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I wrote a post a while back call “The Death of UTL_FILE”, and probably because of it’s click-bait title I got lots of feedback, so I’m back to flog that horse . Seriously though, I stand behind my assertion in that post, that the majority of usages of UTL_FILE I’ve seen my career are mimicking the spooling behaviour of a SQL*Plus script. And as that post pointed out, you can now achieve that functionality directly with the scheduler.

That is well and good for writing files from the database, and I added:

Advance warning: This post is a just another normal Friday morning rant. If you’re not interested in my pontificating, move along…nothing else to see here

Sometimes you can’t make use of a facility that you normally would, and you have to substitute in something else. For example, if I would normally take the train to the basketball game, but today it’s not running due to track maintenance, then I’ll take the bus. I have no problem with that, because there’s a reason that I can’t take the train that day.

What does get my goat is on a day when the train is running, you come to me and say:

One of the very cool things about DBMS_JOB is that a job does not “exist” as such until the session that submitted the job is commits the transaction. (This in my opinion is a critical feature that is missing from the DBMS_SCHEDULER package which, other than this omission, is superior to DBMS_JOB in every way).

Because DBMS_JOB is transactional, we can use it to make “non-transactional” things appear transactional. For example, if part of the workflow for hiring someone is to send an email to the Human Resources department, we can do the email via job submission so that an email is not sent if the employee record is not created successfully or is rolled back manually, eg:

It’s always so good to see a user community growing. Last week was the first ever technical conference for obug (or is it OBUG) – the Oracle Benelux User Group. It was an excellent couple of days, packed with a fantastic range of presenting talent and an enthusiastic audience. I was honoured to be asked to be one of the presenters.

I thought about writing a post on juggling work commitments, travel with my job and time at home with children and family. And then I came across this post from community friend Robin Moffatt.

https://rmoff.net/2019/02/08/travelling-for-work-with-kids-at-home/

It’s a simple requirement. We want to transform this:

SQL> select deptno, ename
  2  from   emp
  3  order by 1,2;

    DEPTNO ENAME
---------- ----------
        10 CLARK
        10 KING
        10 MILLER
        20 ADAMS
        20 FORD
        20 JONES
        20 SCOTT
        20 SMITH
        30 ALLEN
        30 BLAKE
        30 JAMES
        30 MARTIN
        30 TURNER
        30 WARD

into this:

I’ve written in the past about oddities with descending indexes ( here, here, and here, for example) but I’ve just come across a case where I may have to introduce a descending index that really shouldn’t need to exist. As so often happens it’s at the boundary where two Oracle features collide. I have a table that handles data for a large number of customers, who record a reasonable number of transactions per year, and I have a query that displays the most recent transactions for a customer.

My last post was about patching my home databases from 18.3 to 18.5 on Windows, and how I encountered a patch conflict when I tried to patch the JVM. I thought I’d give a little bit of info for anyone who runs into patch conflicts from time to time. It can be stressful especially if unforeseen, or you are in the middle of limited time outage window etc.

So before you jump into applying a patch, a nice little tool you might like to explore is the patch conflict checker on My Oracle Support. You can get it via:

https://support.oracle.com/epmos/faces/PatchConflictCheck

It is straightforward to use, you simply fill in the platform and your current patch inventory details, and then list out the patches you intend to apply.

Contrary to wild rumours on the internet, it was not a fear of the number 13 that led to a numbering jump from version 12c to version 18c. The jump was part of our new, more flexible release mechanism so that we can get fixes and enhancements to customers on a more frequent and predictable schedule. In a nutshell, smaller bundles of features and fixes, more frequently.

I won’t dwell on that – if you’re unfamiliar with the new strategy, the best place to start is  MOS Note 2285040.1, which has a description and a FAQ. But in terms of (as the saying goes) eating one’s own dog food, I downloaded the 18.5 release update which came out this week, and applied it to my 18.3 installation and I thought I’d share the process.

Just a short post today on something that came in as a question for the upcoming Office Hours session which I thought could be covered quickly in a blog post without needing a lot of additional discussion for which Office Hours is more suited to.

The question was:

“When I gather statistics using DBMS_STATS, can I just create a statistic table and pass that as a parameter to get the results of the gather”

And the answer simply is “No” but let me clear up the confusion.