Steve Callan

Not all errors in Oracle are fatal, and that statement applies to data manipulation language statements as well. Even though an error in and of itself may be fatal, when handled properly it becomes benign. The question is this: how do you make an otherwise fatal error benign or harmless? There are at least three […]

Finally, after countless hours of scouring the Internet, you have come across a job posting for a junior Oracle DBA position, which includes the words you have been waiting for all this time: 0-2 years experience (zero being the operative word or number here). Armed with your fresh, just out of school knowledge of Oracle […]

The title says it all, except these are some of my personal favorites. Use a standard setup in shell scripts Why re-invent the wheel? Any script that relies on access to SQL*Plus or SQL*LDR (on the same machine) can be easily initialized. Take the following code snippet and put it into its own file: #! […]

The time has come to make account “numbers” in your customer database real numbers or real alphanumeric strings across the board. Why would you ever choose to do something like that, especially if you are dealing with millions of records? One reason is that you may be forced into doing so because your company was […]

If a co-worker were to ask you to name as many Oracle table types as you can, what would be in your list? More than likely you would start off with relational, object, "normal," cluster, index-organized, nested, partitioned, and so on. "No, not those table types," your friend says, "I mean these types: stage, history, […]

No, this article is not about the math behind Oracle’s pricing scheme. The question posed in the title has to do with the calculator math, which comes with Oracle. Over the past 30 years, calculators have evolved from expensive novelties to inexpensive, largely ignored dust collectors. What calculators routinely do today dwarfs by many orders […]

SQL*Plus offers several handy features you can use to control your SQL*Plus session. The SHOW command works the same in both UNIX and Windows environments, and SHOW ALL can be used to display the settings or values of nearly 70 items. Instead of just showing these settings, SQL*Plus offers a way to quickly set and […]

Probably the number one database administration headache in pre-9i versions of Oracle concerns the “ORA-01555 snapshot too old” error. Let’s move forward to Oracle 10g and configure a database to use automatic undo management (AUM). Your initialization file (pfile or spfile) has the appropriate settings to use AUM. Life is good until one day (perhaps […]

The newer version of Oracle Enterprise Manager, aka Database Control, offers an easy way to learn RMAN, Oracle’s server managed physical backup utility. The basic or Oracle recommended version of an RMAN backup is useful, but it is the custom backup which exposes more of RMAN’s capabilities. The combination of RMAN, use of a flash […]

One feature often times overlooked by developers is PL/SQL’s ability to allow overloading. As in other programming languages, overloading occurs when a program uses the same name for a function or procedure, and the way the program differentiates which version being called is based on the types and numbers of parameters being passed in. By […]

You may think you know everything there is to know about the Scott schema, but part of its overall usefulness lies in how versatile it is with respect to its ability to illustrate many of Oracle’s and SQL’s features. The illustrative point examined in this article concerns trees and hierarchies. An excellent book by Joe […]

The new server using Red Hat is up and running, Oracle RDBMS software has been installed, a new instance is running with all of the new features you can possibly imagine (at long last, run_fast=true is available), and “all” that’s left to do is migrate the source database (or schema) to the new/target database. It […]