Analytic Functions

May 23, 2013 The following question recently came through an ERP mailing list (significantly rephrased): I would like to use the Microsoft Query tool in Microsoft Excel to extract records from the ERP database.  I would like the list of parent records to be retrieved into Excel when all of the specified child records belong to […]

April 25, 2013 Roughly 12 years ago I was attempting to analyze customer order changes that were received through electronic document interchange (EDI), specifically X12 830 documents that show order forecasted demand for specific part numbers.  At the time, the EDI data was partially transformed and inserted into an Oracle 8.0.5 database, while that data […]

September 3, 2012 (Back to the Previous Post in the Series) In the previous article in this series, a question was posed regarding how many SQL statements would be required to generate the following report, which displays in Microsoft Excel: A significant number of items regarding the report require explanation: Employee IDs and employee names [...]

November 16, 2011 I noticed an interesting request on the comp.databases.oracle.misc usenet group, and I thought that I would make an attempt at solving the request.  The original poster (OP) stated that he had a table with data similar to the following: TX   ID   DEPT   LOCATION   LOAD 1    99    A        NY       12 2    99    A        [...]

October 21, 2011 (Forward to the Next Post in the Series) Sometimes it is interesting to take a step back from some of the more difficult to construct SQL statements, and just put together something simple.  The following request recently arrived through an ERP mailing list: “I want to find the last ship date for all the [...]

July 1, 1011 A recent thread in the comp.databases.oracle.server Usenet group (actually two threads) asked an interesting question.  Assume that you had a detail table that contained several attributes for each of the unique key values.  How would one go about finding all of the unique key values that share the same set of attributes?  [...]

May 26, 2011 In a previous article I showed a simple method to convert values found in multiple table rows into a comma delimited list.  The method works very well, until the situation in which the approach is to be used becomes a bit more complex. Assume for a moment that the following table structure [...]

December 18, 2010 (Modified December 19, 2010) (Back to the Previous Post in the Series) (Forward to the Next Post in the Series) The previous blog article in this series resulted in several interesting comments with very useful advice.  But was the performance issue just an isolated case, one that only happens in one database, with one Oracle Database release [...]