iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Stew Ashton @stewashton.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

I have been a pedestrian for almost 40 years in Paris: never had a car swerve at the last second to avoid hitting me. Yesterday a bike ran a red light, braked screechingly and slalomed between me and the other pedestrian "hiding" behind me. Nice smiling wave of the hand afterwards: nice!

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Stew Ashton @stewashton.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

Why does "Discover"show me almost exactly the same thing as "Following"? Wouldn't it add more value if it didn't show *any* of the content in my normal feed? I don't remember a time I actually "discovered" anything.

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Stew Ashton @stewashton.bsky.social · 15/05/2026

This announcement concerning my favorite application development environment by one of my favorite Oracle people is remarkable for its content and extremely well written! blogs.oracle.com/apex/announc...

blogs.oracle.com

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Stew Ashton @stewashton.bsky.social · 11/05/2026

Boy am I glad I asked that question! Thank you for such a complete, clear and convincing answer.

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Stew Ashton @stewashton.bsky.social · 10/05/2026

Suppose the legacy code is an APEX application. What coding tool can analyze it?

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Stew Ashton @stewashton.bsky.social · 29/03/2026

You know it's been agreed in principle since 2019, right? Individual countries now have to decide between Standard time and Savings time. Everyone has been waiting on everyone else, or else punting due to COVID, war, etc. EU travelers will change time zones more frequently.

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Stew Ashton @stewashton.bsky.social · 03/03/2026

There's a small gotcha (maybe you mentioned it and I missed it?) : json_object(*) doesn't capture invisible columns.

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Stew Ashton @stewashton.bsky.social · 05/02/2026

In the same row, I suppose the start date must be earlier than the end date? I don't see where that is enforced...

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Stew Ashton @stewashton.bsky.social · 02/01/2026

Please don't forget "compliment" and "complement"...

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Stew Ashton @stewashton.bsky.social · 08/12/2025

The only applications I have truly been happy to have written are those where I had strong contacts with the users and they could tell me what they really needed. Feel trumps look!

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Stew Ashton @stewashton.bsky.social · 06/12/2025

It’s the barometric pressure I was told…

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Stew Ashton @stewashton.bsky.social · 27/11/2025

Have you definitively left the conference circuit? It's been a few years for me, but I sometimes wish I could go one more time to see again so many people I have fond memories of. Do you have any future conference plans or possibilities?

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Stew Ashton @stewashton.bsky.social · 26/11/2025

Trying to remember if you ever asked me about anything and trying not to feel bad if you didn't...

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Stew Ashton @stewashton.bsky.social · 23/11/2025

I thought of a requirement to simply reverse the items in a JSON array, and then discovered that REVERSE was added to JSON_TRANSFORM (in 26ai I think). JSON is improving continuosly and more rapidly than any tech I know of in the Oracle database. 👏👏👏

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Stew Ashton @stewashton.bsky.social · 19/11/2025

Did you pass by the Abbey of Fontgombault ? I spent 5 years there in the ‘70s.

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Stew Ashton @stewashton.bsky.social · 18/11/2025

Come on, that's *one-third off* ! (on the 9s 🫠 )

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Stew Ashton @stewashton.bsky.social · 08/11/2025

Yes! The 10x net positive is immediately obvious, sorry if I gave another impression.

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Stew Ashton @stewashton.bsky.social · 08/11/2025

People who know me better would not even let me *pretend* to be a dba 😱 Both things I mentioned are allowed in LiveSQL, so I assumed growing pains, not a conscious decision. I'll save this kind of thing for the forums henceforth.

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Stew Ashton @stewashton.bsky.social · 07/11/2025

Yet more remarkable work from you and your teammates! It would be nice, though, to have info on limitations (even if temporary). For example, is it just me or is there no way to see parameters other than NLS? And of course no access to V$SESSION so no execution plans 🤷‍♂️ Still great work though 👏

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Stew Ashton @stewashton.bsky.social · 14/10/2025

I’m waiting a bit longer to get more protection later on for the flu. As for Covid, it’s too close to my last jab right now. No SpongeBob for me 😢

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Stew Ashton @stewashton.bsky.social · 11/10/2025

From experience, this is a time of intense activity, fatigue and disorganised reflexion. May your parent rest in peace and may you benefit from all possible support and internal strength 🙏🏻

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Stew Ashton @stewashton.bsky.social · 04/10/2025

Where I buy my wine, every bottle of beaujolais is "neuve". If you are buying used beaujolais that's your choice, but it's an unusual one...

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Stew Ashton @stewashton.bsky.social · 03/10/2025

Nouveau means just created or a new replacement. Neuf means unused or at least “like new”.

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Reposted by Stew Ashton

Tim Hall @oraclebase.bsky.social · 24/09/2025

Joel Kallman Day 2025 : Announcement oracle-base.com/blog/2025/09... #JoelKallmanDay @oracleace @OracleAPEX #orclapex @OracleDatabase

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Stew Ashton @stewashton.bsky.social · 08/09/2025

See the banner of my blog : stewashton.wordpress.com On the way back to Sorento from Capri in January. Also living in France but not where you are 🤷‍♂️

stewashton.wirdpress.com

wirdpress.com

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Stew Ashton @stewashton.bsky.social · 01/09/2025

YES to sentences 1 and 3. APEX apps can be "low code", I too did some COVID apps quickly in 2021. Still, many APEX apps are "low code" on the front end but less so on the back end. What's sad is that so many developers want the opposite: "low code" to the DB and code the heck out of everything else.

