Daily Archives Tuesday, October 2008

My Oracle Support Community to Launch Soon

Yet another Oracle social network is about to be born. In addition to Oracle Mix, OracleCommunity.net, and OAUG Knowledge Factory, My Oracle Support Community will be launched in the next few days.

If you have a My Oracle Support (formerly known as Metalink) account, you will be able to access My Oracle Support Community. It is [...]

IOTs and blocksize

A question came up on the Oracle database forum a few months ago asking:
What are the benefits and the downside of using IOTs on 16k blocks? Would you recommend it?
I think the best response to the generic question about block sizing came from Greg Rahn in another thread on the forum:
If someone has to [...]

Flying toasters and dense_rank

Have fun with this caps-lock user question :
asktom:Logic behind the DENSE_RANK
This is one more statement on how to not use order by
like in

select ename, deptno, row_number() over (order by 1)
from emp order by 2;
ENAME          DEPTNO ROW_NUMBER()OVER(ORDERBY1)
———- ———- ————————–
CLARK              10                          1
KING               10                          2
MILLER             10                          3
JONES              20                          4
FORD               20                          5
ADAMS              20                          6
SMITH              20                          7
SCOTT              20                          8
WARD               30                          9
TURNER             30                         10
ALLEN              30                         11
JAMES              30                         12
BLAKE              30                         13
MARTIN             30                         14

According to the doc, order by [...]

End of summer time

Last Sunday was the end of the daylight saving scheme that goes in these parts by the name of British Summer Time, today 2 days past the end of summertime it snows!
I don’t recall snow so far south in October. Oh well it gives me something to write about!
Posted in Random       [...]

Geolocation: Cool or Creepy?

Location aware services and apps are white hot right now.
Cases in point, two new iPhone apps: Google Earth and Brightkite.

I can’t seem to find any use for Google Earth beyond the obvious eye-candy, cool factor. This has always been my complaint with Google Earth. It’s nice to look at, but not very useful.
The iPhone app [...]

Partitioning For Developers, Part 3

LewisC’s An Expert’s Guide to Oracle Technology
This is the final post (3 of 3) that I began last week. Before reading this one, read part 1 and part 2. I will post a presentation on this topic shortly.
How do I use Partitioning?
Now we get to the c…

Carl Backstrom - A great loss

I woke up to the news this morning that Carl Backstrom has been killed in a car accident.
I’m not going to post a link to the news article directly, as it contains some distressing details that some people might not wish to read, however the news has been confirmed by various Blogs and (reliable) people [...]

Dunedin to Fox Glacier…

Day 5. Today started out with a trip over to Dunedin Hospital to see some of the guys I met at the NZOUG conference in Rotorua. Tim Cleminson had invited me along to have an informal chat with the team about all things Oracle. Anyone who has met me knows once I get started I [...]

Why? oh Why! A great friend, an amazing APEX guy…

I couldn’t believe what I read when I first got up in the morning. But it got confirmed by other posts and some people in OraTweet….Carl Backstrom had a car accident on Sunday and passed away.It’s unbelievable, I wish it wasn’t true! What do you need…

We Miss You Carl

Carl Backstrom died in a single car accident early Sunday morning. He was 35.
Earlier today, the news trickled through several of our Twitter feeds, as a nurse involved attempted to find and notify Carl’s friends.
Carl was an avid APEX evangelist and blogger, snowboarder and generally well-liked, nice guy. Carl read this blog and commented frequently; [...]