General Administration

August 30, 2010 As I am sure that you are aware, there are compatibility problems between Oracle Databases and Oracle Clients that are from different releases.  The Oracle Database 11.1 documentation states the following: “Upgrade Clients to the Current Release You can upgrade any or all of your Oracle8i, Oracle9i, or Oracle Database 10g clients [...]

August 14, 2010 My replacement laptop arrived this week to fix an occasional problem that I had with the old laptop: I thought that I would perform a test on the new laptop, so I thought that I would try a slightly modified version of the script that appeared in the “Expert Oracle Practices” book in the Buffer [...]

August 6, 2010 An ERP mailing list email asked if there was a way to determine which Oracle clients had not been upgraded to the Oracle 11.2.0.1 client - I also recently encountered a request to determine similar information about the Oracle client versions of potential sessions, so I thought it might be fun to develop a [...]

August 2, 2010 Last Friday I received my copy of the new book “Expert Oracle Database Architecture: Oracle Database 9i, 10g, and 11g Programming Techniques and Solutions“.  There is an interesting demonstration of SQL injection on pages 17 through 21 of the book, where a clever use of SQL injection permits a significant amount of information [...]

July 23, 2010 While reading the OTN forums a couple of days ago I found a simple request regarding the meaning of the SQL_TYPE_MISMATCH column in V$SQL_SHARED_CURSOR.  The Oracle Database 8i documentation and the Oracle Database 11.2 documentation both state the following very limited description for that column in V$SQL_SHARED_CURSOR: “The SQL type does not [...]

July 19, 2010 (Modified July 26, 2010) In an earlier blog article I showed that adding an index hint is sufficient to allow Oracle to use a normal (non-function based) index on a column when that column is included in the WHERE clause inside a function.  Another blog article listed reasons why the Oracle optimizer may [...]

July 13, 2010 (Modified July 14, 2010, July 22, 2010) I try to follow the discussions on the Oracle-L mailing list, even though I do not participate in that mailing list.  Just a couple of days ago I saw an interesting discussion thread in the group that forced me to think for a moment… maybe [...]

July 7, 2010 I have not had much of a need to send emails on a scheduled basis using Oracle Database.  Roughly nine years ago I created a program that directly interacts with an SMTP server to send HTML formatted emails on a schedule.  If I recall correctly, we have over 200 such emails based on [...]

July 5, 2010 It might appear that my last two, three, four or maybe even five Oracle Database book reviews were a bit harsh.  In some of the blog articles leading up to the last two book reviews I pulled out a sentence or two from the book and offered readers of this blog an opportunity to comment [...]

June 24, 2010 I am in the process of reading the June 2010 printing (fourth printing) of the “Oracle Performance Firefighting” book.  To say that I have stumbled upon one or two gems in the book is probably an understatement.  The book is filled with interesting statements – this time I found a couple of interesting paragraphs [...]