plsql

I wrote a post a while back call “The Death of UTL_FILE”, and probably because of it’s click-bait title I got lots of feedback, so I’m back to flog that horse . Seriously though, I stand behind my assertion in that post, that the majority of usages of UTL_FILE I’ve seen my career are mimicking the spooling behaviour of a SQL*Plus script. And as that post pointed out, you can now achieve that functionality directly with the scheduler.

That is well and good for writing files from the database, and I added:

Yes, it sounds like a lamentation of the aging process, and from my own experience, it is definitely true that the wheels started falling off for my knees, back and plenty of other body parts once I turned 30. But that is perhaps a legacy of too much alcohol, not eating well in my youth and failing to stretch rather than any particular chronological milestone .

But this post is not about that. This one is about the magical 30 character limit on identifiers that we finally lifted in version 12c. For static SQL, this is obviously a no impact change – you either define your tables and columns with longer names or you don’t, and the static SQL you write reflects that position.

We had an AskTOM question recently about how to calculate the IRR, ie, the Internal Rate of Return. To be honest, I had not really heard of the function, but readers were quick to point out to me that it was a commonly used function in the most “popular” database on earth, namely Microsoft Excel

A while back in an Office Hours session, I touched on a relatively new privilege in the database called INHERIT PRIVILEGES which is designed to avoid erroneous privilege escalation via AUTHID CURRENT_USER routines.

You can watch the full video below

I was asked some time ago what the Oracle database event ‘TCP socket (KGAS)’ means. This blogpost is a deep dive into what this event times in Oracle database 12.1.0.2.180717.

This event is not normally seen, only when TCP connections are initiated from the database using packages like UTL_TCP, UTL_SMTP and the one used in this article, UTL_HTTP.

A very basic explanation is this event times the time that a database foreground session spends on TCP connection management and communicating over TCP, excluding client and database link (sqlnet) networking. If you trace the system calls, you see that mostly that is working with a (network) socket. Part of the code in the oracle database that is managing that, sits in the kernel code layer kgas, kernel generic (of which I am quite sure, and then my guess:) asynchronous services, which explains the naming of the event.

A new blog post on the Databases at CERN blog to think about:

Where to run business logic: in the database or another tier?

What language for coding business logic: SQL, PL/SQL, JavaScript?

Guess how to reduce licensing costs? https://db-blog.web.cern.ch/blog/franck-pachot/2018-10-odc-appreciation-day-reduce-cpu-usage-running-business-logic-oracle

ODC Appreciation Day : Reduce CPU usage by running the business logic in the Oracle Database