In a previous post I covered a technique to improve the performance of UTL_FILE, but concluded the post with a teaser: “you probably don’t need to use UTL_FILE ever again”.

Time for me to back that statement up with some concrete evidence.

UTL_FILE can read and write files. This blog post will cover the writing functionality of UTL_FILE and why I think you probably don’t need UTL_FILE for this. I’ll come back to UTL_FILE to read files in a future post.

Yeah…try saying that blog post title 10 times in a row as fast as you can

But since we’re talking about doing things fast, this is just a quick post about a conversation I had a twitter yesterday about the WHEN clause in a trigger.

That is an easy benchmark to whip up – I just need a couple of tables, each with a simple a trigger differing only by their usage of the WHEN clause.  Here is my setup:

Think about your rubbish bin for a second. Because, clearly this is going to be an oh so obvious metaphor leading into UTL_FILE right?  OK, maybe a little explanation is needed. I have a basket next to my desk into which I throw any waste paper. It is where I throw my stupid ideas and broken dreams

Java and Oracle expert Lukas Eder tweeted yesterday about a potential optimization that could be done when reviewing database SQL code.

The UKOUG’s Scottish conference is on the 21st June in the centre of Edinburgh, at the Sheraton Grand Hotel, not far from Edinburgh Castle in the centre of the city.

I popped out a tweet yesterday in Throwback Thursday style showing the date of the first question we took AskTOM – 18 years ago! Many entire computer systems don’t even last that long, and AskTOM hasn’t really needed to change that much in those 18 years.

Some readers might recall that classic Blondie track “Call me”.  Of course, some readers might be wishing that I wouldn’t harp on about great songs from the 80’s. But bear with me, there is a (very tenuous) link to this post. If you haven’t heard the song, you can jump to the chorus right here.  Go on, I’ll wait until you get back.

I’ve spoken about attribute clustering before here, here and here. So from that you can probably glean that I’m a fan.

I recently spoke about an example of this as well during my AskTOM Office Hours session which you can watch below:

I’ve just come back from OracleCode Singapore.  It was a great event – the venue was awesome and the attendees were engaged and interested in the content. But there was one thing that I found amusing (disturbing perhaps?) is the number of times I had people approach me on the topic of scaling.  Conversation would typically run along the lines of:

“What is your recommendation for scaling?”

which almost suggests that scaling is of itself, the end solution here.  Not “Here is function X, and I need it to scale”, or “My business requirement is X, and it needs to scale” but just “I need to scale”