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…
Roleplaying Dimensions and SSAS Multidimensional
Yes, I can hear you, SSAS Multidimensional is so old and unsexy. Still, a lot of the data warehouse projects I work on still use this techonology. So what is a roleplaying dimension? It’s quite simply a dimension, that plays different roles in regard to…
Object type “nested” implicit grants
A colleague got an “ORA-01720: grant option does not exist” error and couldn’t understand why. So together we researched a bit and learned some things about how object type grants across schemas works – including a small surprise that was the reason for our puzzlement….
Hunting date errors
Just recently, I had to find out, why a dataload, that had been working smoothlessly in the past, suddenly prodced an error. The data is coming from an ORACLE database, and imported into MS SQL Server with an OPENQUERY statement. The error message read: “Error…
SQL Server Graph Database and Performance
When Microsoft announced, that their upcoming release would contain an implementation of Graph Database objects, I was intrigued. There are already a couple of good posts around, that explain how to use the feature, e.g. how to create a table structure and query the information,…