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In the recent versions of the Oracle database, we’ve had the ability to convert between a System Change Number (SCN) and the approximate time to which that SCN pertains. These functions are unsurprisingly called SCN_TO_TIMESTAMP and TIMESTAMP_TO_SCN. The only potential misnomer here is that even though the functions are called “timestamp” and return a datatype of timestamp, on most platforms you are going to notice that the granularity doesn’t run down into fractions of seconds

SQL> select scn_to_timestamp(14816563713652) from dual;

SCN_TO_TIMESTAMP(14816563713652)
---------------------------------------------------------
08-JUN-19 02.30.59.000000000 AM

This all looks great until you start poking around too far into the past, and you end up in territory like this:

Yeah yeah I know. What kind of dufus cut-pastes a giant image into their blog post. That would be ….. me

But the reality is, there is just soooooo much going on this year on the Sunday before the “official” start of the Kscope conference, it was too hard to condense it into a few sentences. So I just dumped the image from the website, but you can read about it here.

It’s my first Kscope and it will be blast to be running a day of high quality but dirt cheap learning with Maria, Jeff, Steven and Blaine.

OK, let’s be honest right up front. The motivation for this post is solely to be able to roll out a tongue twisting blog post title . But hopefully there’s some value as well in here for you if you’re hitting the error:

ORA-32034: unsupported use of WITH clause

First some background. A cool little enhancement to the WITH clause came along in 12c that allowed PLSQL functions to be defined within the scope of the executing SQL statement. To see the benefit of this, consider the following example that I have a personal affinity with (given my surname).

Let’s say I’ve allowed mixed-case data in a table that holds names.

If you have performed some sort of data cleanup or similar on a table, then the deleted space will be reused by future insertions. But if

• that cleanup was the last task you were performing on that table, ie, you were not expecting a lot of new data to ever come in again, or
• you are performing a lot of full scan queries on that table and you want to make sure they are as efficient as possible

then there may be benefits to performing a shrink on that table to reclaim that space. One of the cool things about the segment advisor is that it will detect if there are some benefits to be gained by shrinking a segment. Here’s an example of that. I create a large table and then delete every 2nd row.

There’s a hesitation to publish this example, because publishing it may be interpreted as an endorsement of this approach and it certainly isn’t. Over the years there have been plenty of articles describing the long term pain that typically comes from generic data models. Here’s a few to whet your appetite.

https://rodgersnotes.wordpress.com/2010/09/21/muck-massively-unified-code-key-generic-three-table-data-model/

This is a followup to yesterdays post on DBMS_JOB and is critical if you’re upgrading to 19c soon. Mike Dietrich wrote a nice piece last week on the “under the covers” migration of the now deprecated DBMS_JOB package to the new Scheduler architecture. You should check it out before reading on here.

Mike’s post concerned mainly what would happen during upgrade (spoiler: the DBMS_JOB jobs become scheduler jobs but you can maintain them using the old API without drama), but immediately Twitter was a buzz with a couple of concerns that I wanted to address:

1) What about new jobs submitted via the old API after the upgrade?

Last week I wrote a note about turning a range-partitioned table into a range/list composite partitioned table using features included in 12.2 of Oracle. But my example was really just an outline of the method and bypassed a number of the little extra problems you’re likely to see in a real-world system, so in this note I’m going to bring in an issue that you might run into – and which I’ve seen appearing a number of times: ORA-14097: column type or size mismatch in ALTER TABLE EXCHANGE PARTITION.

I had a friend point this one out to me recently. They use DBMS_JOB to allow some “fire and forget” style functionality for user, and in their case, the jobs are “best efforts” in that if they fail, it is not a big deal.

So whilst this may sound counter-intuitive, but if you rely on jobs submitted via DBMS_JOB to fail, then please read on.

By default, if a job fails 16 times in a row, it will marked as broken by the the database. Here’s a simple of example that, where the anonymous block will obviously fail because we are dividing by zero each time. I’ll set the job to run every 5 seconds, so that within a couple of minutes we’ll have 16 failures. First I’ll run this on 11.2.0.4

In a perfect world, the optimizer would reach out from the server room, say to us: “Hey, lets grab a coffee and have a chat about that query of yours”. Because ultimately, that is the task we are bestowing on the optimizer – to know what our intent was in terms of running a query in a way that meets the performance needs of our applications. It generally does a pretty good job even without the coffee , but if we can keep that caffeine hit in mind, we can do our bit as SQL developers to give the optimizer as much assistance as we can.

Most developers tools out there have some mechanism to unload a table into a flat file, either as CSV, or Excel, and some even allow you to unload the data as INSERT statements. The latter is pretty cool because it’s a nice way of having a self-contained file that does not need Excel or DataPump or any tool additional to the one you’re probably using to unload the data.

SQLcl and SQL Developer are perhaps the easiest to utilize for such an extract. You simply add the pseudo-hint INSERT to get the output as insert statements. For example: