Updated 9/28/2018 Writing Code is for Suckers Yes, I’m joking, mostly. But if you’re in a tool, and it can help you save time, then why not? Here’s a simple scenario: building a SELECT statement for one or more tables/views. Dragging and dropping tables to the worksheet is a pretty obvious feature – it copies the object names over for you. But did you know you had the option to get more bang for your…
Entity Relationship Diagrams tell a story. An employee is assigned one department. A location can house one or more departments. Jeff doesn’t have a boss because he is ‘the man.’ It can be challenging to understand the nature of your data by simply reading through the list of Foreign Key constraints for a table. Who wants to read this when you can instead see this So how do you go from one to the other?…
This is turning out to be a bit harder to write than I orginially thought. I generally land in the laissez-faire camp, and I know what you’re thinking: “Jeff, we didn’t come here to read French!” Sorry about that, bad habits picked up from 4 years of public education instruction. In terms of American politics, think of me as the Ron Paul of database security folks. Set a user up to be able to do…
Regardless of your role or responsibility, if you work in the database, you’re going to spend a lot of time looking at data. This is usually what will push someone from the command-line to a GUI – the spreadsheet look and feel for browsing tables or query results. Since you’re going to be spending so much time in these grids, let’s make sure you know the basics. I know you’re not writing very many SELECT…
There’s a lot of confusion out there about the absence of a value, also known as NULL. It can cause havoc with your queries if you don’t account for it. Some folks confuse it with a blank space in a string. At least SQL Developer can make one thing a bit easier, interpreting NULLs in a data grid. By default when SQL Developer displays data in a grid, it indicates NULL with {null}. I’m a…
Modeling is cute when you’re in a class and the sample application is for a rotisserie league for fantasy football, or you need a shopping cart ordering system for online retail. You spend a few hours and might come up with several dozen tables. But what about in the real world when you are trying to wrap your head around something with several thousand (or more!) objects? Enter the SubView SubViews allow the user to…
Got a great question off the Twitter-verse this morning from @ApoloDuvalis “..in SD (SQL Developer) you cannot use the same connection in a different command window until the busy command is done or aborted.” I know many of you aren’t familiar with queries that take so long to run that you have to wait on them, but believe me, they are out there! Anytime I need a query that takes more than a few seconds…
I think one of the dirty secrets in the software business is how LITTLE feedback we get from our end-users. You know they are out there though, gritting their teeth, cursing the day someone trusted you with a keyboard and mouse. Some of this software is very expensive to boot, so one would expect these users would be very vocal with their feedback. In actuality, I reckon we only only hear from a very small…
It’s very rare that a query is developed in a single take. You start with a framework, and then trim down to the essential elements. Then you start working about sort orders, performance, and formatting. As you develop your SQL, you may want to keep several iterations of the data and their plans available. SQL Developer’s Worksheet allows you to ‘pin’ the Query Results, Explain Plan, and AutoTrace panels. While pinning the Query Results panel…
Some folks find this hard to read 11356595646627ce7948aa3_000001 If your computed column code or column names are very long, they’ll often trail off the edge of the viewable screen. If you’re missing a comma somewhere, you’re bound to run up against an ORA-. You want to know right away WHERE you’re missing the separator. I covered this ‘debate’ earlier in ‘Trailing or Leading Commmas.’ If you would like to get your code to FORMAT with…