Justin just announced that he rolled out the final piece to blogs.oracle.com - an RSS aggregator. The only change I noticed was the addition of the “RECENT POSTS” side bar. Is this the RSS aggregator? There is no RSS feed for the aggregator, however, Justin said that they were looking into adding it.

Nevertheless, I was […]

In Oracle, you quote string literals in single quotes. If you have single quotes inside that string literal, you have to escape each single quote with another single quote. But, did you know that, in 10gR2, there is an alternative approach, called the “Q-quote mechanism”?. I only knew about it when Martin mentioned it on […]

Oracle is a good investment. This is not my advice to you, but rather the gist of an article by Tim Beyers from the Motley Fool.

To explain why Oracle is a good investment, Tim debunks the three so-called threats to Oracle that have pervaded the market’s consciousness. To summarize:

Threat 1: Acquisition risk is too great

The […]

Today, Jeff Moss, an Oracle blogger has left the building. I have also noticed that there are other Oracle bloggers who have not updated their blogs for many months, an implicit indication that they too have gone on hiatus. Looks like “blogger burnout” has finally taken its toll.

I have gathered a couple of quick thoughts […]

It is Sunday night and I’m sitting next to my wife Jasmine on the sofa in front of the TV. Jasmine is watching “Big Love” on HBO (a series about a guy who is married to three wives, poor guy!), and I have my laptop on my lap, trying to write some thoughts.

Well, I finally […]

Continuing the series about joins, today I will review outer joins. An outer join extends the result of an inner join. An outer join returns all rows that satisfy the join condition and also returns some or all of those rows from one table for which no rows from the other satisfy the join condition.

The […]

I often want to capture some part of my screen to an image file or the clipboard. Sure there are a lot of software that do that, but, today, I found a completely free and a very easy to use screen capture software called ScreenHunter 4.0 Free. I just thought that you might find it […]

Continuing the series about joins, today it’s about inner joins. An inner join (aka simple join) is a join of two or more tables that returns only those rows that satisfy the join condition. When you hear people talking about a “join”, usually they are referring to an “inner join”.

For example:

Am I considered old school because I do not use Oracle’s SQL92 compliant join syntax? After all, it is recommended to follow the standards whenever possible.

Starting with Oracle database version 9i, you can use the SQL join syntax that is compliant with the ANSI/ISO SQL92 standard. You also have the option to continue using the […]

At least I forgot all about LEAST, a very simple Oracle SQL function.

You want to select the smallest value from a list of expressions, you use LEAST:

LEAST(expr [, expr ]…)

Some examples: