Jealousy is not an emotion I generally feel for the SQL Server technology stack. I covet their Twitter camaraderie, but I ‘know’ that Oracle can counter just about anything thrown at it. People that Helped Me with this Post I was reminded that even old dogs can be taught new tricks while monitoring the #SQLSaturday conversation going on in Chicago this weekend. The subject of monitoring INDEXES came up, and it was casually mentioned that…
Do you take pleasure in killing peo…people’s sessions in the database? If so, you are not alone. If you have Blocking Locks, the easiest way to fix that is kill the offending session and free up the requested resource. But, who should win this battle? What transactions take precedence? Should the business analyst have his report kiboshed because a developer is testing a new feature? Should an ETL process be allowed to finish under any…
Question: How do I find the hour portion of the value between to timestamps? Answer: Use the EXTRACT() function! Thankfully @TheRealLewisC (twitter | blog) pointed us in the right direction! I was tempted to do a subtraction and then a substr() to pull out just the hour portion of the returned string – way more work than necessary for the Optimizer. EXTRACT (Oracle Docs) gives us just what we want! So there is not an…
After a year of tweeting my brains out for the past year, I have some data I could talk about Boring stuff, even meaningless one could argue. Number of followers, number of Re-Tweets, number of lists, my Klout (link) score – ALL BORING. When I try to convince someone to join Twitter, I never reference these slightly less than meaningless metrics. I talk about the REAL value of Twitter – the relationships I’ve cultivated or…
You better run and catch it then! You know you’re getting old when the new crop of kids don’t get this joke, or even worse, don’t understand what a prank phone call is. I’m pretty sure that folks still get phone calls from frustrated people who want to know how much time is left before their query will finish executing. You sit down and write what looks to be a pretty straightforward request for some…
Farming out your application to a hosting service really has a lot of appeal. Let someone else worry about backups, performance and uptime Service Level Agreements (SLAs), upgrades, etc. But do you really know exactly what your hosting agreement includes? What you will have access to? What is and is not covered? Picture courtesy Public Domain Pictures.NET One of the most eye-opening conversations I’ve ever had was with %*#@(^* – you know where they are…
Think the NHL or PGA seasons are brutally long? Try keeping up with all of the SQL Server and Oracle events. The friendly folks in Denver, CO tend get the conference ball rolling with the Rocky Mountain Oracle User Group (RMOUG) Training Days event. I had the pleasure to attend a couple of years ago and catch some skiing with my wife. Every conference doesn’t turn into a vacation, but I try! The 2011 calendar…
Relational databases are powerful for many reasons, but you cannot deny the ‘relational’ part is pretty compelling. Rows or ‘tuples’ in a table are comprised of related data. So for one row in an Employee table, you can assume that each value or column pertains to that particular Employee. Of course you can’t – or rather shouldn’t – put everything about said employee in a single row or table. I hate using absolutes, but in…
Are you new to Twitter, and need people to follow to get the conversation started? If you work with Oracle, then please continue reading. Don’t forget to check out @BrentO’s Twitter Book! I harangued (definition) my colleague and close friend this morning until he relented in joining Twitter. He specializes in Oracle, so I thought I would send him a quick who-to-follow list in the Oracle Community. As I was building this list, I was…
Assumptions can often get us in trouble. People don’t know what you think they know, and they know what you don’t think they know. I often present to small groups. I ask questions up front to gauge the experience level, but even so I am forced to make some assumptions. Then there are some basics that I assume any database user will have nailed down. I recently spent 90 minutes talking about writing queries and…