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”

I had a fun request come in from a colleague the other day.  They had a simple list of fully qualified file names and they needed to present that data in the familiar hierarchical tree layout. 

To demonstrate, I took a little trip down memory lane and grabbed a subset of presentations I’ve done over the years.

18.2 was released a few days ago, so I thought I’d throw it against my 18c instance and see how things played out.  This was just a single instance database, running with a single pluggable.

Yesterday I was caught up in an interesting SNAFU at my local Supermarket.  All of the checkout registers shut down, thus making it impossible to pay for groceries.  Later on Twitter, the company apologized as we discovered it was actually a nationwide outage!

Let’s face it. Concurrency is a good thing when it comes to database applications.

Here’s a little-known feature that has been around since at least Oracle 10, though I don’t think I had ever seen it in the wild until today when someone reported on the ODC (OTN) database forum that they had a problem getting repeatable results.  It’s always possible, of course, that failure to get repeatable results is the natural consequence of running queries against a multi-user system, but if we assume that this was not the cause in this case we have to ask why a special hashing function that Oracle supplies to allow you to check that a set of data hasn’t changed gives you different results when “the data hasn’t changed”.

Some members of the Oracle community got well and truly into the April Fools Day spirit this year.

There were plenty of very earnest looking blog posts about a new 18c function – “TO_DOG_YEAR”.  You can read their posts here

It’s a big day here at AskTOM HQ !

Just a quick post here so I could consolidate some information about histograms in 12c.

I did a little video for St Patricks day, but it also brought back memories of my first computer experiences.  A Sinclair ZX80, a Commodore 64, and many other machines that I thought were so cool for their time.

Feel free to share your experiences in comments.