think we are on the right side…
You want to know how much pain you are going to inflict on the server and network before you run that ad hoc query? An explain plan can give you an idea of how long it might take to run, and tell you how much data it thinks will be involved. Cardinality – Fancy Word, Simple Concept From Wikipedia: “In mathematics, the cardinality of a set is a measure of the “number of elements of…
“Those people are fine, they JUST write SQL.” I often hear this in the context of visiting customers and offering to provide training (and yes, software) to their database users. There is a class of people who are deemed unworthy of such productivity tools because they do nothing but ‘just write dumb SQL all day long.’ The only problem is, I know that it’s these people that are largely responsible for running the business. When…