Disclosure: I manage a blog syndication site, OraDBPedia. Part of my job involves looking for compelling bloggers in the Oracle database space and convincing them to let us syndicate their content. Syndicate: (Communication Arts / Journalism & Publishing) (tr) to sell (articles, photographs, etc.) to several newspapers for simultaneous publication — from FreeDictionary.com The general idea for a blogger is to get their content to as many different sets of eyes as possible. The more…
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…
We moved a few years ago, to a wonderful home in the heart of Cary, NC. Lots of things to love about the house, but the geek in me has been eyeing these sets of in-ceiling speakers littered throughout the house. The previous owner was a huge fan of classical music and NPR, and wanted to be able to listen in the bath, the yard, the garage, even the kitchen. When we moved in, I…
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…
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…