Today the new OakTable web site, www.oaktable.net, has been published: many thanks to Kurt Van Meerbeeck (that I'm told worked the most on the site), James Morle and Marco Gralike!

I really like (besides the light and modern look) the aggregator of the OakTable members' blogs - a window on high-quality news and investigations about Oracle ...

That’s the Oak Table Network, not the other OTN. We have a new website which, amongst other things,  includes a convenient blog aggregator that will include the blogs of all Oak Table members. I’ll probably be taking all the Oak table members off my blog roll some time soon since I’ve found it very convenient to [...]

Although I wasn’t convinced by the 25,000,000 view figures I reported last week, I’m inclined to trust my page view counter which is currently showing a little of 1,500,000 page views; and, as I have in the past, I thought I would produce a summary of what’s been of most interest to visitors: If we [...]

No, not active session history – but the volcanic stuff that’s drifting through the skies and keeping me in Denmark after Miracle Open World 2010. I’m feeling a little lucky at present (compared to the other visiting speakers – especially the American contingent). My flight home on Friday was postponed then cancelled, but my diary [...]

I often make a fuss about making sure that people include the predicate section when looking at execution plans. Here’s another example demonstrating why it can be so helpful. We start with an SQL statement that happens to have a large number of child cursors – and every child cursor has exactly the same plan_hash_value [...]

[Back to part 11] Part 12 is about a 2-node RAC system.  Someone recently posted links to a matched pair of AWR reports in this thread on the OTN Database General forum and, after I had made a couple of quick comments on them, gave me permission to use them on my blog. Because OTN [...]

The call for papers  for the  Tech Server and E-Business event in the UKOUG Conference Series is only a couple of weeks from closing, so I’m just bouncing this email to the top of the pile: Once again we are launching call for papers for the annual Technology & E-Business Suite user group conference. This [...]

Can you believe it? Already?? Yes, that’s right, the Call for Papers for the UKOUG Technology and E-Business Suite conference is already open! In my opinion, this is one of the best conferences out there! Wide variety of speakers, great topics, and, it’s not too big! This coming year will be my fifth (or is it sixth?) year attending, and it’s a trip I’ve always enjoyed, and never regretted taking the time (or money) to attend.

The CFP is open through Monday, August 2nd, 2010. The conference itself is coming up on November 29th – December 1st, 2010, in Birmingham, England.

More information is available here.

Hi all,

My apologies for my extended absence.  Well, I ran into something interesting today, and, I thought it would be appropriate for a blog post, and apparently, I got inspired.  No startling revelation here, this is just a bit of a cautionary tale about the unintended consequences of using a new feature.  A quick search of the Oracle Documentation confirms that the skip locked directive of the select for update statement was introduced in Oracle 11g, version 11.1. But, before we dive into that, let’s review the functionality of select for update through versions of Oracle preceding 11g.

Select for update