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Stew Ashton @stewashton.bsky.social · 01/09/2025

APEX may be "low code" for some, but I see it more as a window to the world for database developers and DBAs. Not really the same thing, in fact one might say "low code" denigrates database development. 2/x

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Stew Ashton @stewashton.bsky.social · 01/09/2025

I wrote APEX applications for the Paris medical school. Adding DDL, backend code and PL/SQL or SQL embedded in the apps, I am up to almost 8000 lines of code. When we say "low code" it really means "little or no javascript". My son runs a Web dev company and they won't touch my stuff for money. 1/

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Stew Ashton @stewashton.bsky.social · 31/08/2025

If only bikes were equal users and not privileged users! After 37 years in Paris, the only accident in my family was last year when my daughter had her arm broken by a bike collision. No way to hold the cyclist responsible because rules of the road are not precise.

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Stew Ashton @stewashton.bsky.social · 29/07/2025

I'm not sure how "obvious" it is. Aside from all the physical, logical, legal and contractual separations, the customer can manage the encryption keys so even if the data was surrendered the feds would have to break the encryption. As the article states, EU-based tech may have issues too.

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Stew Ashton @stewashton.bsky.social · 27/07/2025

Some software does work like that; it’s just that everybody badmouths it. Think mainframes or SQL.

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Stew Ashton @stewashton.bsky.social · 12/07/2025

If your without_merge procedure did the UPDATE first, wouldn't it behave like MERGE?

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Stew Ashton @stewashton.bsky.social · 12/07/2025

In the MERGE statement, you want a "restart" when the insert fails? The whole statement would have to be rolled back and retried. With UPDATE restart, rows are selected and locked so the restart will always succeed. In a MERGE restart, success would not be guaranteed; how many restarts do you want?

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Stew Ashton @stewashton.bsky.social · 03/07/2025

Real speed comes from lower latency, not throughput. - Instead of waiting for the printed output to come up from the computer room, thus testing twice a day, I now test continuously as I develop. - With APEX, some design changes can be made *during* customer review meetings, saving weeks.

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Stew Ashton @stewashton.bsky.social · 03/07/2025

In the '80s as a COBOL developer, I once tracked how my time was spent: writing code was 15% ! When management learned that a new code generation tool, which promised to make me 3 times faster, would at best make me 10% faster, they decided not to buy it 🤷‍♂️ 1/

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Stew Ashton @stewashton.bsky.social · 11/06/2025

Sorry, I meant they will go the way of the MODEL clause IF there is no further investment. I fervently wish for further investment in bug fixes, enhancements and documentation that really explains what macros do *and don't do*

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Stew Ashton @stewashton.bsky.social · 10/06/2025

Some great new features get enhanced in later releases, such as JSON. Others, like MATCH_RECOGNIZE and SQL macros, stagnate. SQL macros are so misunderstood and so inadequately documented that they will go the way of the MODEL clause without further investment.

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Stew Ashton @stewashton.bsky.social · 10/06/2025

And it works another way: if you have a WITH clause inside the SQL statement *generated by* the macro, parameter names are not converted to bind variables. They should be called WITHOUT clauses 😡

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Stew Ashton @stewashton.bsky.social · 31/05/2025

There was much good in that approach! but it was so strange to hear a product manager of a SQL database forbid access to the database using SQL 😱

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Stew Ashton @stewashton.bsky.social · 31/05/2025

In the 1980s, as an in-house COBOL developer, I spent 15% of my time actually writing code - and that included some “test while writing”! My biggest productivity gain was much more frequent testing.

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Stew Ashton @stewashton.bsky.social · 31/05/2025

Sessionless transactions, or why the #smartdb refusal to allow clients to COMMIT was nonsense.

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Stew Ashton @stewashton.bsky.social · 22/05/2025

As Connor explained on twitter: works only when OS time zone = dbtimezone and dbtimezone is set to a region.

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Stew Ashton @stewashton.bsky.social · 21/05/2025

As seen on Twitter: systimestamp with TZR (and TZD for daylight savings time). At least it works in the northern hemisphere...

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Stew Ashton @stewashton.bsky.social · 03/05/2025

Given my age, half of these were not albums but events ! When Abbey Road came out, friends and I listened to the flip side with dimmed lights in rapt silence, not speaking at the end - then suddenly "Her Majesty..." !! Then more silence until a friend whispered : "Is it over?"

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Stew Ashton @stewashton.bsky.social · 01/05/2025

I lived 20 miles north of there for five years: Abbaye Notre-Dame de Fontgombault. Church is Romanesque architecture, with the nave rebuilt in the 19th century.

Aerial view of abbey, the Creuse river and a chapel on the other bank

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