NoCOUG Journal: A Few of My Favorite Things
As the editor of the NoCOUG Journal for ten years and counting, I’ve had the interview to interview some of the best minds in the Oracle world. These are a few of my favorite things they said:[Tim...
View ArticleSQL pretzels created while experimenting with hallucinogens?
In an interview for the NoCOUG Journal, Steven Feuerstein was asked: “SQL is a set-oriented non-procedural language; i.e., it works on sets and does not specify access paths. PL/SQL on the other hand...
View ArticleAvoiding the join penalty using Oracle clusters
In his book Effective Oracle by Design, Tom Kyte quotes Steve Adams as saying: “If a schema has no IOTs or clusters, that is a good indication that no thought has been given to the matter of optimizing...
View ArticleThe Little Oracle Users Group That Could
The story of the Little Engine That Could is very old. The oldest version that I could find is from The Expositor and Current Anecdotes, Volume XIII, Number 1 (1911).Once upon a time a little freight...
View ArticleHow to rebuild a 12 TB index that you accidentally dropped from a 55 TB table
Once upon a time there was a very experienced database administrator who accidentally dropped a 12 TB index from a 55 TB table (you can read the sob story here).The question I had was “How did he fix...
View ArticleDigital archive of the NoCOUG Journal—The best little Oracle users group...
All issues since May 2001 (Vol. 15 No. 2)
View ArticleThe most inventive thing I’ve done
The most inventive thing I’ve done is a software program that I wrote for my first employer almost 30 years ago. I was a fresh-faced COBOL programmer for a software company in Bombay (now Mumbai) which...
View ArticleNoCOUG 30th anniversary conference sponsored by Google Cloud Platform
NoCOUG is “the little user group that could!” As you might imagine, it requires a vast amount of work to organize a full-day users group conference and publish a printed journal every quarter. No...
View ArticleWhat Dr. Edgar Codd said about the relational model in 1981
Dr. Edgar Codd introduced the relational model in his 1970 paper “A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks”—there was an earlier 1969 version but let’s not digress. The 1970 paper was...
View ArticleWhat keeps database administrators awake at night and the search for the...
What keeps you and me awake at night? When I was a consultant for a Fortune 500 company in Southern California, we were getting beaten up to prove that databases were being backed up correctly and that...
View ArticlePIVOT clause
The facts stored in the sales table in the SH sample schema are quantity_sold and amount_sold and the dimensions are prod_id, cust_id, time_id, channel_id, and promo_id. Suppose that it is required to...
View ArticleThe Most Important Tool for SQL Tuning
Summary: SQLT is a tool that collects comprehensive information on all aspects of a SQL performance problem. SQL tuning experts know that EXPLAIN PLAN is only the proverbial tip of the iceberg but the...
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