Steve Callan

SYSMAN can be compared to a mothman in the movie titled “The Mothman Prophecies” because like the mothman, SYSMAN also seems like it is a dark, mysterious figure lurking in the background. SYSMAN, by way of introduction, is used in Oracle as the schema used for Enterprise Manager or Grid Control or Database Control, the […]

You may think the title of this article refers to “Learning Oracle is as easy as one, two, three.” Actually, the numbers I have in mind are eight, nine and ten (and soon to be eleven). Although Oracle obviously increments the version number from release to release, the versions you work with from job to […]

This article covers the use of setting some extra string values in the registry, how to display what the values are set to, and how to work around the missing tool known as oerr. Configuring SQL*Plus Ever get tired of seeing the same old display in SQL*Plus? One relatively easy fix you can make is […]

As mentioned in a previous article, one of the benefits of being able to examine alternate execution plans derived from an original SQL statement is seeing how Oracle attempts to come up with a different approach. The different approaches can be divided into two areas: the use of hints and the rewriting or restructuring of […]

Everyone has them, even you. Don’t be afraid to admit you have some less than optimal code consuming resources in one or more of your production databases. The tuning advisor’s output of, “Hey DBA, you should do a better job tuning statement with a SQL ID 8ycxdfgyre2” is useful, but what happens when the session […]

Table partitions in Oracle can be extremely useful and becoming proficient in managing them doesn’t take too long to accomplish. The benefits of using partitions (and you should realize them since you must pay extra for this feature) are listed in various places, but the short and sweet of it is shown below: Faster Performance—Lowers […]

How and when do alerts or informational messages about what’s taking place inside your database make their way out to you, the DBA par excellence? There are several ways, some free and some hand-crafted, to expose alerts and messages. Let’s face it, as the Oracle RDBMS engine becomes more and more Skynet-Terminator-Judgement Day-aware, keeping track […]

One of the relatively newer features in Oracle concerns the moving of rows. Why would a row move and who or what controls that movement? Furthermore, by “move,” what exactly does move mean? Does a row move to another table, or is row movement constrained to the row’s container (i.e., a table)? An early use […]

If you write any significant amount of PL/SQL code, your day of salvation has arrived, and the salvation is in the form of Quest Code Tester for Oracle (QCTO). If you work in a structured development environment (even minimally so), the responsibility for performing unit tests falls upon the developer. This tool has the potential […]

When Oracle gave up the ghost on client-server Forms several years ago, one of the built-in’s that went by the wayside was related to feeding parameters into an alert message function. If you handled errors or missing input (as you should), part of the Forms migration process involved changing the built-in from the 6i version […]

Is Oracle always the best tool or application to manipulate data? The answer lies within what you mean by manipulate. Data can be transformed via data manipulation language, and it can also be transformed via string or numerical manipulation. To distinguish between the types of manipulation, let’s say that stored data is in the purview […]

One of Oracle’s most critical and important functions is how it keeps track of events. Even within a single processor, “simple” database system, keeping track of events is just as important as recording and maintaining the proper order of events in a distributed system. Recording the “when” in “when did event X take place?” can […]