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 213254544468501119237a0_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…
It’s amazing how the ‘little things’ can often make the biggest impact on the end user experience. Example: when you ask your software to do something, you want a visual indicator or feedback dialog to let you know how that request is being processed. Imagine submitting a order request on your favorite shopping website and not getting a response back. Did they accept my order? Will I get my book? Did they take my money?…
In case you’re curious, I’m calling yesterday ‘Day 0’ as it was spent doing trivial things like getting email setup. Today I feel like was closer to a real day of work. I spent a few hours this afternoon going over some request from the users. One stuck out pretty prominently – ‘Keep-alive functionality’ The basic gist is at some point your connection to the database is terminated due to an inactive connection. This can…
Since I announced my new job at Oracle, I’ve had more than a few friends and associates approach me about databases. They’ve always wondered just what it is that I talk about all the time, or perhaps they want to get their feet wet and want to know more about data in general. I think this is fairly normal and expected, especially as just about everyone has some sort of interaction with a database. As…
The good folks at Oracle, namely @krisrice, approached me this past Summer with an offer I found myself unable to refuse. The short version would be something like, ‘Hey, come join our SQL Developer team.’ So next week, I will start the next chapter of my professional life as the Product Manager for Oracle’s primary database development tool. This is a very exciting moment for me. I remember first seeing Oracle in my senior year…
