My data hero, Karen Lopez aka @datachick, is hosting a blog meme for this friday called “#FailFriday: I was young and didn’t know any better.” I have made lots of mistakes, but this one still gets to me more than 10 years later. In 2000 I was working for a small ISV in the library management systems space. We had customers all over the world, including Kuwait. Now most of our customers were librarians, not…
Source control systems are a vital component to any serious software development environment. Tracking and merging changes, branching new versions, or reverting back to a previous incarnation of the code is so much easier when you have your source code versioned in a system like Subversion or CVS. Of course source control isn’t the answer to every question. Sometimes you just want to crack open your editor, splat some code out, and run it. Adding…
If a picture is worth a 1,000 words, how valuable is a 6 minute video? Instead of throwing up a bunch of bullet points and screenshots on the blog, I’m going to let you watch the movie instead. In just a few minutes, learn how to maximize your SQL Developer experience by Navigating the connection tree with just your keyboard Optionally using the Schema Browser instead Jumping to package members in the Procedure Editor Using…
DBMS_OUTPUT is a technology that many Oracle people will just assume you already grok. It is a very basic building block for Oracle PLSQL programs. If you do not understand it, then your first attempts at scripting will likely be very frustrating. So in a nutshell from the Oracle Docs – The DBMS_OUTPUT package enables you to send messages from stored procedures, packages, and triggers. The package is especially useful for displaying PL/SQL debugging information.…
I have a nasty habit of not thinking. I take something for granted or assume something for so long, that it corrupts my original learning or understanding of a concept. And then when someone calls me out, my first reaction is to defend my ‘shortcut’ thinking instead of re-evaluating my set of assumptions. So I’ve been working with data modeling software for almost 15 years and on a regular basis for the last 8 or…
You run a query. You wait patiently for your query and results to return. You want the results in Excel. You ask SQL Developer to ‘Export.’ SQL Developer seems to start over by running the query again. You are no longer waiting patiently. How can you avoid this? The solution is to ensure all of the data has been fetched into the grid before you ask for the Export. What the heck is he talking…
This post is not a ‘How to Version Your Models’ tutorial. We have that in movie form in the Oracle Learning Library (OLL.) There’s a series of several 2-3 minute videos that step you through how to add a model to source control via Subversion, how to make changes, commit said changes, and how someone else can do a Check Out to see and continue your work. I want to concentrate on a small but…
Near the end of a product demonstration with a customer yesterday, someone asked how they could build physical models for each of their different environments using Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler (SQLDev.) Imagine having a application and database setup ‘out of the box’ that adequately described your meta data. But, you might have one implementation of that system for a very very large customer that required database partitioning. The physical aspects of that environment could…
I was asked recently if SQL Developer supported multiple children reports. The answer is ‘yes’, and here is a post showing how to achieve this. First I need to clarify the answer a bit. Reports have a ‘master’ record set. These records can be used to ‘look up’ related records in a ‘detail’ set. This detail set becomes the ‘Child Report.’ A parent can have 1:Many children. However, children cannot be parents (at least not…
Just because you can do something, doesn’t necessarily mean that you should. Case in point, database object names. Yes, you can call a table in Oracle pretty much anything you want, including ‘TABLE.’ Using quotes allows you to do some pretty silly things like use reserved words, mixed case names, and worse. On a call today someone mentioned that they found it odd that you could have a table and an index share a name.…