One of the very cool things about DBMS_JOB is that a job does not “exist” as such until the session that submitted the job commits the transaction. (This in my opinion is a critical feature that is missing from the DBMS_SCHEDULER package which, other than this omission, is superior to DBMS_JOB in every way).

Because DBMS_JOB is transactional, we can use it to make “non-transactional” things appear transactional. For example, if part of the workflow for hiring someone is to send an email to the Human Resources department, we can do the email via job submission so that an email is not sent if the employee record is not created successfully or is rolled back manually, eg:

It’s always so good to see a user community growing. Last week was the first ever technical conference for obug (or is it OBUG) – the Oracle Benelux User Group. It was an excellent couple of days, packed with a fantastic range of presenting talent and an enthusiastic audience. I was honoured to be asked to be one of the presenters.

I thought about writing a post on juggling work commitments, travel with my job and time at home with children and family. And then I came across this post from community friend Robin Moffatt.

https://rmoff.net/2019/02/08/travelling-for-work-with-kids-at-home/

It’s a simple requirement. We want to transform this:

SQL> select deptno, ename
  2  from   emp
  3  order by 1,2;

    DEPTNO ENAME
---------- ----------
        10 CLARK
        10 KING
        10 MILLER
        20 ADAMS
        20 FORD
        20 JONES
        20 SCOTT
        20 SMITH
        30 ALLEN
        30 BLAKE
        30 JAMES
        30 MARTIN
        30 TURNER
        30 WARD

into this:

My last post was about patching my home databases from 18.3 to 18.5 on Windows, and how I encountered a patch conflict when I tried to patch the JVM. I thought I’d give a little bit of info for anyone who runs into patch conflicts from time to time. It can be stressful especially if unforeseen, or you are in the middle of limited time outage window etc.

So before you jump into applying a patch, a nice little tool you might like to explore is the patch conflict checker on My Oracle Support. You can get it via:

https://support.oracle.com/epmos/faces/PatchConflictCheck

It is straightforward to use, you simply fill in the platform and your current patch inventory details, and then list out the patches you intend to apply.

Contrary to wild rumours on the internet, it was not a fear of the number 13 that led to a numbering jump from version 12c to version 18c. The jump was part of our new, more flexible release mechanism so that we can get fixes and enhancements to customers on a more frequent and predictable schedule. In a nutshell, smaller bundles of features and fixes, more frequently.

I won’t dwell on that – if you’re unfamiliar with the new strategy, the best place to start is  MOS Note 2285040.1, which has a description and a FAQ. But in terms of (as the saying goes) eating one’s own dog food, I downloaded the 18.5 release update which came out this week, and applied it to my 18.3 installation and I thought I’d share the process.

Just a short post today on something that came in as a question for the upcoming Office Hours session which I thought could be covered quickly in a blog post without needing a lot of additional discussion for which Office Hours is more suited to.

The question was:

“When I gather statistics using DBMS_STATS, can I just create a statistic table and pass that as a parameter to get the results of the gather”

And the answer simply is “No” but let me clear up the confusion.

“delayed commit ok initiated” –  is a thread state in Aurora MySQL which indicates the thread has started the async commit process but is waiting for it to be ack’d. You will not find this thread state in MySQL as  MySQL  does not use our async commit protocal, it is Aurora MySQL specific. This is  usually the genuine commit time of a transaction.

This is a “state” and not a wait.

I got a nasty shock this morning when I fired up my local Application Expression installation.

It had been working fine and all of a sudden…just dead. I sounded like all of those family members that as I.T practitioners we have to deal with (and that we’re so sceptical of) when they say: “I didn’t change anything…it just stopped!”

In keeping with the treatment of family members, I then adopted the advice that I normally give them first.

Here are the blog posts that you hit on most this year, with the most viewed entry on top. Unsurprisingly it is about the release of 18c, but interestingly the ORA-14758 and the Active Sessions post have come up again from last years list, so it appears they are still common issues for the modern Oracle professional. And of course, it is nice to see that my Openworld Mega-download is helping the community.

Thanks for supporting the blog, and as always, there will be more content next year !