Database Administration & Monitoring

By Franck Pachot

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I have written a few blog posts about some NoSQL (vs. RDBMS) myths (“joins dont scale”, “agility: adding attributes” and “simpler API to bound resources”). And I’ll continue on other points that are claimed by some NoSQL vendors and are, in my opinion, misleading by lack of knowledge and facts about RDBMS databases. But here I’m sharing an opposite opinion: SQL being user-friendly is now a myth.

By Franck Pachot

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Announced by Larry Ellison last week, here it is: the Autonomous Data Guard. You can try it, unfortunately not on the Free Tier.
First you create an Autonomous Database (ATP or ADW) and then you enable Autonomous Data Guard.

By Franck Pachot

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J’essaie quelque chose de nouveau. Je publie beaucoup en anglais (blog, articles, présentations) mais cette fois quelque chose de 100% francophone. En sortant du confinement, on reprend les transports (train, voiture,…) et c’est l’occasion de se détendre en musique mais aussi de s’informer avec des podcasts. J’ai l’impression que c’est un format qui a de l’avenir: moins contraignant que regarder une video ou ou lire un article ou une newsletter. Alors je teste une plateforme 100% gratuite: Anchor (c’est un peu le ‘Medium’ du Podcast).

By Franck Pachot

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By Franck Pachot

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Oracle Enterprise Linux (OEL) is a Linux distribution which is binary compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). However, unlike RHEL, OEL is open source, free to download, free to use, free to distribute, free to update and gets free bug fixes. And there are more frequent updates in OEL than in CentOS, the free base of RHEL. You can pay a subscription for additional support and features (like Ksplice or Dtrace) in OEL. It can run the same kernel as RHEL but also provides, still for free, the ‘unbreakable kernel’ (UEK) which is still compatible with RHEL but enhanced with optimizations, recommended especially when running Oracle products.

By Franck Pachot

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I had a few questions about the Oracle ACE program recently and I thought about putting some answers there. Of course, that’s only my point of view, there’s an official web page: https://www.oracle.com/technetwork/community/oracle-ace/index.html

The program is flexible and open, with a large diversity of people, technologies, contributions, levels,… Then rather than explaining what it is, which would be limiting, I’ll rather tell you… what it is not.

By Franck Pachot

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We have an incredible number of possibilities with Oracle. Yes, an index can be global (indexing many partitions without having to be partitioned itself on the same key) and partial (skipping some of the table partitions where we don’t need indexing). In the previous post of this series of small examples on recent features I partitioned a table, with covid-19 cases per day and per country, partitioned on range of date by interval. The index on the country code (GEOID) was not very efficient for data ingested per day, because countries are scattered through all the table. And then I have reorganized the old partitions to cluster them on countries.

My global index on country code is defined as:

By Franck Pachot

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In this series of small examples on recent features, I have imported in a previous post, the statistics of covid-19 per day and per countries. This is typical of data that comes as a time-series ordered by date, because this is how it is generated day after day, but where you probably want to query from another dimension, like per countries.

By Franck Pachot

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This post is part of a series of small examples of recent features. I’m running this in the Oracle 20c preview in the Oracle Cloud. I’ll show a very basic example of “Row Pattern Recognition” (the MATCH_RECOGNIZE clause in a SELECT which is documented as “row pattern matching in native SQL” feature by Oracle”). You may be afraid of those names. Of course, because SQL is a declarative language there is a small learning curve to get beyond this abstraction. Understanding procedurally how it works may help. But when you understand the declarative nature it is really powerful. This post is there to start simple on a simple table with time series where I just want to detect peaks (the points where the value goes up and then down).

By Franck Pachot

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After reading the https://cloudwars.co/oracle/oracle-deal-8×8-larry-ellison-picks-amazons-pocket-again/ paper, I am writing some thoughts about how a database can be serverless and elastic. Of course, a database needs a server to process its data. Serverless doesn’t mean that there are no servers.