Sometimes I get a little preachy in my presentations. OK, maybe I get a LOT preachy. In exchange for being stuck with me for 90 minutes, I promise every person will receive at least one new technique or trick that will greatly affect their productivity when working with the database. Fortunately for me, most agree that this is a fair trade! Things generally go at a pretty rapid pace until I bring up one of…
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…
Disclaimer: When I wrote this I was not an employee of Oracle, a RDBMS vendor. I am now, and you should know that. First, please go read Karen Lopez’s rant on Normalization Myths here. Now, a bit of my experience with relational database theory, design, and practice. As a senior Computer Science undergraduate I took a 200 level course on ‘Databases.’ We were taught set theory, a bit of algebra, Boyce-Codd, what it means to…
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…
Oracle 11gR1 Enterprise Edition with the Diagnostic and Tuning packs has a very compelling new feature, Real-Time SQL Monitoring. Oracle thinks enough of the feature that it was highlighted prominently in whitepaper by ACE Directory Arup Nanda titled “Oracle Database 11g: The Top Features for DBAs and Developers” (read it here) Long story short: Too late or too lazy to start a trace on a poorly performing query? Want to know what is going on…
I’ve been referring customers to SQL Developer’s Migration Workbench for a few months now. I thought it might be a good idea to give it a try myself before I send any more children out to play with the wolves. This is NOT a formalized review. This is a quick glance at a cool tool from a cool vendor. I did what all geeks do – I ran it without reading ANY of the product…
Ask questions, get answers – and a Toadie! He wants questions. You want answers (and a Toad). So, ask away – stump the Toad chump! We’re looking for challenging questions dealing with Oracle Database and Toad, for example: Can Toad do that? I had this problem once where… I hate it when… The Rules! If I like your question, you get a Toad beanie. I’ll answer any and all questions submitted. Please keep the questions…
Disclaimer: I work for Oracle now. This post pretty much pertains to any and all database IDE and GUIs. –Thanks, Jeff 1/25/2012 Let’s get this out of the way, because anyone who knows me, knows that I have a HUGE bias in this argument: I work for Quest Software, and my primary job is to help sell Toad for Oracle. I also love SQL*Plus, and I use it almost everyday. So don’t bash me because…
So the news is out, Charlotte NC is a destination city! image courtesy Wikipedia 2012 Democratic Presidential Convention 2013 PASS Summit Already folks are wondering, hey, where is Charlotte? And, can I get good sushi there? Charlotte is a city I visit frequently. Here are a few things I’ve picked up along the way: It’s the ‘Queen City’ – but so are a half dozen other towns in the US The downtown area is called…
Some of my earliest memories involve trips to the dentist when I was maybe 3 or 4 years old. To this day, my blood pressure rises whenever I go in for a simple cleaning. There’s a particular poster I can’t seem to get out of my head, like a bad 80’s song. The intent was to encourage us kiddies to floss our teeth. I remember thinking “Well, I don’t need ALL my teeth…” Hmmm, this…