The “best” tool
I had a question the other day that constantly pops up on my feed whether it’s on social media or people asking Q&A at a conference etc. And that...
2026-07-15 (first published: 2026-07-13)
80 reads
Tip: Expanding a SQL statement
In all recent versions of the database you can call DBMS_UTILITY.EXPAND_SQL_TEXT to get the “true” version of a SQL that the database will run. It takes your SQL as...
2026-07-03 (first published: 2026-07-02)
78 reads
The Goldilocks problem – Materialized Views
I’m sure you’ve all heard the tale of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, but I’d like to apply the Goldilocks principle to a database object-namely, a materialized view. You...
2026-06-30
63 reads
Blue Sky Programming – The Optimism Trap
Many years ago, before I joined Oracle, I was working on a major modernisation project. We were replacing an existing non-Oracle system with an entirely new Oracle database application...
2026-06-27 (first published: 2026-06-26)
77 reads
Keeping your tech ego in check
In my usual twitter doom scrolling, I came across this post the other day Now it’s pretty obvious to me that this is one of the standard “engagement bait”...
2026-06-07
56 reads
First dabblings with APEXlang
Obviously there are plenty of folks in the Oracle APEX team with waaaayy more experience in APEXlang than I have, so this isn’t an in-depth expose into all of...
2026-05-27
48 reads
Vanishing objects; hello ORA-08103
In the previous post we saw that even though we had done an exchange partition mid-flights through a query execution, the query kept on running to successful completion. The...
2026-05-13
99 reads
A very robust query
Some times I’m blown away by how the database will try very hard to save you from yourself :-). Consider the following example: I’ve got a table called T....
2026-05-12
67 reads
The secret APEX performance hack
Here’s a little secret APEX performance hack if you are running on the Autonomous database. As background, I’m running an Autonomous database with six CPUs and a terabyte of...
2026-05-08
56 reads
Signal to noise ratio – the AWR trap
Its never been easier to analyze an AWR report. With our new oracle skills repository, your favourite agent can do a respectable job giving some insights into the AWR...
2026-05-06
50 reads
Blogs
10 Things I Hate About Fabric Deployment Pipelines— And Some Alternatives
Fabric deployment pipelines look like they solve CI/CD for Fabric content, especially for people...
The Book of Redgate: Evidence
By Steve Jones
We aren’t the only company that does this, but Redgate Software does try to...
When Your Microsoft Fabric Capacity Runs Out: Optimize, Scale Up, Scale Out, or Isolate?
By James Serra
Microsoft Fabric makes it wonderfully easy to put many analytics workloads on one platform....
Forums
Logic question in a WHERE clause using IIF?
Thanks in advance, I'm trying to avoid using IIF for performance reasons, but the...
Execute as failure
Security has long been a problem for me. Every time I think I understand...
BIT_COUNT() V
Comments posted to this topic are about the item BIT_COUNT() V
Question of the Day
BIT_COUNT() V
What does this return on SQL Server 2025?
select bit_count(null)See possible answers