Come, young one. Come sit by the open fire; hold your cold hands to its warmth. Let me tell you a story. Back when I was young, the world was a simpler place: we roamed the plains, hunted game with our spears – and Oracle Select statements consisted of only a SELECT, a FROM and, possibly, a WHERE. Things don… Read more
A wise man once said, insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results. If that is the case then no one’s saner than a computer programmer*, because programming is executing the same code over and over again and expecting the same results. We’ve already talked about bundling up statements in anonymous PL/SQL blocks; now… Read more
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 A wise man* once said: To build the Great Wall of China, you must start with a brick. In our previous articles we acquainted ourselves with our bricks; now it’s time to build. If we consider what we’ve learned so far – Select, Update, Insert, Delete – as unicellular organisms, what we’re about to… Read more
A wise man* once said, an expert is someone who uses big words and acronyms where simple phrases would do just as nicely. So stand back and listen to this: Database, Relational Database, DBMS, RDBMS, SQL, Sub-queries, normalisation. [* that wise man was me.] So now that I’ve established my credentials by bamboozling you with arcane words and capital letters,… Read more
During this Oracle Database 12c new features article series, I shall be extensively exploring some of the very important new additions and enhancements introduced in the area of Database Administration, RMAN, High Availability and Performance Tuning. Part I covers: Online migration of an active data file Online table partition or sub-partition migration Invisible column Multiple indexes on the same column… Read more
The art of doing mathematics consists in finding that special case which contains all the germs of generality. David Hilbert One of the most mindboggling values in the Oracle database is the NULL value. What is NULL? NULL is nothing. NULL is not even the same as NULL. NULL is undefined. But you need to work with NULL values (which are no… Read more
