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May 7, 2012 (Back to the Previous Post in the Series) Today’s blog article has an unusual tie in with Oracle. The last couple of weeks I have been experimenting with video technology.  Computer related video capabilities have certainly changed over the years.  In 1996 I purchased a Sony Handicam and a Video Snappy.  The [...]

A little something to revive flagging spirits at the end of the day:

Red-tailed Hawk nest

Great Blue Heron nest / alternative view

It’s wonderful to “be” this close to the nests and see such detail (ymmv, depending on time of day).

If anyone is expecting email from me any time in the near future, you may have to hold your breath.

In a staggering feat of customer relations BT (British Telecomms), or Yahoo acting on their behalf, has managed to introduce random blocks to any email I send out. At present I have something like a 30% chance of email being blocked by their smtp servers with reports like the following:

An unknown error has occurred. Subject ‘Re: {deleted}‘, Account: ‘{deleted}‘, Server: ‘mail.btinternet.com’, Protocol: SMTP, Server Response: ’554 Transaction failed : Cannot send message due to possible abuse; please visit http://postmaster.yahoo.com/abuse_smtp.html for more information’, Port: {deleted}, Secure(SSL): {deleted}, Server Error: 554, Error Number: 0x800CCC6F

Just in on the Oracle-L list server – if you want to hear from the author of SQLTXPLAIN (MOS 215187.1) how to install and use the main features, Carlos Sierra is presenting a one hour seminar on May 15th. In his words:

If you or someone you know may want to attend, please register following link below. Capacity for this 1hr SQLTXPLAIN Webinar on May 15 is limited, so please register early so you can reserve one connection. Feel free to share this link with your customer(s).

https://oracleaw.webex.com/oracleaw/onstage/g.php?d=590415036&t=a

Event Information: Using SQLTXPLAIN to diagnose SQL statements performing poorly

The event is scheduled for 8:00 am in San Francisco, which is 4:00 pm BST (GMT+1) if you’re in the UK.

Just in from Peter Robson on the Oracle-L listserver:

Chris Date on Database Design and Relational Theory, Edinburgh, June 7/8 2012

I’m using the ‘good offices’ (thank you Mark) of the list to inform you all that Chris Date is making a rare appearance in the UK (he was last here two years ago) for a 2 day seminar on the above topic. It is planned that all delegates will receive a complimentary copy of his very latest book on the subject, just being published by O’Reilly. Two years ago people attended his seminar on SQL from as far away as Benelux and Spain, so lets agree that this posting could be of interest to anyone in Western Europe!

More details are here:  http://www.justsql.co.uk/chris_date/cjd_edin_june_2012.htm

I did an update of the my Fedora 16 machines this morning and I’ve got GNOME 3 back in full effect, rather than the fallback option. It seems the updated Nouveau Driver was included in the update, so I don’t have to wait for Fedora 17 to get me back on GNOME shell, and I won’t be requiring software rendering of GNOME shell when I do upgrade. Happy days…

Cheers

Tim…

This is just a temporary note to point you to a poll set up by Timur Akhmadeev to get an idea of how people are handling stats collection in newer versions of Oracle.

This past week, Cary Millsap posted one of the ways he’s teaching his children to understand concepts and to prove to him that they understand the methods for solving problems by presenting them with a classic puzzle.

The puzzle talks about the length of a piece of string wrapped around a circle (in this case, the whole Earth), and how much longer it would need to be if it was raised 4 more inches off the ground? As his kids worked through the problem, Cary provided us with the neat answer in which you didn’t need to know the circumference of the Earth, or any other circle for that matter — the increase in length is a simple function applied to the additional height above the ground.

Oracle 10.2.0.1 (I know, version out-of-date) on Windows 2003:

The other day one of my stored procedures error’ed out with:

ORA-01801: date format is too long for internal buffer

somewhere near a line in which I was doing the following assignment:

d := to_char(c.date_field,'YYYYMMDD');

Where d is of type varchar2, and c is a row from a cursor for loop, and date_field is a date column in the cursor

selecting the date field from the database didn’t look odd:

select date_field from table_name t where t.id = ;

’04-AUG-17′

However, selecting to_char did yield something odd:

select to_char(date_field,'YYYYMMDD') from table_name t where t.id = ;

’00000000′

Odd, no 04, no AUG and no 17.

At this point I could tell something was up with the data in the field, so I resorted to dump’ing it’s contents:

The other day I was attempting to debug a SQL statement which was doing a REGEXP_REPLACE and the comments said something like “remove all zero’s from the string”.

However, in looking at the code, it looked like it was removing all capital O’s from the string instead of 0′s — see even here within WordPress I can’t tell the difference between an O (the letter) and a 0 (the number).

At first I thought it a coding mistake until I tried to type both of them into a window within SQL Developer — nope, they looked the same. Must be a font issue.

Fonts can be changed in SQL Developer under the Preferences / Code Editor / Fonts selection — you may want to limit choices to fixed-width fonts by checking “Display Only Fixed-Width Fonts”. The default on my system was DialogInput — which appears to have the O/0 problem. I ended up choosing Consolas 12pt and exiting back out to the editor.

Only to see a horribly grainy looking font.  Yuck!