SQL

The # character is for commenting in SQL*Plus, right?

The character # has been mostly used for comments in many languages, such as shell scripts and python. Interestingly # is legal syntax in SQL scripting as well; but is it considered a comment? The answer is no; it's not. The purpose of # in SQL scripts is very different. and you should be very careful using it.

Entering # tells SQL*Plus to temporarily pauses what has been entered before and execute everything after that #sign, as if in a different session. Here is a usecase. Suppose you are writing this query:

SQL> select *
  2  from v$sesstat
  3  where

There is a good chance that (based on this blog post title) that you’re expecting a post on SQL, and that’s understandable. But I’ll come clean nice and early – that was just to lure you in

The post is about SUM and DISTINCT, but not in the technical sense.

Geeks around the world will be celebrating Pi day, a shameless excuse to put the month before the day like the Americans do so we can talk Mathematics on “3.14” day

So what better way to show how cool SQL can be with some expressions to approach Pi with continuous series

All we really need to know by way of background is the CONNECT BY LEVEL trick to generate arbirtary sequences of row, eg

SQL> select level from dual connect by level <= 5;

     LEVEL
----------
         1
         2
         3
         4
         5

Now we can get some approximations to Pi using the some of the standard SQL functions SQRT and POWER

When dealing with a RANGE partitioned table, the defined partitions dictate all of the data that can be placed into the table. For example, if I have a SALES table as per below

This week I was in an excellent presentation by Kerry Osborne about Outlines, SQL profiles, SQL patches and SQL Baselines. I’ve used three of those features in anger but when I looked at SQL Patches I just could not understand why you would use them – they looked to me like a very limited version of SQL Profiles.

I’ve just added a picture to the right side of this site. It is for a book about SQL and PL/SQL. If you look at the image of the front cover, at the bottom is a list of authors and, near the end, is my name. It’s all finished and at the printers, but it is not out yet – It should be published in the next few weeks.

The British part of me wants to mumble and say “oh, yes, hmmm, I did contribute to a book… but I think you should concentrate on the chapters by the other chaps, they are proper experts, very clever gentleman and lady… I was just involved in a couple of lesser chapters…”

The part of me that spent weeks and months of late nights and long weekends writing it wants to scream “Look! LOOK! I damn well got it done! And it was way more painful than any of my author friends told me it would be as, despite their best efforts, I did not get How Hard Writing A Book Is!
I BLED FOR THAT BOOK!”

Physical Data Independence means that you and I shouldn’t have to worry about implementation details such as the storage structures used to store data.(read more)

Database management systems such as Oracle are the interface between users and databases. Database management systems differ in the range of features they provide, but all of them offer certain core features such as transaction management, data integrity, and security. And, of course, they offer the ability to create databases and to define their structure, as well as to store, retrieve, update, and delete the data in the databases.(read more)

A series of posts in response to Tim Ford’s #EntryLevel Challenge.

Part I: Getting started with Oracle Database

Part II: What is a Database?

Part III: What is a Relational Database?