Blog in Isolation

There is a radiant darkness upon us

Oracle

how bind variables made me a demigod

In a previous life, I was a development DBA. Sorry that’s not quite true. My job title was ‘Persistence Architect’ for a J2EE application. The Oracle database wasn’t really considered to be a database. In fact, it wasn’t even considered to be a repository either. The database was merely a means of persisting objects.

There was a swear box for the terms ‘Table’, ‘Column’, ‘Database’, ‘record, ‘schema’, ‘SELECT’ and bizarrely, ‘PMON’. This meant I had to resurrect the word ’tuple’.

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introduction to ETL for Oracle

There are a variety of methods to extract, transform and load (ETL) data in and out of an Oracle database. This short article provides an overview of some of the basic options that are supplied with Oracle.

L is for Load

Firstly, we need a table to load data into. This SQL script creates a table called PERSON.

    create table person
    (person_id number(12),
    forename varchar2(200),
    surname varchar2(200),
    title varchar2(10),
    email varchar2(100),
    gender varchar2(1),
    ni_number varchar(30),
    address1 varchar2(100),
    address2 varchar2(100),
    town varchar2(100),
    county varchar2(100),
    postcode varchar2(10),
    country varchar2(100),
    phone varchar2(100),
    mobile varchar2(100),
    salary number(12),
    date_of_birth date);

The following PL/SQL procedure may be used to populate this table with an arbitrary amount of data.

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interviewing stories #3

A few years ago, I worked for a small internet company and was a successful dot com millionaire. Then the confounded Italians went and devalued the Lira.

We spent (wasted) lots of time interviewing Oracle developers. Interviewing was time consuming and we had a fairly rapid turnover of people with varying technical abilities and personality disorders.

After a while, we decided to set a short technical test in an effort to save time and improve the quality of the technical people we hired.

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a short history of Oracle blogging

I was just reviewing the list of Oracle related blogs I subscribe to. Here they are in approximate chronological order with the blogging platform. Apologies for any inaccuracies.

A couple of things struck me…

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curious case of the missing spool file

Bit of a ghostly theme today.

One great aspect of my job is that I write SQL scripts that are reviewed and executed by other people. This suits me just fine. The less work for me, the better.

Obviously, I never add ‘spool off’ to the tail of a SQL*Plus script. This is a whole ten characters to type (including newline). Multiply this by all the SQL scripts you might produce in a lifetime and just think of how much time that would waste. In any case, everyone knows that ’exit’ implies a ‘spool off’ anyway.

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Raptor is out of the cage

Oracle have released Raptor (a freely available GUI SQL query tool) which may be of interest to those of you who use Toad or are frustrated with the terseness of the SQL*Plus interface.

Raptor is primarily a cross platform, PL/SQL developer tool, written in Java (60 MB download). The SQL output is a scrollable grid (like Toad) and there is the standard schema browser, PL/SQL debugger, SQL pretty printer, DDL generator and a graphical interface to explain plan for query tuning.

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Tom Kyte makes mistake shock

London, near England - Wednesday 2 November 2005

The Oracle community was reeling yesterday from the revelation that the universally respected, internationally renown technical expert and long standing Oracle employee, Thomas Kyte, had made a mistake.

The error was discovered by a Senior Oracle DBA based in Solihull in the UK, Mr. N. Brightside who explained:

“I was dearly looking forward to attending the UK Oracle User Group in Birmingham and hoped to get my copy of Tom Kyte’s latest book, (Expert Oracle - Database Architecture) signed by Tom personally. However, at the last minute, my manager told me that the end of Q3 was imminent and there was no budget available for the daily 4.50GBP return rail fare. So, I decided to ‘work from home’ and sit down to savour Tom’s excellent book. Imagine my surprise when I found what appeared, at first sight, to be a typographical error on page 38. In a paragraph discussing other relational database systems, Tom incorrectly refers to ‘Ingress’ instead of ‘Ingres’. Then to my horror, a quick search on AskTom revealed that Tom makes this identical misspelling elsewhere. It was not a typo, it was a genuine mistake.”

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Oracle newbies, wizards and gurus

I recently stumbled upon Lisa Dobson’s Oracle Newbies blog. Although I have never met Lisa, I admire her for two reasons. Firstly, she is about to give a presentation at the UK Oracle User Group in Birmingham. I am a good deal older than Lisa and the prospect of presenting to a large number of ‘grumpy old men’ would fill me with absolute dread.

Secondly, I really like Lisa’s rather self deprecating, modest statement on her profile

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