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Everything or Nothing in SQL
May 23, 2013 The following question recently came through an ERP mailing list (significantly rephrased): I would like to use the Microsoft Query tool in Microsoft Excel to extract records from the ERP database. I would like the list of parent records to be retrieved into Excel when all of the specified child records belong to […]
Grouping Data Sets by Week Number of the Month
May 1, 2013 I saw a decent SQL brain teaser this morning in the comp.databases.oracle.server Usenet group. The OP in the message thread is attempting to summarize data in one of his tables, with the summarizations broken down by month and then the week within that month. Increasing the challenge, the OP required that the dates defining […]
Analysis Challenges
April 25, 2013 Roughly 12 years ago I was attempting to analyze customer order changes that were received through electronic document interchange (EDI), specifically X12 830 documents that show order forecasted demand for specific part numbers. At the time, the EDI data was partially transformed and inserted into an Oracle 8.0.5 database, while that data […]
Unexpected Timer Resolution, Unexpected Parked CPUs, Unexpected Power Consumption
April 19, 2013 (Modified May 11, 2013) This blog article is not purely Oracle Database specific, yet it may have some relevance to companies that run Oracle Database on the Windows Server platform (for those DBAs lucky/unlucky enough to run Oracle Database on the Windows Server platform, you may find this article interesting). I am […]
Value of Improving One’s Knowledge
March 24, 2013 As I type this blog article I am in the middle of reading a second book on the topic of Windows Server 2008 R2. I bought the books several months ago, possibly even a year or two ago, and just had not found the time to invest in reading yet another dry […]
Bitten by a Virtual Column, _OPTIMIZER_IGNORE_HINTS Doesn’t Ignore Hints?
March 9, 2013 I had a couple of spare minutes today, so I tried a couple of experiments with Oracle Database 11.2.0.2 just to see if I could produce some unexpected results. First, I will create a simple database table with two indexes: CREATE TABLE T1 ( N1 NUMBER, V1 VARCHAR2(20), D1 […]
What does it Mean when a Select Statement in Oracle is using 100% CPU?
February 14, 2013 A couple of days ago I noticed that an interesting set of search keywords were used to access this blog. The search keywords: What does it mean when a select statement in Oracle is using 100% cpu I had two thoughts when I first saw that set of search keywords: Well Done! […]
Feeling ANSI About Oracle Join Syntax? 2
February 7, 2013 (Back to the Previous Post in the Series) As I have mentioned a couple of times previously, I am not much of a fan of ANSI style joins – I prefer using the classical Oracle join syntax when possible. I try to keep up with an ERP mailing list, and try to assist with […]
Send an Email From Excel, Visual Basic 6, or a Windows Command Line Using Oracle’s UTL_MAIL Package
November 30, 2012 (Back to the Previous Post in the Series) Today is this blog’s third anniversary, so to celebrate, I thought that I would share a simple code example. As many regular readers of this blog probably know, Oracle Database 10.1 introduced the UTL_MAIL package, which allowed programs accessing Oracle Database to easily send […]
Connecting to an Oracle Database with Visual Basic 6.0 on Windows 8 64 Bit
November 25, 2012 (Modified December 7, 2012) Compatibility problems? Visual Basic 6.0, released in 1998, is not officially compatible with Windows 8 Pro 64 bit… or Windows 7, or Windows Vista. But I still like the language a lot for its simplicity, rapid development, and significant pre-existing code base within my company. Of course, Oracle […]
