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…
How much time to do you spend debugging database application problems? Probably more time than you want. How much of that time is spent capturing the SQL that is being submitted by your application to the database? I’m going to guess that it’s a significant amount. Asssuming you have access to production (or a test environment that adequately replicates production), then you probably want to check out V$SQLTEXT_WITH_NEWLINES. Before I talk about V$SQLTEXT_WITH_NEWLINES, let’s talk…
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…
Post Updated on November 10, 2011. 11gR2 was supposed to be 12g..or so the story goes. You can read tons of posts on OTN from several years ago where 12g is referenced. Nothing recent though. So… Oracle Open World 2011 is coming soon, and you know the Big Red Machine will want to have a big splash. Will it be a new version of their RDBMS solution? And for all those people who just got…
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…
Apologies to Wynonna Judd for borrowing and mangling her lyrics and song title, but I just had a really interesting conversation with a fellow Oracle tools guru. We we’re discussing just how much functionality an end-user really takes advantage of in a software product. He had mentioned that users maybe exercises about 20% of a tool’s feature-set and I countered with 10%. Maybe we’re both wrong, but I think we are on the right side…
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…
“Those people are fine, they JUST write SQL.” I often hear this in the context of visiting customers and offering to provide training (and yes, software) to their database users. There is a class of people who are deemed unworthy of such productivity tools because they do nothing but ‘just write dumb SQL all day long.’ The only problem is, I know that it’s these people that are largely responsible for running the business. When…
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…
Coming up with themes and titles for a blog post can be very challenging. You want something that will catch the eye, but not be so random or out of left field that no one catches your drift. This morning I had two themes battling inside my head for this post. Welcome to the Jungle Baby! Pigs In Space You’re here so you already know who won. Pigs in space? Pigs don’t belong in space?!?!…