My Kscope19
A little later than many post-Kscope19 blog posts (because the wife and I just had a nice relaxing vacation week right after I returned from Kscope ;-), but better late than never. A few thoughts, but for once not a lot of writing – most…
Coming up: My 10th Kscope!
In June 2010 I attended ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2010 in Washington D.C. I got this T-shirt: But I didn’t get just a T-shirt, I got an awesome experience. And most importantly I got to be part of a fabulous community of friends all over the globe…
Results of the Dev Gym SQL Championship for 2018
All the after-play checking of the results of Oracle SQL Annual Championship for 2018 is done. The awards have now been processed, and it is with great pleasure I can publish the results here to serve as an inspiration for you to trying out your…
ORA-22905 when calling ODCI Table functions from PL/SQL
Back in 2015 I experimented using ODCITable* functions to dynamically parse delimited text (see blog post here.) Now blog reader Daniel Cabanillas points out, that it raises an error when used in PL/SQL. Silly me – I had only tried it out in SQL (my…
Participant list for Oracle Dev Gym SQL Championship 2018
2018 is over. Throughout the year people have participated in the “Select for SQL” Tournament on Oracle Dev Gym. It’s time for the Top 50 to try their skills in the Annual SQL Championship! Everybody who tried the quizzes have hopefully had fun as well…
ODC Appreciation Day : The ever growing toolbox
It’s ODC Appreciation Day 😃 ! The day initiated by Tim Hall where Oracle bloggers worldwide make a blog post to show appreciation of the Oracle Developer Community. This year I won’t dive into a specific technical thing in SQL or PL/SQL, but rather I’m appreciating…
Corrupting characters – How to get invalid byte values stored in strings
Having worked with Database Migration Assistant for Unicode (DMU) to convert some databases from single-byte charactersets to AL32UTF8, I had problems with DMU reporting a lot of characters with invalid byte values (in this case binary values that did not exist in WE8ISO8859P15.) So how…
Announcing the results of the Oracle Dev Gym SQL Championship for 2017
A huge round of applause to the top players in the championship: 1st Place: mentzel.iudith of Israel 2nd Place: Pavel Zeman of Czech Republic 3rd Place: Andrey Zaytsev of Russia Especially noteworthy is the accomplishment of Iudith Mentzel, who also won the DB Design Championship…
SQL Magic Squares – or Why the Optimizer does not like Magic
A long-time player at the Oracle Dev Gym tried his hand at generating Magic Squares using SQL. When he attempted to tune his statement a bit, he was surprised that it didn’t go a little faster as expected, rather it went from 2 minutes to…
Announcing participants in Oracle Dev Gym SQL Championship 2017
Another year, another Oracle Dev Gym SQL Annual Championship. Woohoo! Players have exercised their mental muscles with the SQL puzzles throughout 2017. Congratulations to everybody digging in all year, trying to figure out the pretzelbenders of me and other quiz authors. And hopefully you’ve learned…