I haven’t written anything in my blog for a few months now, and if you have been following me for a long time you know that’s quite unusual. However, there is a good reason for this, which I’m going to explain here. If you follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn, you probably saw that we’ve ..read more

A few years ago I wrote the post All You Need to Know about Oracle Database Patching, and I also presented a presentation about this topic a few time. But over time I learned new things and ran into new problems, so it’s time to revisit this topic and add some more info about which ..read more

When you develop an application that uses a database, one of the topics you need to consider is how to connect to the database. Some application use a one-to-one connection, meaning the user connects to the application and it connects to the database for this user. Using this method it’s easier to implement some separation ..read more

As I started this project, I prepared a list of topics for my posts. One of them was “working with different data types” as there are differences between the different databases. However, it seems like the “date” datatype family deserves an entire post by itself, so this is it. If this is the first time ..read more

This is the third post in this project, where I compare 4 major databases: Oracle, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, and MariaDB, and this time I’ll talk about pseudo columns (or system columns). If you want to read about this project and see the other post, you can click here. Let’s begin: Coming from the Oracle world ..read more

Before I start I just wanted to remind that this is one part of a series about comparing the basic functionality of four different RDBMS: SQL Server, Oracle, MariaDB, and PostgreSQL. For more information about this project and links to the other posts, check this introduction post. And now to the post: One of the ..read more

I decided to start a comparison between four main databases from a development perspective. If you want to read more about it, I introduced the project here. And for the topic of this post: NULL value is a unique thing in the database. It means “no value” and it is handled a bit differently in ..read more

I’ve decided to start an interesting project. I have no idea how long it will be or how many topics I’ll decide to research, but I have at least a few in mind. And this project is: DB Comparison. Now, I’m not talking about performance or deep dive into the internals, but normal use cases ..read more

I dedicate this post to Pieter Van Puymbroeck, who left us way too early. I actually sent him details about this issue one day before I got the news of him passing. RIP. Oracle 19c introduced a new feature called “Automatic Flashback of Standby Database”. This feature performs flashback database of the standby database automatically ..read more

When Oracle moved to the new Oracle database release model in 2018, some changes were introduced with it. I just realized that I haven’t blogged about it (even though I talk about it as part of my Creating Order in the Database Patching Chaos presentation), and I also think it’s a good complement to my All You Need To Know about Oracle Database Patching post. Yearly Oracle Database Releases Starting in 2018, Oracle has decided to abandon their version numbering with 2 releases per version (10gR1-10gR2, 11gR1-11gR2, 12cR1-12cR2) and move to a yearly release containing the year number (18c, 19c ..read more