The Smith family is an Android family. However, we’re not so weird as not to own some Apple products as well. We have a Mac Mini, 1st Gen AppleTV, an iPod, and an iTouch. The iTouch is my wife’s toy. She spent a LOT of time building a playlist that had just what she wanted. She lost that playlist in iTunes though when we ditched our Windows Home Media PC and bought the Mini. She…
I loved my job at Quest Software. I loved the people, the technology, and usually our customers! I got paid to talk and think and write. But that chapter of my life closed last week. There were so many friends and close acquaintances I made over the last decade that it was impossible for me to reach out to all of them. So I hope if you are reading this now, you’ll know how grateful…
Yes, a post about something other than Toad or Oracle! I hope you folks don’t mind, but I need to brag a little bit 🙂 My wife and I welcomed our son to this world on Tuesday night! My wife was extremely brave and did the whole thing without any sort of pain medication. Not that she had much choice – the labor process was so fast that any epidural wouldn’t have had time to…
A Toad user posed this question today: Is there a way to move a (marked) TABLE mytable123 from Tablespace AAA and Schema BBB to another Tablespace USERS and Schema MYSCH? Let’s tackle the 2nd and easiest part first! Moving a table or partition to a new tablespace is pretty straightforward: ALTER TABLE table_name MOVE TABLESPACE tablespace_name; The ALTER TABLE MOVE clause is documented and diagrammed in the Oracle Docs. However, the user ALSO wants to…
I stumbled upon an interesting discussion in the ODTUG group on LinkedIn this weekend. A vendor is doing some research I suppose and wanted to know who enjoyed using what IDE and why. Here’s the original question: In your opinion which is the best IDE for PL/SQL programming and why? e.g. PL/SQL Developer, Toad, Oracle SQL Developer. To participate in the conversation, you’ll need to join the group on LinkedIn. My only input was to…
Toad used to just be a simple freeware software program. Oracle developers could download it and use it in a matter of a few minutes. Today, it’s an entire brand at Quest Software – and does everything from Oracle to Apache Hadoop and surely isn’t limited to just developers anymore. This week my friend and co-worker Steven launched a new contest where Toad users can compete for prizes and money by taking a series of…
In yesterday’s post, I posed a question: What Hint Do You See Over or Misused? Gary (Twitter) responded with With APPEND the rows are written directly to the datafiles and are not logged. If the DBA doesn’t know that unlogged changes are being made then whatever recovery plans they have may be useless when it comes to restoring from a backup. In theory they can set FORCE LOGGING on individual tablespaces so they can’t be…
I’ve overheard the SQL Server folks talking about the challenges of support applications where the NOLOCK (or is it NO_LOCK?) hint has been deployed to make transactions and queries go faster. This probably causes more problems than it solves, and rather trying to rehash what I’ve heard second hand, I suggest you go listen to a MSFT MCM talk about it. Brent Ozar PLF co-founder Kenda Little does an excellent overview on it here. That…
My employer has a freeware utility you can run on your network to find and document instances of SQL Server. One of SQL Server’s primary advantages is also one of its primary disadvantages – you can spin one up in a manner of minutes. To grow deals at a company buying our SQL Server software, we’d offer to document their servers for them. They would claim they only had 10-15 instances of SQL running. We’d…
I’ve been blogging in one form or another for about 5 years. Since I published that first story, I’ve spent more than a little bit of time waiting for comments to start flooding in. And they haven’t really flooded in. If I compare my posts to folks that I follow (Mark Schaefer and Brent Ozar), my 6 comments looks puny to their 337. I have a pretty good idea why a blog post may or…