Travel tip for Kscope15 and Beyond: Bring a water bottle!
I encourage everyone attending Kscope15 to take a vow:I will not drink water from a disposable plastic bottle.It won't be hard to find them. I imagine the conference organizers will provide them by the...
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The Oracle Database Developer Choice Awards: We Need You!
Years ago, Oracle Corporation gave out Excellence Awards for developers. For example, I was honored to be chosen as "PL/SQL Developer of the Year" in both 2002 and 2006. But it's been a while since...
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Kscope15: Reflections on another great ODTUG conference
I recently spent a week in hot, muggy Florida, visiting my mom both before and after Kscope15. Thanks, ODTUG, for organizing the event near my mom's home! Oh, and a BIG thanks for scheduling Kscope16...
View ArticleWill Oracle ruin the PL/SQL Challenge?
I received this email from a person who has played the PL/SQL Challenge quizzes for years and now wanted to delete his account and player history.Here's part of the reason he gave:"I get the impression...
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Inline your subprograms - but only within same program unit
Got an email from an expert Oracle Database developer (let's call him Sheldon, in honor of my dad, who taught himself programming - RPG, no less!) yesterday:Is inlining (via PRAGMA INLINE) even...
View ArticleNuances of NOCACHE, a.k.a., Steven eating (partially) his words
I posted this tweet yesterday:#314b #plsql Avoid gaps in sequence NEXTVALs: use NOCACHE option when creating or modifying sequence. #FrugalProgramming It was a great success social media-wise. Several...
View ArticleGetting started: Sharing your Oracle Database Developer experience
Last week, I was emailing back and forth with Paul, who is a senior developer/architect at a major financial firm. He is widely respected within the company, a valued resource for many development...
View ArticlePL/SQL Brain Teaser: how many ways can you define a cursor in PL/SQL?
According to the PL/SQL User Guide,A cursor is a pointer to a private SQL area that stores information about processing a specific SELECT or DML statement.So how many ways can you define a cursor in...
View ArticleThoughts on PL/SQL, code sharing, and code generation
[While I am sure you will be BLOWN AWAY by what I write below, just in case you are already convinced of the need for a flexible code generator for PL/SQL, skip to "Needed: Flexible Code Generator for...
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Smoothing rough edges for productive programming
No language is perfect and while PL/SQL is an incredibly "tight fit" for building applications on top of Oracle SQL (and, of course, Oracle Database), it also is not yet quite perfect.Maybe in Oracle...
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Table Functions, Part 5a: An introduction to pipelined table functions
[Gee, that was embarrassing. I start a series on table functions, and then it falters and stops. My apologies; I got so busy eating and drinking and breathing and sleeping and....anyway, back to the...
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Developer Choice Awards Update: Let the judging begin!
After a one week extension for the nominations period, we have now closed nominations for the first-ever round of Oracle Database Developer Choice Awards.We have a total of 75 nominations across five...
View ArticleTable Functions, Part 5b: Table Functions vs Pipelined Table Functions
Last week, I published my first post in the Table Function series on pipelined table functions. I included this advice at the top of the post:Here's my first piece of advice regarding this interesting...
View ArticleTable Functions, Part 5c: Another use case for Pipelined Table Functions (and...
From Oracle Help Center (a.k.a., documentation), we read:Data is said to be pipelined if it is consumed by a consumer (transformation) as soon as the producer (transformation) produces it, without...
View ArticleOptimizing PL/SQL Panel at Oracle Open World 2015 - Questions welcome!
At Oracle Open World 2014, I was a member of a panel on SQL and PL/SQL Performance. It was an awful lot of fun, but as I had expected, most of the questions focused on SQL performance, and most of them...
View ArticleZero tolerance for out-of-scope references!
I received this question last week:Hi Steven,Here is a question that I have been pondering for sometime and haven't found a definitive answer to. Perhaps you can shed some light.When writing a...
View ArticleVideo series on NOCOPY parameter hint
Finally, finally, FINALLY! I have overcome my resistance to learning Camtasia (or enough of it to not make an utter hash of things). To celebrate my newfound skills, I am releasing today a linked set...
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Oracle Database Developer Choice Awards: the voting has begun!
The Oracle Database Developer Choice Awards celebrate and recognize technical expertise and contributions in the Oracle Database community. As longtime and new users of Oracle Database move to the...
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YesSQL Celebration 2015: Andy Mendelsohn! Dev Choice Awards! Food and drink!
YesSQL Celebration OOW15October 27 - Noon to 1:30 PMLast year, we held our first-ever YesSQL Celebration at OOW14. It was precisely that: a celebration. It started with fascinating stories from Andy...
View ArticleExecute any SQL statement from within a Application Express app? Sure, why...
Received this question today:We are planning to develop a product with APEX and is it possible to execute free sql inside an apex application? I mean is it possible to have a SQL execution window...
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