ODC Appreciation Day: Cursor Variables
You know everything is Tim Halls fault, right? Including this blog post? Oh yes it is, he came up with the idea of OTN ODC Appreciation Day – a day where Oracle Bloggers all over the world show their appreciation of the Oracle Developer Community by…
Avoiding reinventing the wheel – use MULTISET EXCEPT to get set relative complement
Today in an application I stumbled upon a PL/SQL function created to return those elements of one nested table that did not exist in another nested table. Not a huge function, but still a bit of work and some thinking that had been done some…
Partitioning external tables in 12.2
One of the new features in Oracle 12.2 is partitioning of external tables – a quite useful feature if you have multiple identical files of data, for example from multiple sources. But how can you partition external files, you ask? Well, you don’t partition the…
Collation in 12cR2 – when AA equals Å (or not?)
Collation in Oracle 12cR2 gives some more finegrained possibilities for setting up how your data is to sorted and compared linguistically. A lot we could do before with NLS_SORT and NLS_COMP and the likes, but the collation features can both be simpler to use as…
Results of Oracle Dev Gym SQL Annual Championship for 2016
March 29th 2017 a group of 35 database developers competed in the Oracle Dev Gym SQL Annual Championship for the top ranked players of 2016. They worked their little grey cells hard for 45 minutes over 5 quizzes that I had tried to make extra…
String to DATE conversion and validation in 12.2
A new little feature in Oracle Database 12.2 is, that you can convert strings to dates without worrying about exception handling. (That goes also for converting to numbers or timestamps or other datatypes, but here I’ll concentrate on dates.) It’s just one of a ton…
Temporal validity and open/closed intervals
A short while ago I created a SQL quiz for Oracle Dev Gym (PL/SQL Challenge) demonstrating the use of temporal validity and VERSIONS PERIOD FOR syntax to create a “change report” for changes in item prices. Use of temporal validity makes this easier, shorter and…
Announcing the SQL Annual Championship for 2016
I’ve been making SQL quizzes for years now over at the Oracle Dev Gym (or PL/SQL Challenge as it started out as.) Every year I really have to work my few braincells hard when it is time for the annual championships. The players that have…
A handful of articles
A little while ago a member of the Danish Oracle User Group DOUG asked if anyone had a bit of experience with use of R together with Oracle Database. I remembered an article I wrote for OTech Magazine on forecasting with R and Oracle and thought…
OTN Appreciation Day : GeoJSON and SDO_GEOMETRY marriage in Oracle 12.2
The native JSON functionality in Oracle Database version 12.2 has evolved quite a bit since the JSON functions first appeared in Oracle Database version 12.1.0.2. Just one example is JSON_TABLE can be used as a bridge between the open standard GeoJSON format and the database…