Category Archives: Oracle

Oracle related postings

Update multiple columns

This is something I knew somewhere in the back of my head, but had forgotten about until now. When you want to update multiple columns in a single SQL statement based on a sub query you can of course duplicate this query for every column you want to update. But this violates the SPOD (Single […]

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Autonomous transaction to the rescue

Today, at my current project, I came across an issue where autonomous transactions came in handy. The situation: I need to create a query to perform an export. A couple of the fields to be selected come from a global temporary table, nothing fancy so far except this global temporary table is filled by a […]

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Numeric sorting an alphanumeric column

The other day a customer came up to me and said: I have this column that holds numeric data, usually. But when I sort it it gets all messed up, because is sorts it alphanumerically. That is 10 is listed before 2 etc. My first suggestion was: well, sort by TO_NUMBER(column) then. Well, he replied, […]

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Is it unique?

The other day one of my colleagues said something like: ‘Hey, this is strange. Oracle is not working correctly’. My first thought is then: ‘well, you probably didn’t specify you requirements correctly’. What was the problem? A unique index was created on a table to implement a business rule which can be rephrased into ‘One-Manager-Per-Department’. […]

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Some things to share…

I have been awfully quiet on my blog lately. I think that is because I have been busy with other things, like my garden and stuff like that. There are some ‘techie’ thing I have done in the meantime, though, I have submitted a couple of abstracts for Tech14. Hope at least one of them […]

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PL/SQL vs SQL

There is a ‘rule’, I think it was created by Tom Kyte, stating: If you can do it in SQL, do it in SQL. I came across some code the other day that makes perfect sense to do then you are running an Oracle 10g (or earlier) instance. I rewrote the code to use only […]

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Typical

After a presentation by Lucas Jellema I decided to try something with types in Oracle. One of the issues posed in this presentation was that the type cannot include self-reference. Neither direct nor indirect.

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KScope14

This year, from June 22 – June 26, the best convention in the world, ODTUG‘s KScope14 will be held in Seattle, Washington. I am already looking forward to meeting some ‘old’ friends again, creating new friends and seeing some of the best content by presenters from all over the world. Some of the presentations I […]

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