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.…
It helps to know the developers. They can tell you things that are not documented in the help or release notes. They mostly don’t hide things on purpose, mostly. They often build things into the application to aid themselves, but usually it’s for the end user’s benefit. @krisrice sent me over a few nuggets to share with you folks. These are truly ‘tricks.’ Cool things that you would not know about unless someone showed them…
One of the coolest parts of my job is that I actually get to use the software that I help manage. The end-user perspective is hard to imagine sometimes, but when you ARE the end-user things become clear as day. This morning I spent quite a bit of time in DataPump and the SQL Developer Cart. I needed to copy a schema from databaseA to databaseB. Everything’s relative, and this goes double when it comes…
I’m not saying there’s anything wrong per se with SQL Developer’s tree control for navigating your connection objects. As a matter of fact there are a few things to really admire about the tree implementation. Just in case you have NO IDEA what I’m talking about, here is the tree in all its glory. Scrolling can get tedious on large databases. So here’s a few tips for those that are keyboard savvy: Navigate the tree…
Updated: July 16, 2020 There are many data types to choose from when defining your table columns. The eighty percent rule tells us we can probably get away with a smaller subset of data types, 8 times out of 10. Here is what the ‘TYPE’ control looks like in the modeler when defining a column: I was curious to see what data types were used most in my 11.2.0.3 database, so I fired off a…