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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Search plugins: Search Oracle docs from your browser search bar
Tired of navigating to the SQL documentation every time you need to look up syntax? I created a search plugin so that you can search the SQL documentation directly from your browser’s search bar:
Running totals in SQL
LAG and analytic COUNT
Just a quick post today to play around with some analytic functions.
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How to SSH into your VirtualBox VM from another machine, OS X edtion

By far the easiest way to get Oracle up and running on OS X is to install VirtualBox and run a developer VM. The VirtualBox and VMs are free downloads from Oracle. You don't have to install the database and the developer VM comes with labs to get you started.
So what could make it even better? Well, the VM needs memory and CPU, and my laptop is old and feeble (the problem with "laptop RAC" alas). What if I could install the VM on a desktop and just ssh into it from my older, low-powered low-memory laptop?