Steve Callan

A fairly common question on Oracle Q&A forums is one where the original poster (OP) asks how to identify schemas within a database, usually accompanied by some qualifying reason such as “my management needs to know how many schemas we have.” Many times, a mostly correct, but really quite misleading answer is given telling the […]

Upgrades and migrations are fairly common events in the lifecycle of an Oracle database. Today’s 11g database may have started off under version 7.3.4, and one of the intermediate steps in this path probably included a change from 32-bit to 64-bit Oracle. If following one of several options as far as the upgrade method is […]

In the same way that friendly fire really isn’t, it is not uncommon to encounter “Complete Guides” on MetaLink which aren’t. You would think that upon exercising due diligence in researching and following the steps therein of a process or procedure, especially after reading the official documentation, README text files, notes on My Oracle Support […]

How many times have you heard the phrase, “Same thing, but different?” In Oracle, there are many concepts where this applies. Physical files, for example, can be the same, but how they are used is different. RMAN operations can delete, but the type of backup item deleted can be different. Replaying database operations can be […]

Today’s final Jeopardy category is language features. The answer is: glyphs, diacritics, canonical equivalence, base letters, contracting characters and expanding ones. Time’s up. If you wagered everything on, “What are factors Oracle considers when sorting strings?” then you win. And these are just some of the factors. When performing a sort using one language (i.e., […]

In the last article, we covered some of the possible implementations Oracle uses to perform searches. Closely related to searching is sorting, and that raises the question of how Oracle performs this key piece of functionality. If you’ve done it once, you’ve done it a million times, and that is to include an ORDER BY […]

When it comes to searching, how often do you find yourself using the LIKE (including NOT LIKE) operator in SQL statements? Other well-known tests include equality and comparison (greater or less than), and this includes not only strings, but also numbers. Conceptually, the equality/comparison tests are pretty simple, and indexes can add a tremendous boost […]

What if you have two data sources, such as flat files or table data, and have to merge or join them together? If there is a common attribute, such as customer ID, the solution should be pretty obvious: join the related attribute, and in this example, the customer ID suffices. What if the sources have […]

Oracle 10g’s Automatic Workload Repository, as part of Oracle’s Intelligence Infrastructure, works hand in hand with the Automatic Database Diagnostic Monitor to help you, the DBA, diagnose and remedy performance problems. Under the Intelligent Infrastructure, we see the following components: Automatic Workload Repository Automatic Maintenance Tasks Server-Generated Alerts Advisor Framework The AWR is most closely […]

    Optimizer hints are an interesting feature of Oracle. On one hand, the documentation goes out of its way to tell you to use them sparingly, but on the other hand, you can choose from more than 60 hints in 10g and more than 70 in 11g (64 and 71, to be precise). That’s […]

Anyone who’s been involved with Oracle over the past decade has seen a huge improvement in the ability to capture performance data. We can explain, trace, debug, advise, and profile. Most of the attention still seems to be on SQL, and probably rightly so because that is the end purpose of a database, right? Select, […]

There are several ways you can get your hands on E-Business Suite. The first, probably under lots of supervision, is while at work. Your workplace may have several instances in place, ranging from test, dev, QA, a mirror of production, and of course, production. The installed database is likely to be created from a fresh […]