April 2017

As part of another project, where I need to support the Edition Based Redefinition feature, I needed to add support inside the promise class for the dbms_scheduler job_class parameter. The job_class parameter can point to a service, and a service can be assigned a default edition to run in. This allows me to execute code inside a promise, and automatically support any edition that has been created in the database, as well as assigned to a service.

When talking tools to help with SQL Tuning the question on SQLTXPLAIN vs SQLd360 comes out very often. “What’s the difference?”, “Which one should I use?”, “Why another tool?” are probably the top ones

• CBO
• SQL Tuning
• SQLd360
• SQLT

Today, while describing the usefulness of DBMS_ASSERT package to prevent SQL and PL/SQL Injection attacks someone asked me how to pass a string with single quotes successfully to this package.

First, if you don't know what DBMS_Assert is or why you should know about it, check out the presentation on this blogpost. In summary, the ENQUOTE_LITERAL() function strips off all the single quotes from around the string and replace with just a pair of single quotes, which makes it a clean, uninjected string. Here is an example of a string called Joe Pizza.

SQL> select dbms_assert.enquote_literal('Joe Pizza')  from dual;

DBMS_ASSERT.ENQUOTE_LITERAL('JOEPIZZA')

There seem to be a lot of interest (at least on Twitter and at OUG conferences) about Oracle recommendation to install a couple patches on top of 12.1.0.2, in order to emulate 12.2 behavior when it comes to SQL Plan Directives (details here, need MOS account).
One of the things SQL Plan Directives do is trigger column groups (CG) creation.