March and April are booking up fast. Getting real busy and loving life. Utah Oracle Users Group (UTOUG) March 17 – 18 Keynote: “Curves ahead: Emerging technology threats.”, “Holistic Database Security in the cloud.”, and “PL/SQL Secure Coding in the cloud.” INSYNC Tuesday March 30 and April 1 “Holistic Database Security in the Cloud.” Uzbekistan INHA University April 6. “Staying Current in a Constantly Changing IT Environment ..read more

In our series on the future of AI, here is the interview with Sandesh Rao, VP Autonomous Health and Machine Learning ..read more

First draft, more to come. I’ve spoken in the past about the utility of blockchain, to create a table that can not be altered. Oracle 21C is not available in OCI. The syntax to create a blockchain table is quite simple. create blockchain table test (x number) NO DROP UNTIL 30 DAYS IDLE NO DELETE LOCKED HASHING USING "SHA2_512" VERSION "v1"; The addition of the blockchain keyword, the options no drop until <>, no delete, locked, and specifying the hashing algorithm and version ..read more

We have people giving opinions on a complex subject that for all practical purposes seem to contradict each other. I’ll give them this, they are some smart people; all of them have demonstrated vision and accomplished quite a few things over the years. People like Elon Musk, Ki Fu Lee, and Stephen Hawking have been sounding alarms on what the future will be in AI. We are hearing everything from AI is an existential threat to humanity to fifty percent of the workforce will be made obsolete in the next fifteen years. Of course, some world leaders have made outrageous statements like “The first ..read more

I came across an interesting problem, we are using JSON in one of our applications and have no control over the people sending us the JSON data. This has caused some issues with data quality. One thing we needed to do is to check that all the required fields have a value when the data is loaded. I found solving the problem to be quite simple by adding check constraints on the JSON column. alter table payload add constraint payload_first_name_check check (json_exists(json_document, ‘$.first_name)); alter table payload add constraint payload_last_name_check check (json_exists(json_document ..read more

If you’re not following Jeff Smith and Kris Rice, you should be. These are two really smart guys, who are designing the tools we use everyday to do our jobs. If you’re like me, 99% of your data is in relational tables. So how do you get the data out of your relational tables into a JSON format. SQLcl has a command for that. Getting data out of your relational tables and into JSON format is pretty easy; only, up until now, it was not easy to read.  set sqlformat json-formattedSQL> select * from hr.employees  2* where rownum = 1;{“results”:[{“columns”:[{“name”:”EMPLOYEE_ID ..read more

Yes, this is a bit outside of my specialty; however, I receive somewhere between four to five hundred emails a day. Some are informational, some require me to make a decision, others are request. There is a US DOD standard for emails that makes things much easier for everyone involved. It starts with the subject line and goes into how the body of the email should be crafted. The Subject Line key words: ACTION, INFO, DECISION, SIGN. You can put all kinds of key words in the beginning of your subject line. This will tell the reader what to expect and what kind of actions they may need to do. BLU ..read more

On 20 October I’ll be speaking at the Spanish Oracle Users Group on Holistic Database Security. Registration URL to follow. On 29 October I’ll be giving the talk “Staying Current in a constantly changing IT Environment” This talk is open to the public and free of charge. It is being offered through Moscow Polytech and Oracle Academy. There is one thing you can count on in life and that is change. The IT space is changing at breakneck speed, wait a six months, and you’re dealing with an emerging technology, wait a year and you’re behind. I’ve been fortunate to be surrounded by some of the most ..read more

Monday August 31st at 1800 Sandesh Rao VP AI Ops and Machine Learning for Oracle Corporation will be giving a talk on AI Ops. Predict failures, make IT Operations easy. This is a no cost webinar. Registration link at the bottom. https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_72IaUGLaTRiTCpIhq2S-4A ..read more

When COVID-19 hit, many of us started working hard to stay in contact. Also, I have an interest in peak performance and getting to know people who excel at almost every thing they do. Here are some of the top people in the world and I’m happy to call them my friends ..read more