Jared Still

Oracle has released an 'early adopter' version of the the data modeling enhancements to SQL Developer.

See the OTN article for details.

I haven't tried it yet, it will be interesting to see just how well it works.

Undocumented functions in Oracle are always fun, and you just may find something useful.

The caveat of course is that they are undocumented. They can change without notice between releases or patch levels, so building apps that depend on them may be unwise.

They are often quite useful from a DBA perspective when used in SQL scripts.

Here are a few that I've played with. These are all found in Oracle 10.2.0.3

These functions have one thing in common - they have a prefix of SYS_OP_

Some of these appear to be identical to documented functions.

I don't know of any official explanation regarding the purpose of undocumented functions that seem to mimic documented functions. It could be that the source for the documented functions are separate from those that are documented, ensuring that functionality will not change for an undocumented function that is used in the Oracle kernel, even though its documented doppelganger may change in future releases.

In any case, undocumented functions are always interesting, and here are a few to play with.

Just keep in mind that these are undocumented, and as such may change or disappear entirely in future releases

sys_op_vacand - Return the binary AND of two raw values. Results are in hex

SELECT sys_op_vecand(hextoraw('FF'),hextoraw('FE')) from dual;
FE

16:13:12 SQL>SELECT sys_op_vecand(hextoraw('C3'),hextoraw('7E')) from dual;
42

sys_op_vecor - Return the binary OR of two raw values. Results are in hex

16:14:39 SQL>SELECT sys_op_vecor(hextoraw('FF'),hextoraw('FE')) from dual;
FF

sys_op_vecxor - Return the binary XOR of two raw values. Results are in hex

16:14:39 SQL>SELECT sys_op_vecor(hextoraw('FF'),hextoraw('FE')) from dual;
FF

sys_op_vecbit - Return the value of the bit at position N in a raw value

The return value is 0 or 1

This is an interesting function as it can be used to determine the value of bits in a number. If for instance some flags are stored in a bit vector and you need to know the value of the 3 bit, this is an easy way to do it.

I believe the upper limit on the number of bits is 127.

prompt
define decnum=10
prompt &&decnum dec = 1010 bin

16:16:27 SQL>select 'Bit 0 is ' || sys_op_vecbit(SYS_OP_NUMTORAW(&&decnum),0) from dual;
Bit 0 is 0

16:16:27 SQL>select 'Bit 1 is ' || sys_op_vecbit(SYS_OP_NUMTORAW(&&decnum),1) from dual;
Bit 1 is 1

16:16:27 SQL>select 'Bit 2 is ' || sys_op_vecbit(SYS_OP_NUMTORAW(&&decnum),2) from dual;
Bit 2 is 0

16:16:27 SQL>select 'Bit 3 is ' || sys_op_vecbit(SYS_OP_NUMTORAW(&&decnum),3) from dual;
Bit 3 is 1

sys_op_bitvec - This appears to be for used to build a bit vector, but I haven't figured out
how to use it. Please let me know if you do.

sys_op_map_nonnull - This has been thouroughly discussed on Eddie Awad's blog:
sys_op_map_nonnull discussion

sys_op_descend - Returns value as it would be used in a descending index. This is essentially
reverse() function with output in hex.

16:32:41 SQL>select sys_op_descend('ABC') from dual;
BEBDBCFF

sys_op_undescend - The inverse of sys_op_descend. Well, almost

17:12:59 SQL>select sys_op_undescend(sys_op_descend('ABC')) from dual
17:12:59 2 /

414243

Notice the output is in the original order, but in decimal rather than hex.


sys_op_dump - dump the data from an ADT/UDT (Abtract/User Data Type)

16:54:13 SQL>CREATE OR REPLACE TYPE my_adt AS OBJECT (
16:54:13 2 last_name varchar2(30),
16:54:13 3 first_name varchar2(30),
16:54:13 4 id number(6)
16:54:13 5 )
16:54:13 6 /
16:54:13 SQL>
16:54:13 SQL>
16:54:13 SQL>select sys_op_dump(my_adt('still','jared',234987)) from dual;

('still','jared',234987)

I don't use objects in the database, but this would likely be useful for someone that does.

sys_op_guid - this appears to be identical to sys_guid

17:00:50 SQL>select sys_guid(), sys_op_guid() from dual;

52BA7CF06BB488ECE040010A7C646200 52BA7CF06BB588ECE040010A7C646200

Unlike Open World 2007 there were many database oriented sessions at Oracle Open World 2008. There were many good performance oriented sessions, so many in fact that there were several conflicts in the schedule, and I had to pick one in several time slots that had multiple choices.

