Oracle Worst Practices Over-normalization of table structures, inadequate indexing, poor optimization of initialization parameters, poor schema statistics management, bad disk I/O sub-system and more… (tags: oracle tip dba plsql […]

Since my last post about the undocumented pragmas in Oracle, I have found more information about the FIPSFLAG pragma directive and more specifically about the FIPS part of it. Jens commented about the existence of a session parameter FLAGGER and its possible relationship with FIPSFLAG and FIPS. After a bit of searching, here is what […]

The Oracle Database Concepts is a great resource not only if you are just getting started with Oracle, but also if you are an experienced Oracle professional and looking to review the basic concepts that are often forgotten or hidden behind more complex topics. The foundation of complexity is simplicity.

While researching a topic related to […]

According to Microsoft’s new adCenter Labs Demographics Prediction tool that enables you to “predict a customer’s age, gender, and other demographic information”, Oracle.com is female oriented with following confidence: 64% female and 36% male.

A Gentle Introduction to SQL Interactive SQL tutorial, learn about: SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, DB2, Mimer, PostgreSQL, SQLite and Access. (tags: oracle sql tutorial reference) […]

On my Oracle database 8i (8.1.7.4) instance, I ran the following:

SQL> SELECT 1 my_number 2 FROM DUAL 3 UNION 4 SELECT NULL my_number 5 FROM DUAL 6 / SELECT 1 my_number * ERROR at line 1: ORA-01790: expression […]

Thank you all for your answers to my question What’s so special about the world cup?. Here is a summary of the comments:

Geeks watch the world cup via telnet. When you watch a match, you don’t watch just two teams playing, you watch two nations. The World Cup gives the only possibility where the “poor” nation can […]

I do not watch or follow the world cup games - or any other “ball” games for this matter. I could care less who wins or loses. But I guess, I’m just a minority. Maybe because I’m a geek, and geeks don’t care about sports. But I know many geeks who do care about sports. […]

RATIO_TO_REPORT is a very handy and useful function. Before going through what it does, let’s first look at this example:

SELECT last_name, salary, ROUND (salary / SUM (salary) OVER () * 100, […]

Since January 2005, Oracle has made 20 acquisitions. That’s about 1.11 acquisition per month on average, totalling $19.7 billion. Wow!

Here is the list in chronological order:

2005 - January: PeopleSoft - enterprise management software. $11.1 billion. 2005 - March: Oblix - identity management solutions. Undisclosed price. 2005 - April: Retek - retailing software solutions. $701 million. 2005 - June: […]