OraNA :: Oracle News Aggregator

The call for papers is open for Tech 13 – the “server-side” conference of the UKOUG.

The conference was getting so big that we’ve split Apps from Server Tech and will be running the two conferences separately this year. The Server Tech conference will be in Manchester from 2nd to (more...)

Dominic Brooks published a note recently about some very nasty SQL – originally thinking that it was displaying a run-time problem due to the extreme number of copies of the lnnvl() function the optimizer had produced. In fact it turned out to be a parse-time problem rather than a run-time problem, (more...)

I’d like to dedicate this posting to fellow Oak Table member Richard Foote, for reasons that the readers we have in common will immediately recognise: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KaOC9danxNo

The singer is Canadian astronaut Commander Chris Hadfield who has been tweeting and posting pictures from space – be careful, you (more...)

Here’s a quick and dirty script to create a procedure (in the SYS schema – so be careful) to check the Hakan Factor for an object. If you’re not familiar with the Hakan Factor, it’s the value that gets set when you use the command “alter table minimize records_per_block;”.

I (more...)

Cost Based Oracle – Fundamentals (November 2005)

But the most interesting function for our purposes is sys_op_countchg(). Judging from its name, this function is probably counting changes, and the first input parameter is the block ID portion (object_id, relative file number, and block number) of the table’s rowid, so the (more...)

Anyone who has used Kevin Closson’s “Silly Little Oracle Benchmark” will want to know about his significantly updated SLOB2.

I’m about to make a serious move into online webinars, and as a warm-up exercise I’ll be doing a couple of one-hour free events on Friday 17th May.

I’ll be talking through a Powerpoint presentation called “Smarter Statistics in 11g” twice, once at 2:00 pm BST, and again at 6:00 (more...)

The problem of slow queries on v$lock just came up again on the OTN database forum, so I thought I’d better push out a post that’s been hanging around on my blog for the last few months. This is actually mentioned in MOS in note 1328789.1: “Query Against (more...)

Materialized views open up all sorts of possibilities for making reporting more efficient – but at the same time they can introduce some “interesting” side effects when you start seeing refreshes taking place. (Possibly one of the most dramatic surprises appeared in the upgrade that switched many refreshes into “atomic” (more...)

I think I may have broken my record with 6 countries in 6 weeks – so I haven’t been very thorough at updating my blog recently. Just time, before I head off to Heathrow once again, to do a quick advert for the next redgate webinar that I’m doing with (more...)