VBS

November 2, 2016 In late September 2016 I gave a somewhat long presentation that lasted roughly four and a half hours.  Surprisingly, the only glitch that I encountered during the live demonstration portion of the presentation was due to an apparent bug, at least in Excel 2010, that causes long object names (specifically checkbox names on […]

June 24, 2016 I have been working with an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system platform for a bit over 16 years.  Through various methods of observation, including the use of 10046 extended Oracle SQL traces, Process Monitor traces, Wireshark traces, and just general observation of the various components of the ERP system, I noticed a […]

November 30, 2012 (Back to the Previous Post in the Series) Today is this blog’s third anniversary, so to celebrate, I thought that I would share a simple code example.  As many regular readers of this blog probably know, Oracle Database 10.1 introduced the UTL_MAIL package, which allowed programs accessing Oracle Database to easily send […]

November 25, 2012 (Modified December 7, 2012) Compatibility problems?  Visual Basic 6.0, released in 1998, is not officially compatible with Windows 8 Pro 64 bit… or Windows 7, or Windows Vista.  But I still like the language a lot for its simplicity, rapid development, and significant pre-existing code base within my company.  Of course, Oracle […]

January 20, 2012 A request for assistance came in from an ERP mailing list.  The original poster (OP) is running an unspecified version of Oracle Database 9i, and is in need of a solution to generate new part numbers with prefixed characters that describe the type of part, followed by a sequential number that is [...]

July 21, 2011 Have you ever wondered about the V$OPEN_CURSOR view, the SESSION_CACHED_CURSORS parameter, and the two session-level statistics “session cursor cache count” and “session cursor cache hits”?  I did after reading from two different sources that stated essentially that a larger shared pool would be required when the value for the SESSION_CACHED_CURSORS parameter is [...]

March 30, 2011 If you take a look at the Oracle Database Performance Tuning Guide, you will find the following SQL statement to help identify the session waiting in an enqueue and the session that currently prevents that session from continuing: SELECT DECODE(request,0,'Holder: ','Waiter: ') ||           sid sess, id1, id2, lmode, request, type    [...]

January 24, 2011 It happened again, another blog article that forced me to stop, think, and … hey, why did Oracle Database 11.2.0.2 do something different than Oracle Database 10.2.0.5?  What is different, even when the OPTIMIZER_FEATURES_ENABLE parameter is set to 10.2.0.4 (or 10.2.0.5)?  The number of consistent gets for a SQL statement is significantly different - we did [...]

October 30, 2010 Older versions of the ERP package that I work with stored lengthy text data in LONG RAW columns.  Newer versions of the ERP package store lengthy text data in BLOB columns.  When tables containing those columns are queried using the Microsoft Query tool, which allows the data stored in tables to be retrieved into [...]