The new release update experience
For about the last … hmmm…maybe decade or more, when you downloaded a release update from MOS for your database, the patch would consist of a single folder which...
2026-05-04
17 reads
My APEX installer / patcher
Hopefully you have just seen that APEX patchset bundle 16 has just been released for 24.2. Of particular note is that a well-publicised Chrome change to deprecate the unload...
2026-05-01
28 reads
The unhealthy obsession with ROLLBACK
So I jumped onto an LLM and asked it to give me some PL/SQL to handle a 3-step series of DML statements and out popped the following code: That...
2026-04-30
11 reads
Unleashing Skills onto my database
You may have already seen that thanks to Kris Rice, we now have a baseline set of Oracle skills available for your favourite AI tools. Check out the skills...
2026-04-28
8 reads
SQL skills just got MORE important
There seems to be a school of thought in the tech community that a robust knowledge SQL is now optional. After all, with modern AI tools able to generate...
2026-04-22
12 reads
GROUP BY ALL – Is it ALL you ever need?
You have probably seen a couple of cool GROUP BY features that came with Oracle Database 26ai. You can check out the short video below but since you’re on...
2026-04-17
26 reads
Voxxed Days Zurich
That was my first experience at a Voxxed Days event. Obviously I like Oracle-focussed events, but that can give you a blinkered view of the world. There’s a lot...
2026-04-07
11 reads
Thank you after 21 years
Throughout my long history of working with the Oracle Database, there are some things that often just take for granted, on the assumption that they have always been present....
2026-03-12
12 reads
Bind Variables – Worse than you were told
Many of you probably know Martin Bach. He’s a colleague here at Oracle although we’ve both been good mates in the Oracle community long before either of us joined...
2026-03-09
16 reads
Where is my TNSPING?
I’m a big fan of the “instantclient” solution to Oracle connectivity. No more calls to “runInstaller”, no registry files on Windows, it is just download-unzip-go. That makes installation a...
2026-03-05
19 reads
Blogs
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....
Accessing the Data API Builder MCP Server from VS Code
By Steve Jones
I recently started playing with the MCP Server for SQL Server, which is a...
From DBA or Data Engineer to AI Engineer: A Realistic Path
If you spend your days tuning queries, managing pipelines, or keeping a production database...
Forums
Two queries work until compared with EXCEPT statement
I've got multiple databases on 2 SQL 2019 CU32 servers , all using the...
STRING_AGG DISTINCT
Has anyone written a wrapper function (or similar) around STRING_AGG() to allow the retrieval...
In-place OS upgrade or migration to new OS?
Putting this here as we're currently on SQL Server 2019 installed on Windows Server...
Question of the Day
BIT_COUNT() V
What does this return on SQL Server 2025?
select bit_count(null)See possible answers