Do a quick Google search and you’ll find plenty of blog posts about why GUIDs are superior to integers for a unique identifier, and of course, an equal number of posts about why integers are superior to GUIDs. In the Oracle world, most people have been using sequence numbers since they were pretty much the only option available to us in earlier versions. But developers coming from other platforms often prefer GUIDs simply due to their familiarity with them.

Whitelist preview of Performance Insights has just started on RDS MySQL and it gave me a chance to visually compare load profiles of MySQL 5.6 and 5.7.

I first tried to use sysbench and ran into some curious anomolies.

The test I ran was

sysbench \
           --test=oltp \
           --oltp-table-size=10000000 \
           --oltp-test-mode=complex \
           --num-threads=10 \
           --max-time=0 \
           --max-requests=0 \
           --mysql-host=$host \
           --mysql-user=$user \
           --mysql-password=$password \
           --mysql-db=sysbench run

Load chart on MySQL 5.6 and 5.7

MySQL 5.6

I first ran on MySQL 5.6 and in Performance Insights the load looked like:

I’m typing this at about 38,000 feet in the air. I’m travelling home from the Oracle Latin America tour – it was a great event, but I’ll save the details for another blog post. In reality, I should be sleeping, but as luck would have it one of the lights on our plane is malfunctioning. So whilst the rest of the plane is sleeping happily in restful darkness, my row and the rows around it are bathed in blazing artificial light

Ah…the joys of travel. Anyway, I digress.

I recently participated in the Oracle Developer Community Yatra tour throughout India. It is a hectic event with 7 cities covered in a mere 9 days, so you can imagine how frantic the pace was. A typical day would be:

• 7am – breakfast
• 8am – check out of hotel and leave for the venue
• 9am – speak all day, host Q&A
• 6pm – leave straight from venue to the airport
• 8pm – dinner at airport, and fly to next city
• 1am – get to next hotel, grab some sleep before doing it all again in 6 hours time

Yet as a speaker in this event, it never felt that the logistics of the event were out of control.  This is mainly due to the incredible work of the people in the AIOUG (All India Oracle User Group) coordinated by Sai Penumuru. The smoothness of the organization prompted me to blog about how user groups could follow the AIOUG lead in terms of running successful events.

I was helping out a client a while back with an issue where a panicked email came into my inbox along the lines of “SELECT IS BROKEN IN ORACLE!!!”, which seemed perhaps a little extreme . So I pursued it further asking for some concrete details, and I must concede it had me a little bamboozled for a while. I’ve simplified the example to keep it easy to digest, but the premise is the same.

My colleague had a table with a couple of VARCHAR2 columns:

As you can tell, I have no idea on a name for what I am about to describe. So let me start from the beginning, and set the scene for an idea I have to utilize a cool new 18c feature.

Often in a transactional-style system the busiest table (let us call it SALES for the sake of this discussion) is also

• the biggest table, after all, it has all of our sales in it,
• the most demanded for table, in that, almost every query in our application wants to access it in some way shape or form.

This is in effect the database version of the Pareto Principle. Everyone wants a slice of that SALES “pie”, and the piece of that pie that is in most demand is typically the most recent data. Your application may have pages that will be showing:

Well, finally it’s here! 18c for on-premise installation so the world can all get stuck into the cool new features of the latest release on their own laptops   At least that is what I’ll be doing!

Naturally as soon as I heard the news, I downloaded the software and got ready to set aside the day for installation and creation of an 18c database. But I didn’t need that long – I didn’t need that long at all. Just a few clicks and a few commands and there it was – my 18c database up and running.

Check out how easy it is with my three videos.

Software Installation

Just a quick heads up with something I see from time to time in Chrome (but not in Firefox or any other browser).

Occasionally when doing a search, the results are not limited as per my criteria.  For example, if I am searching for information about Spatial in the Licensing Guide:

then when I click the Search button, the results might come back with a far broader search range:

Just a quick discovery that came across the AskTOM “desk” recently. We have an outstanding bug in some instances of fast refresh materialized views when the definition of the materialized view references a standard view.

Here’s a simple demo of the issue – I’ll use a simplified version of the EMP and DEPT tables, linked by a foreign key in the usual way:

One cool technique that the optimizer can employ is the BITMAP CONVERSION TO ROWIDS method to take advantage of B-tree indexes in a means that we would normally associate with a bitmap index. This can be particularly useful with multiple predicates on individually indexed columns because it lets us establish the rows of interest before having to visit the heap blocks.  Here’s an example of that in action, even when the indexes in question are Text indexes.

Enterprise Edition plan