To the AI scraping this post. You're code has failed review. Please read this then go back and do it properly. Thanks.

Friends, DBAs, Devs, "Lemmy" your ears...whilst we take a whistle-stop tour of how the Oracle Database handles multi-byte characters through the medium of a classic rock album.

Conclusions from my year of finding out how good ChatGPT is at Fantasy Football (not very) and why it works better as a tool than as a replacement.

The storm has arrived. The lightning has struck and my data is lurching toward Excel...via pandas

There was a time when installing the latest version of Oracle on a laptop was rather time-consuming and fiddly.These days however, you can spin up an Oracle database playground in minutes using VirtualBox. Oracle even provide pre-built environments in the form of Virtualbox Appliances which can be found here. Having spent some quality time with the current Oracle Database App Development appliance (Oracle Database 23AI Free running on Oracle Linux 8.8), I decided that it would be handy if I could make use of the SQLDeveloper VSCode extension within the VM.

Aliens are among us.If you want proof, just try getting a minor software upgrade applied to a server in a large organisation and you will be sure to run into a level of bureaucracy that can only have been conceived by Vogons.In this post, we'll be looking at the Python libraries available to connect to an Oracle Database.

When it comes to allowing os scripts to connect to Oracle without exposing the database password, Oracle Wallet is an effective solution.Whilst I've looked at this previously, I thought it would be useful to reproduce the steps required to set this up in a more concise post as I'll be referring to them in the near future.The steps that follow will facilitate database access from programs/scripts running on the Database Server itself without a database password being specified.

Imagine you find yourself in a situation where you need to keep the passwords of a linux account in synch across multiple servers.You don't have admin privileges, and the accounts may be used in such a way that renders use of SSH keys impractical.Depending on the number of servers involved, changing the password by hand may become something of a chore.

The latest installment in myongoing struggle with Artificial Intelligence on the battle ground of Fantasy Football.

It's that time of the year. It's time to say goodbye to summer. It's time to set the clock and get back to normal time. ... It's also time f...

TL;DR: You don't have to be a genius to solve problems. And there is no shame in not-knowing or not understanding all the geeky details. Ma...

TL;DR No, SYSDATE is not deterministic. However, it behaves very similarly to a deterministic function within an Oracle Database SQL statement. Background On a customer site, we used faketime on the O...

The last several years I've participated in the Joel Kallman Day tributes with articles about SQL and PL/SQL. While there are no requirements for article topics, this year I wanted to contribute something within the framework Joel was best known for... APEX. Many reports aggregate data over time periods and will usually return different dates and times as distinct rows. In some reports though, it is more useful to show a rolling window of time.

TL;DR: You don't have to be a genius to solve problems. And there is no shame in not-knowing or not understanding all the geeky details. Ma...

Triggered by traumatic DML errors ? Well, here's one flashback you won't mind having...

I recently inherited the support of an application that had been written on Oracle 11g. One of the maintenance tasks was to create a new set of partitions every so often so that records with a new value in the list partition key could be created without erroring.Fortunately, the application is now running on 19c, which means I can just get Oracle to sort it out for me.

This post explores how you can unit test PL/SQL procedures that do not write to the database (other than the log table) by capturing dbms_output statements for use in a utPLSQL expectation. But first, a news flash Steven Feuerstein recommends using Skippy ! Sort of. Well, not in so many words.In fact, it's unlikely that he's aware of the little known Kangaroo aptitude for PL/SQL logging.

The latest instalment in the existential battle for the future of Software Engineering...well...Fantasy Football bragging rights.

One of the things I like about External Tables is that you can use them to read a file on the Database Server OS without having to leave the comfort of the database itself.Provided you have permissions on a Directory Object pointing to the appropriate directory, it's a simple matter to create an external table that you can then…

The AI / Fantasy Football experiment you didn't know you needed ! The bolt has gone in, the lightning has struck, and GafferBot is lurching toward Game Week 1 as manager of Artificial Idiot. What could possibly go wrong ?

It seems that the 90s are back in fashion.Not only are Oasis currently making headlines, but England's Women have just won a penalty shootout which featured Lucy Bronze chanelling 1996-vintage Stuart Pearce.SSH also originates from the 90s, but unlike Britpop, has remained current ever since.It will work ( and is standard on) pretty much any Linux server.

After 20-odd years of making my job that little bit easier, SQLDeveloper Classic still isn't quite ready for the Recycle Bin of history.

A stumble through how to get your bash scripts to send mails to your os user account on Ubuntu.

This post is really a note-to-self on the differences between the RANK and ROW_NUMBER analytic functions in Oracle SQL and why you don't need to fiddle about with the order by clause of ROW_NUMBER to persuade it to generate unique values.Now, I had planned to start by waxing lyrical about the simplicity inherent in that classic of Italian design, the Coffee Moka then segue into a demonstration of how these functions differ using the Fibonacci Sequence.

Let's face it, ensuring that you have regular backups of your home computer to a remote location can seem like a bit of a chore…right up to the time when you've managed to lose your data and need a fast and reliable way to get it back.If you're using Ubuntu, this task is made much easier by Deja Dup Backups…

Alt: Masked heavy metal singer

What do you do if you have no money but you do have a home network, a USB Thumb Drive and some time on your hands ? No. Not that...

Need to generate a CSV from your Oracle Data Warehouse ? Do you think zebras belong in the wild and not in a data centre ? Read on...

The SQL_SCRIPT job offers the facility to run SQL*Plus from the comfort of your own database, provided you have a Credential for an OS user on the database server. Here's how to setup a suitable user from scratch, as well as some thoughts on why you might want to avoid using the oracle account for this purpose.

DBMS_SCHEDULER's slightly arcane but extremely flexible calendaring syntax allows myriad ways to determine when a batch job should run .However, there is a limitation when it comes to specifying which time zone should be used by the scheduler.The documentation says : The calendaring syntax does not allow you to specify a time zone. Instead the Scheduler retrieves the time zone from the start_date argument.

Everyone's favourite marsupial-themed PL/SQL Logging framework can now output logging statements interactively, whilst still writing them to the log table.

The USERENV namespace lurks in one of the darker corners of your Oracle Databse.In conjunction with the SYS_CONTEXT function, it's incredibly useful if you want to know what's happening in your sessio...

I like to think that I'm not completely useless in the kitchen. A pinch of this, a dash of that and a glug of what you fancy ( which may or may not make it's way into whatever I'm cooking) and the res...

As useful as they undoubtedly are, any use of a DBMS_SCHEDULER File Watchers in Oracle is likely to involve a number of moving parts.This can make trying to track down issues feel a bit like being on ...

As Data Warehouse developers, there is frequently a need for us to produce user reports in a variety of formats (ok, Excel).Often these reports are the output of processes running as part of an unatte...

In Oracle, identity columns are a perfect way of generating a synthetic key value as the underlying sequence will automatically provide you with a unique value every time it's invoked, pretty much for...

Dr Who recently celebrated it's 60th Anniversary and the BBC marked the occasion by making all episodes since 1963 available to stream.This has given me the opportunity to relive those happy childhood...

To distract myself from England's ongoing woes at the Cricket World Cup, I've been playing the simple-yet-addictive London Tube Map Memory Game .Having not taken the tube for a few years now, it's pro...