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Technical Article

Demystifying Oracle's Clustering Factor

One of the more confusing statistics in Oracle is one called the clustering factor. Associated with an index, it's actually dependent on the table data, more specifically the distance between 'jumps' for a given index key. Commonly, a 'jump' is the number of blocks between rows containing the given index key starting with the first block found containing that key. If that sounds confusing don't despair, David Fitzjarrell explains in detail.

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2015-07-29

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Technical Article

The Importance of Maintenance on MSDB

MSDB is a system database used by SQL Server. MSDB stores all sorts of data, such as backup history, log shipping monitor history, SSIS packages and Service Broker queue data to name a few. Just like user databases, MSDB needs regular maintenance, including index optimizations and, more importantly, regular purging. In this article, Tim Radney looks at how neglecting your MSDB can negatively impact on your environment.

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2015-07-28

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Question of the Day

RegEx Functions IV

I have this data in a table in a SQL Server 2025 database:

EmailAddressID EmailAddress
7              dylan0@ADVENTURE-WORKS.COM
8              Diane1@ADVENTURE-WORKS.COM
If I run this query, which row(s) are returned?
SELECT top 10
 *
 FROM person.EmailAddress
 WHERE REGEXP_LIKE(EmailAddress, '^D', 'i')
 AND BusinessEntityID IN (7,8)

See possible answers