Block Names
There are a number of tiny details that I can never remember when I’m sketching out models to test ideas, and one of those is the PL/SQL block name. Virtually every piece of PL/SQL I write ends up with...
View ArticleRTFM
Imagine you’re fairly new to Oracle and don’t have a lot of background information at your fingertips; then one day someone tells you to read the manual pages for the view dba_free_space. Look...
View ArticleAssumptions
As the years roll on I’ve found it harder and harder to supply quick answers to “simple” questions on the Oracle-L list server and OTN/ODC forum because things are constantly changing and an answer...
View ArticlePhilosophy
Here’s a note I’ve just re-discovered – at the time I was probably planning to extend it into a longer article but I’ve decided to publish the condensed form straight away. In a question to the Oak...
View ArticleTaking Notes – 2
[Originally written August 2015, but not previously published] If I’m taking notes in a presentation that you’re giving there are essentially four possible reasons: You’ve said something interesting...
View ArticleRTFM ?
My entrance at the Polish Oracle User Group conference 2017 has just resurfaced on Twitter. There is a back-story to this which contains an allegorical lesson in using Oracle. As I said in the opening...
View ArticleAssumptions
Over the last few days I’ve been tweeting little extracts from Practical Oracle 8i, and one of the tweets contained the following quote: Practical Oracle 8i p.29 "If you are going to depend on a...
View ArticleTroubleshooting
An anecdote with a moral. Many years ago – in the days of Oracle 7.2.3, when parallel query and partition views were in their infancy and when RAC was still OPS (Oracle Parallel Server), I discovered a...
View ArticlePhilosophy 23
It’s a long time since I wrote a note with the “philosophy” theme, but a recent complaint about Oracle prompted me to suggest the following thought: “If you write SQL that is technically incorrect it’s...
View Article“Priors”
I was listening to a podcast recently about “Thinking Clearly” when the presenter gave a very rapid description of a common mistake that occurs when human intuition meets statistical information. The...
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