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)
107 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)
93 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
84 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)
89 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
72 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
56 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
143 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
118 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
76 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
69 reads
Blogs
Keeping Redshift System Table History Past 7 Days with S3 Tables
Redshift keeps its SYS_* monitoring views for seven days in cluster, which is fine...
Updating the Data API Builder
By Steve Jones
I was updating my session for the Data API Builder (DAB) recently, mostly to...
T-SQL Tuesday #202 Invitation: That One SQL Server Outage You’ll Never Forget
I am excited to host T-SQL Tuesday for the first time. I want to...
Forums
Practical Ways to Approach SQL Server Problems and Case Studies
Working with SQL Server can involve more than just writing queries. Understanding database design,...
Measuring Productivity
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Measuring Productivity
Importing Excel files into SQL Server using DuckDB and Python
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Importing Excel files into SQL...
Question of the Day
Tracking All the Queries
I have 3 instances of a brand new long running query that are executing on a SQL Server 2025 instance. Query store is enabled. One of the queries is killed by the administrator, one is cancelled by the user. The other runs to completion. How many rows are in Query Store for this query?
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