Earlier this month, I conducted a totally unscientific survey on Twitter, asking where people got their Oracle news from. Twitter and the NoCOUG Journal were two popular sources, along with a wide range of blogs. Here are some of the blogs that the Oracle DBA & Dev superstars in my Twitter like to read, along with my own recommendations.
HOWTO solve any problem recursively, PL/SQL edition…
PROCEDURE solve (my_problem IN varchar2) IS BEGIN my_idea := have_great_idea (my_problem) ; my_code := start_coding (my_idea) ; IF i_hit_complications (my_idea) THEN new_problem := the_complications (my_idea); solve (new_problem); ELSE NULL; --we will never get here END IF; END solve;
This abuse of recursion was inspired by @ThePracticalDev !
What’s in a name? – “Brittany” edition
How do you spell “Brittany”? The picture above has four well-known women with four different spellings of the name. It turns out there are nearly 100 different ways that Americans have spelled it. The US Social Security Administration names data lets us tease out all the spellings and find out which ones are most popular – and when.
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What’s in a name? or rather, in the SSA Names data
One of the amazing things about being a DBA/developer in 2016 is the sheer amount of freely available, downloadable data to play with. One fun publicly available data sets is the American Social Security Administration names data. It contains all names for which SSNs were issued for each year, with the number of occurrences (although names with <5 occurrences are not included to protect individual privacy).
“What do you mean there’s line breaks in the address?” said SQLLDR
I had a large-ish CSV to load and a problem: line breaks inside some of the delimited fields.
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Tip of the day: Always put this in your .bashrc
if you like to scp:
# If not running interactively, don't do anything [[ $- == *i* ]] || return
Otherwise scp will fail without error – it’s a known bug.
SQL vs. Excel – Subgroup medians
Got anyone who needs April Fooling?
Do you have a sql*plus user who really needs an April Fool’s joke played on them? With a little editing to their glogin.sql, every sql*plus session will exit with what appears to be a pseudo-random TNS error.
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Review: Oracle RAC Performance Tuning
Some time ago, I received a free review copy of Brian Peasland‘s recent book, Oracle RAC Performance Tuning.
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Roman numerals to decimal in SQL
Earlier this week I got tangled up doing a Roman Numeral conversion in my head. So of course my second thought, right after “Doh!”, was “I bet I can write a SQL statement to do this for me next time.”
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