David Aldridge

Incredible and depressing to see people still getting Oracle internals as wrong as this.

From slashdot I see that there is once again a new language in town. Now then, there are a great many Java developers who have preached the benefits of implementing data logic (what they call business logic) in the application so-as to create RDBMS-independent code, including James Gosling who apparantly leads the pack in “not […]

Following on from a recent adventure with a problem validating DBMS_Scheduler chain rules, I hit another issue today. A rule was defined with a step name that does not exist. This happened because there is an odd limit of chain step name lengths (27 bytes I think), and the name of the step in the […]

Following on from my recent complaint about an all-time low on the Oracle Forums, does anyone else get the impression that the work there is not just answering questions, but seems increasingly to be correcting all of the incorrect answers? Obviously I have an example in mind. Or has it always been thus?

DBMS_Scheduler chains are a joy to use, until they stop being a joy and start being a real pain. I modified the logic of a process, dropping one stored procedure and replacing it with another (instead of writing out a list of files to a control file so that a cron job can scp them […]

A new low on the Oracle Technet forums: a person with DBA access who can’t work out how to increase tablespace size. Hopefully not a production system.  

Well, it’s happened again. Someone has asked how to implement a requirement to generate a gap-free series of numbers and a swarm of nay-sayers have descended on them to say (and here I paraphrase slightly) that this will kill system performance, that’s it’s rarely a valid requirement, that whoever wrote the requirement is an idiot […]

My frenzied hacking through the unexplored territory of Expression Filters was derailed (to mix my metaphors) by an internal error when using the Evaluate() function in a rather complex query that uses an inline view, analytic functions etc.. The following was extracted from the alert log: ORA-07445: exception encountered: core dump [kkqsCkLegalEqvExpCB()+199] [SIGSEGV] [Address not […]

I just browsed my Yahoo spam folder and found an email purporting to be from an ex-work colleague. It was sent to a bunch of other ex-colleagues as well and contained a link to what looked like a site for selling fake ED pills. I replied to the colleague to say, “Hey looks like you’ve […]

I’m part way through an implementation of some ELT code that uses expression filters to parse records and assign zero-to-many “inboxes” to each row, and as is often the case with the less well-explored parts of the system it often feels like I’m hacking through the undergrowth in unknown territory. Under such conditions it’s not […]