Steve Callan

Keeping track of all the different memory areas in Oracle taxes my memory. With Oracle 10g, there can be fewer parameters to keep track of – if you remember which parameters drive or affect other parameters. It is very common to see numerous reporting scripts in a production environment, and chances are that most reports […]

So much has been written about indexes that you practically need an index to keep track of things. Performance is the number one reason why indexes are needed. However, there are situations where indexes are not needed, so how do you know when and where to index? To index or not to index, that is […]

Buy this book Title: Oracle Performance Tuning for 10gR2, Second Edition Author: Gavin Powell ISBN: 978-1-55558-345-3 Publication Date: 15 September 2006 Price: $69.95 Digital Press Oracle Performance Tuning Tools Within Oracle, performance tuning (sometimes referred to as performance and tuning) is by far one of the hardest subject areas to master. There are no shortcuts […]

SQL Manager for Oracle is a “high performance tool for Oracle Database Server administration and development.” Developed by EMS, a company primarily based in Chelyabinsk, Russia with other offices located in Europe and the United States, SQL Manager for Oracle is an affordable compromise between Quest’s TOAD and Oracle’s SQL Developer. If you like the […]

GUI interfaces into Oracle are becoming more and more common, and aside from the heavyweight TOAD, other products include SQL Developer, SQL Manager 2007 and SQL Edge. Inside of Oracle’s (free) SQL Developer 1.1 product is a tutorial, which includes a little bit about a lot of things in Oracle. Code within the tutorial shows […]

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy comes to mind when the subject of database security comes up. How would you know if there was a mole in your database? A mole, in this context, refers to a malicious user who has hacked Oracle objects to cover his tracks, and much like the mole in John le Carre’s […]

Quest Software recently released version 9.0 of Toad for Oracle, its “industry-leading, proven database development and administration tool that increases user productivity and application code quality.” Management solutions offered by Quest include application, database, and Windows management. Under the database management family of solutions, the databases include not only Oracle, but SQL Server, IBM DB2, […]

Sometimes a programming background can make a task harder than it is when you lose sight of what SQL can do independently of PL/SQL. How often do you find yourself using PL/SQL to loop through records where an update for each record depends on some test or condition? That is certainly a valid approach, but […]

One of the more fascinating toys or objects in a grade school science class is magnets. Give an adult two magnets, and the childhood fascination takes over. Invariably, that person will start putting the magnets together in attempts to make them join and repel. Many people have forgotten the exact principle of why two magnets […]

Do you know what your database is doing after dark and on the weekends? What happens between 10 P.M. and 6 A.M. on weekdays, and all weekend? Would you be surprised to know that Oracle, by default, schedules a job to gather optimizer statistics upon creation of a database? The name of the job is […]

Every once in a while, it’s worth noting an exceptional product or publication, and the purpose of this article is to do just that by highlighting Sam Alapati’s Expert Oracle Database 10g Administration (Apress). The amount of material covered in the book is extensive and its database version emphasis is entirely on Oracle 10g. In […]

When creating large tables (large referring to the amount of data), you may want to consider creating them with the nologging option. If the data is of a transient nature, that is, the table is used for staging and other manipulation will transform it into yet another table, do you really need to generate redo […]