Just noticed it’s April 1st, which means it’s my 15th year anniversary of being an Oracle ACE. As usual I’ll mention some of the other anniversaries that will happen throughout this year. read more ..read more

I mentioned on Twitter, I was on a training course last week for a non-Oracle cloud-based database engine. I went into the week feeling quite nervous about things, because I like to learn things at my own pace. Having to work at the same pace as others doesn’t work well for me. I’m quick at some things, and slow at others. That said, it was a really fun week. It flew by, which is always a good sign. read more ..read more

By Franck Pachot . This post is something I discovered by chance when writing about tagging SQL statement with recognizable comments. We know that Oracle is introducing more and more artificial intelligence and machine learning in the database engine, but here is the first time I see something where random or hash values seems to bring some meaning. There are two common ways to run a query and find it in V$SQL: add some tag as a comment in the query get the sql_id from the executed query The idea of tag is not new at all, and not only for the Oracle database. For example, the Google SQL Insi ..read more

Impressions from the recent upgrade of a Virtualized ODA version 12.2 to 19.9. This upgrade was expected to be a complex task. There are two possible paths to such an upgrade: re-image or go through 12.2->18.3->18.8->19.8->19.9. While re-imaging ODA is the preferred & recommeneded way, it requires you to re-create the whole structure of your environment. If you’ve never done that & it’s complicated & not automated – it’s also not an easy thing to do. We’ve never done re-imaging here, and always followed the hard path of the upgrade. This was not an exception. At each an ..read more

So apparently this cloud-thing is here for good. You may even say that it became endemic ..read more

Just a quick end of month blog post to give a shout out to Sarah Craynon Zumbrum who posted this on Linkedin a few weeks back. I think this is a wonderful call to action for an extremely worthy reason, so I figured I should read more ..read more

We’re excited to tell you more about WordPress.com’s new navigation experience. The update makes managing your entire site more intuitive and creates consistency across all parts of WordPress.com. This update also allows you all to take advantage of the wider WordPress open source community, creating the same admin menu as WordPress.org that you see referenced in lots of documentation and tutorials. As we continue to grow, we’ve heard that navigating WordPress.com could be confusing because of different sidebars layouts, menus, etc. We listened to your feedback and ran usability tests on new d ..read more

We all know from our data modelling days… (Sidenote: Remember those days? You know…when we used to think about good design, good names, table and column comments etc …Ah good times. How I miss them )  … that naming objects is half the battle when it comes to a self-documenting your database and ultimately your code. Good names help the next person who comes along that needs to understand your data and your code. read more ..read more

This blog is part of a series about my first steps in using Spatial Data in the Oracle database.  I am using the GPS data from my cycling activities collected by Strava. All of my files are available on GitHub. I have loaded basic data for all countries, and detailed data for the UK and other countries where I have recorded activities.  The next step is to determine which activities pass through which areas.  Generically, the question is simply whether one geometry intersects with another.   I can test this in SQL with the sdo_geom.relate() function. read more ..read more

In today’s video we demonstrate attribute clustering, introduced on Oracle database 12.1. The video is based on this article. Attribute Clustering in Oracle Database 12c Release 1 The star of today’s video is Francesco Tisiot, who seems to have some aversion to putting pineapple on pizza. Why anyone would ask an Italian about pizza is beyond me ..read more