June 2014

In order to help me stick to my commitment to blog more regularly, I've joined the blogging community at Toad World. I'll link to most posts from there as I make them (I love knocking down two targets with one arrow) and keep on track for at least one post a week moving forward. Yea!

This is the index to a series of articles I’ve been writing for redgate, published on their AllThingsOracle site, about generating and reading execution plans. I’ve completed a few articles that haven’t yet been published, but I’ll add their URLs when they’re available.

I don’t really know how many parts it’s going to end up as – there’s an awful lot that that you could say about reading execution plans, even when you’re trying to cover just the basics; every time I’ve started writing an episode in the series it’s turned into two episodes.  I’ve delivered 5 parts to redgate so far; the active URLs below are the ones that they are currently online.

It’s fairly well known that in Oracle B-tree indexes on heap tables don’t hold entries where all the indexed columns are all null, but that bitmap indexes will hold such entries and execution plans can for predicates like “column is null” can use bitmap indexes. Here’s a little test case to demonstrate the point (I ran this last on 12.1.0.1):

The Day 1 evening festivities consisted of lots of food, followed by a group doing a display of traditional dances. Once they had finished it was up to me to teach the Bulgarians how their local dances should really be done. Needless to say I smashed it!

Day 2 started with a swim and breakfast. When I say swim, I really mean gentle floating, wishing I was still in bed.

The first session I went to was Joel Goodman‘s session on “RAC Global Resource Management”. Lot’s of good stuff! Joel is like a walking Oracle encyclopedia.