First thing to note on this post. No tech content in this one. Just some nostalgia.

Couple of days ago, I was flying from Perth to Dubai on my way to APEX Connect in Bonn. Because this is an 11hour hell in a death tube flight I settled in to my standard sleepless task of watching movies to pass the time. I try to steer clear of going exclusively with new releases because I know I’ll always be travelling again soon, so I try not to exhaust all my options too soon

I was browsing through the “Movie Classics” section and found a movie from my childhood: The Right Stuff.

Direct mode insert using the APPEND hint is a cool piece of technology that lets you load bulk data into a table very quickly and efficiently. Obviously there are a number of implications of doing so which you can read about here, but the one that catches most people out is the that you are locking the table during the load and once the load is completed, the table is “disabled” until the transaction ends. Here’s a quick example of that in action:

Here’s a quirky one for you. It can happen when you are dealing with a partitioned table where the partition key is defined as RAW. To be honest, I really can’t think of a reason why you ever want a table with a raw partition key. (If you have one, please let me know in the comments). Anyway, here’s the demo. I’ll start with a table using the cool automatic list partition facility and load a single row into it.

Below I’m comparing AAS from ASH verses SYSMETRICs specificially

• ASH CPU in AAS vs SYSMETRIC CPU in AAS
• ASH total AAS vs SYSMETRIC  total AAS derived from DB TIME

ASH CPU is consistently lower that SYSMETRIC  CPU and that could be because waits burn CPU but show up as waits and not CPU in ASH.

On the other hand, not sure why total AAS from SYSMETRIC  is consistently smaller than total AAS from ASH.

In my previous post I covered what I felt were the main considerations on deciding how to get someone with no real experience of I.T. online, for an example an elderly relative like my mum. In this post I’ll cover setting up the device.  Set-up is actually quite complex and there is a lot of assumed knowledge, like how the keyboard works, what spyware you leave turned on (none!) etc. So I am setting it up for her.  First I’ll just recap the main points on why I decided to use an Apple iPad for my Mum:

This one came in via an AskTOM question. You need to be careful when disabling constraints that are underpinned by an index, especially when it comes to the storage for that index.

Let’s take a look at a simple example. I’ll explicitly nominate the LARGETS tablespace for my index that will support the primary key.

I posted a video a couple of days ago showing a trigger mechanism to customize the capture of DDL that is issued on your database. The aim here is to be more generous with letting developers execute DDL on their Development databases, whilst still having a thorough record of the changes that are occurring. Of course, it goes without saying, which is why I am saying it »

• Original article

Here’s a simple little PL/SQL block where we call an inner procedure PARAMETER_TESTER from its parent block. Pay particular attention to the parameter we pass to the procedure, and it’s value throughout the execution of that procedure.

I had a request from a client a while back regarding masking of data. They had an application with sensitive data in the Production environment (where access and audit were very tightly controlled) but the issue was how to respect that sensitivity in non-Production environments whilst still preserving full size data sizes for application testing.

After some conversations about requirements, it turned out that since (even in non-Production environments) all access to application components was logged and audited, the issue was simply protecting against “inadvertent” access to sensitive data. For example, in the application, if I searched for “males with black hair with an interest in technology” I should never see the name “Connor McDonald” on screen in the results, because simply viewing that data could be treated as a breach of privacy.

I posted about my APEX upgrade to 19 yesterday, and someone was quick to point out to me that they believed I hadn’t covered all of the steps.

“What if your APEX instance needs to call web services?” they said. “You need to update your Access Control Lists.”

I hadn’t thought of that, so I logged onto one of my other APEX instances that was still at version 18, and checked the current ACLs