One of the more interesting sessions (for me anyway) at OOW 2008 was a session not on database performance, but on data modeling.

The SQL Developer team has been hard at working creating a data modeling plugin for SQL Developer.

This appears to be a very full featured tool, and appears to be the answer to the question "What will replace Oracle Designer?"

While Designer is much more than a data modeling tool, that is one of the core features of the tool, and many folks have used it just for its data modeling capabilities.

The new ERD tool is no lightweight, it is quite full featured from a database modeling and design standpoint.

Some of the features included:

• Domains generated from data
• Real logical and physical modeling, not just one model with 2 different names.
• The ability to reverse engineer several schemas at once and have them appear not only as a master model, but each individually as a sub model.
• Sub model views may be created on sets of objects as well.
• The tool can determine all tables related to a table through FKs and create a sub model based on that set.
• Two forms of notation: Barker and IE
• Many options for displaying sub/super types (D2k fans rejoice!)
• Glossary - a predefined set of names. These can be used to enforce naming conventions for entities, tables and relations.
• Schema comparison with DDL change generation

Also of note, in addition to Oracle schemas can be imported from SQL Server, DB2, or any ODBC connected database.

The repository can be either file based, or database based.
There are two versions of the tool, a plugin to SQL Developer, and a stand alone version. The stand alone version will use only the file based repository.

Now for the bad news.

The release date has not been established. The only release information given was 'sometime in the 2009 calendar year'. As the database repository has not yet been designed, the long time to release is understandable.

And finally, licensing has not been established. It might be free, it might not. If not, at least we can hope for reasonably priced. Personally I thinking having a decent data modeling tool that comes free of charge with SQL Developer would contribute to higher quality databases, as more people would use a real database designer rather than a drawing tool.

There was probably more that didn't make it into my notes.
Suffice it to say this is a great development for data modelers and database designers.

Following a few screen shots taken during the presentation.

A number of recent threads in the Oracle-L list have made it pretty clear that Automated Workload Repository (AWR) is a tool that you are expected to use when troubleshooting a database problem.

Never mind the fact that AWR is still a product that is licensed separately from the database, and that a large segment of the Oracle DBA population doesn't seem to realize that. Or that Active Session History (ASH) is part of AWR, and falls under the same license restrictions.

So I conducted a poll regarding the use of AWR. AWR Usage Poll. If you haven't in the AWR Poll, please do so.

While the web site does provide a chart of results, those results don't include the extra comments made by poll takers. You may are may not be able to download all the results, I'm not sure if that is restricted to the poll owner.

Nonetheless, I have compiled the results from a 100 or so respondents in to an Excel workbook, along with a few charts. You may find some of the additional comments of interest as well. AWR Usage Results

Draw your own conclusions regarding these results. I think it interesting to that AWR appears to be quite widely used. Personally I fall into the category of not using it because of the expense. I may work on changing that for a couple of key servers, as AWR is not that expensive, but in a small shop, spending $20k on feature that is not often needed is sometimes a hard sell.

One question I purposely left out was "Do you use AWR even though you have not licensed it"? While it might satisfy the curiosity of some (including me) I didn't want to give any Oracle sales people (or Oracle attorneys for that matter) any reasons to contact me regarding the poll.

In retrospect a good question would have been: "Did you realize AWR/ASH is a separately licensed product?". Too late to add that now, but bringing that up quite often leads to lively discussion.

Another interesting bit was that a few people have extended STATSPACK in some way, even using it on Oracle 10g+. One even mentioned the excellent repository of statspack scripts assembled by Tim Gorman. Tim Gorman's Statspack Scripts