SQL

Solving performance issues is not magic. Oh, I’m not saying it is always easy and I am not saying that you do not need both a lot of knowledge and also creativity. But it is not a dark art, at least not on Oracle systems where we have a wealth of tools and instrumentation to help us. But it can feel like that, especially when you lack experience of systematically solving performance issues.

Jonathan Lewis just published a blog post about NVL and COALESCE and the optimizer costings for each.

There is also perhaps a significant difference between NVL and COALESCE in that the former seems to have an in-built optimization for handling bind variables and nulls. 

Consider an application where users optionally pass in search criteria and you have to query a table based on that criteria.  You have three natural choices here to implement that:

WHERE column = :search_criteria or :search_criteria is null

or

WHERE column = nvl(:search_criteria ,column)

or

WHERE column = coalesce(:search_criteria,column)

Functionally they are identical*, but the implementation detail shows a nice little optimizer trick that only works with NVL.

ODC Appreciation Day is an idea that Tim Hall (aka Oracle-Base) came up with, to show out appreciation for the Oracle Technology Network (OTN)/Oracle Developer Community.

In SQL, ‘upsert’ is a conditional insert or update: if the row is there, you update it, but if it is not there, you insert it. In Oracle, you should use a MERGE statement for that. You are clearly doing it wrong if you code something like:

begin
insert...
exception
when dup_val_on_index then update...
end;


But it seems that there are many applications with this bad design, and Oracle has introduced an underscore parameter for them: “_suppress_identifiers_on_dupkey”. You won’t be surprised that this one is part of the long list of parameters required for SAP.

Let’s investigate this.

Insert – Exception – Update

So the idea is to try first an insert, rely on the unique constraint (primary key) to get an exception if the row exists, and in this case update the existing row. There are several flows with that.

Jump over to the Oracle Code home page and you will see the “mission statement” of the Oracle Code conference series:

“Learn from technical experts in sessions for developing software in Java, Node.js, and other languages and frameworks.”

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.