Dear Patrick, Last year I did a presentation on table functions at KScope. One of the questions I got was: ‘If pipelined table functions provide their results faster, why would you want to use a normal table function?’ I couldn’t come up with the answer then, maybe you can help? Erik van Roon
Read moreWhat’s the difference between SEMI-JOIN and ANTI-JOIN?
Dear Patrick, What is an ANTI-JOIN? And what is the difference between the SEMI-JOIN and the ANTI-JOIN? Lillian Sturdey
Read moreWhat is the difference between NVL and COALESCE?
Dear Patrick, Could you tell me what the difference is between NVL and COALESCE? Kindest regards, Paul McCurdey
Read moreHow do I get my query results paginated?
Dear Patrick, I have got a website with a search form. I want to display a limited number of results to the user and have him/her navigate through different pages. Is this possible using plain SQL? Kindest regards, Mitchell Ian
Read moreVirtual Private Database…
Some time ago I was asked to assist in fixing or at least finding the cause of a performance problem. The application ran fine until the Virtual Private Database (VPD) policy was applied. Oracle claims there should be near zero impact on your application when you implement VPD, then how is this possible?
Read moreDot Qualify Everything?
There is talk about Dot Qualifying Everything in your PL/SQL Code. But what are the pros and cons in this approach?
Read moreUse the database to do the heavy lifting
Suppose you have data in your PL/SQL program stored in a collection. I am using the EMP table (14 records) but you should imagine you have many, many more records in your collection. If you want to order (sort) your collection in a different manner somewhere in your code you can of course write your […]
Read moreHow an Oracle error can send you the wrong way…
At my current assignment I needed to create an update statement to copy data from one table to another. Quite a simple task, I would say, but an error or actually a constraint violation sent me the wrong way in finding my solution.
Read moreUpdate 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 […]
Read moreAutonomous 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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