April 2020

Isn’t it nice if you can make an impact with your tweets and posts? That’s what I thought today while investigating our online learning registrations.
As you may know, Exasol offers free online learning – recently also combined with free certification. We have also recently changed our course curriculum to better suit customer demands.

Together with very many IT people being in home office, that all leads to quite high numbers in registrations to our online learning platform called Exacademy: 617 in 2020 so far.

That’s many for a still quite small training & certification department like ours, and we couldn’t possibly educate that many customers with instructor-led courses.

Today, I looked at the Exacademy registrations per day:

Many years ago I wrote a note with some comments about conveting the low_value and high_value columns of user_tab_columns to see what values they actually held. At the time the dbms_stats package held a few procedures to convert raw values and it was necessary to wrap these procedures in user-defined functions if you wanted a function to do the job.

In recent versions of Oracle (18c onwards) the package has finally acquired several functions to do a proper job, these are:

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<<<< Why we had to go into lock-down
<< What we could do to help ease social distancing

The UK government is now talking more in it’s daily briefings about what will come “next”, that is after we have seen the number of diagnosed cases & deaths continue to grow, plateau, and then fall. It will plateau & fall, so long as we all keep staying at home and limiting our social interactions. If we do not, we risk the virus spreading out of control again.

Update: I have added an interview with Jonathan Lewis to YouTube too. We talk a bit about the last 10 years and Jonathan describes what he’ll be talking about in his virtual conference talk:
 I will add a few more videos in the coming days. The conference interview playlist URL is here.
You can sign up for the conference here. See you soon!