Or are they just sociable? Social Media has taken the world by storm, primarily through Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, Foursquare, LinkedIn, etc. And now everyone expects to have access to a network of "friends" wherever they are, through whichever device they are using. This raises an interesting question for those us in the technology world and vendors providing tools in which technologists "live": Does social media/networking...

Here we go again! After having written and blogged about this topic a fair bit in the past, having too many managers is a problem I still continue to see all too often. A good example is a site I worked with recently; it had 20+ managers just to run the workflow background processes.

Putting aside the need to address the excessive workflow background processes (which is another problem in its own right) there are major...

We software developers are a very privileged bunch. We don’t have to work in dangerous environments, and our jobs aren’t physically taxing (though carpal tunnel syndrome is always a threat). We are paid to think about things, and then to write down our thoughts in the form of code. This code is then used and maintained by others, sometimes for decades.

Given this situation, I believe we all have a responsibility to write code that can be easily understood and maintained (and, c’mon, let’s admit our secret desires, admired) by the developers who follow in our footsteps. Look at this way: if you have a child, she might grow up to be a programmer. She might even put in time at one of your previous employers. She might actually end up having to maintain code that you wrote.

The choice is yours: avoid mortifying embarrassment either by never putting your name in your code, or by writing code that you would be proud to show to, share with, and inflict on your own flesh and blood.

Everyone celebrates back to school so we are going to celebrate the end of school for a change.  It just sounds better.  With the fiscal year end upon us and the students clambering for summer the IT department is hunkering down.  End of school is when IT gets busy so let Quest Software help you prepare for the time ahead with a great program.  Toad Plus for Higher Education...

One of the major strengths of Benchmark Factory is the ability to Capture and Replay the activity related to a session. This is important because it doesn’t force the user rely on tracefiles or logs to obtain ‘real world’ production data for replay in a test environment. This is important for the following reasons:

Tracefiles may contain multiple user session details It is often difficult to identify which...

It’s that time of year again when Toad for Oracle takes another step forward in bringing the best of class functionality for the Oracle user. Quest Software recently announced the release of Toad for Oracle v11.5 which includes many important enhancements for Developers and DBAs. One of the areas of functionality that has will be exciting for those Developers looking to improve code quality and incorporate best practices...

Many IT shops today are running a combination of Oracle and IBM DB2, which means they either have to cross-train employees to support both platforms, or hire two sets of employees, each with expertise on a particular DBMS.

The new Oracle compatibility features available with DB2 LUW 9.7 offer an alternative: porting Oracle applications to DB2 for LUW.



Although there are terminological differences between...

Yep, you read that right... I'l do my best to keep things "magical and revolutionary!" along the way.

原文：“A USEFUL NEW RULE FOR UPDATE STATEMENTS”    原文投稿日期：2012年3月23日
作者：虹天软件(珠海)有限公司 杜伟业(Richard To）

I write a PL/SQL 101 column for Oracle Magazine and the March/April 2012 issue focused on Error Management. I received the following letter from a reader; we couldn't fit the whole thing in Oracle Magazine's Q&A section, so I decided to publish it here.



Hello Steven, I've very much...

I did not use to pay much attention to the update table in an UPDATE statement. I figured that there was not a lot I could do with an update table unless there were complex search conditions. I preferred to focus on the sub-queries that appear on the update table's filtering and the update SET command.  

Today, I want to introduce a new transformation rule that is not implemented in our engine yet, but it is quite...

Toad for Data Analysts Automation interface is an extremely powerful and oftentimes underutilized feature. To demonstrate the power of the Automation Interface I’ve created a simple example that you can extend for your own use. We start by using the Automation Interface Execute Script feature to run a SQL query. This sql query returns a flag value which we will assign to a variable. With the variable assigned, we can use the...

No, you’re not going crazy… it really is gone. Here’s why.

Oracle technologists, database architects, database administrators, and senior database application developers are all very curious people by nature – even more curious than most people. So naturally database oriented issues evoke debates similar to “tastes great, less filling” from the famous beer commercial. You might be surprised by the scope and passion of such database debates. One area getting lots of discussion of recent...

One of the main task as a DBA is working with objects. Since there are at least two environments (typically one or more for testing and one for production) DBA’s face the challenge of moving changes done in one environment to one or more other environment(s). Toad helps the DBA to undertake this comprehensive and time-consuming task with two very powerful features.

BTW – the features I am going to present are available...

OOW is the big (enormous, really) blast of a conference/party that Oracle hosts each year in San Francisco. I've been attending these conferences since the late 1980s, and each year it seems to get bigger. Fortunately, Oracle offers a "conference within a conference": Oracle Develop, for those of us developing applications with Oracle technology. I usually spend almost all my time at the Oracle Develop hotel, so even though...

In this part, Bert goes over some database instance checklist items to add to your virtualizatoin checklist.

You asked for it, we listened to you and made it happen. Toad Extension for Eclipse version 1.5.2 contains various Schema Browser improvements.

原文： “SQL PATCHES VS SQL PLAN BASELINES” 原文投稿日期：2012年3月12日 星期一
作者：虹天软件(珠海)有限公司 杜伟业(Richard To）

Scheduled requests are one of the mainstays of OEBS concurrent processing.

 

One of the benefits of recurring scheduled requests is they are “set and forget” they just happily run and resubmit without you having to do a thing.

 

The biggest issue I’ve found, and this applies to almost all sites, is the “forget” component. I regularly find scheduled requests that have been running for years that are no longer required, and also duplicate scheduled requests which have come about because someone doesn’t know the original request exists. Both these issues are a waste of processing resources.

...

Richard discusses why SQL tuning by SQL Plan Baselines is a safe and effective method to improve your SQL performance.

Have more questions about Cross-Connection Queries?  Here is video FAQ on the subject.

The Plan Table QBlock Name column is used in conjunction with a hint to expose exactly where the sub queries of a SQL statement appear in the Plan Table.

Quest Software is pleased to announce that Quest Backup Reporter for Oracle is now bundled as a component of the Toad DBA Suite for Oracle and Toad DBA Suite for Oracle - RAC Edition for no additional cost. As you may already know, the above-mentioned Suites offer a complete Oracle DBA solution that enables you to become more proactive by automating tasks related to administration, maintenance, performance management and change...

As many of you know, Toad Extension for Eclipse can be used for development and basic administration of Oracle databases.
The latest Community Edition - version 1.5 - introduced support for PostgreSQL 9. Supported operating systems: Windows, Linux, Mac OS.

 

At some point every DBA’s going to be asked if not forced to adopt virtualized databases. Oh yes we can argue until we’re blue in the face about performance worries this and other mostly technical concerns, but we’d simply be “fish swimming upstream”. The business has made a decision and while the business may permit appeals for concessions, those concessions will be neither automatic nor sympathetic. So unless we’re willing...

See our Advanced Analytics library in Toad for Data Analysts.

New PLAN_TABLE support starting in Oracle10g.

 

原文： “SQL OPTIMIZER FOR SQL SERVER 8.0 BETA” 原文投稿日期：2012年2月21日 星期二

作者：虹天软件(珠海)有限公司 杜伟业(Richard To）

Consider the following block:

 

DECLARE

   l_date   DATE;

BEGIN

   l_date := '15-FEB-2011';

END;

 

I declare a date variable and then assign a string to it. Will this block raise an error? Hard to say. It depends on the NLS settings for the default date format – for the database as a whole or for my session. If this string doesn’t match the default, then Oracle will raise...

After almost a year of development, I would like to announce the beta release of SQL Optimizer for SQL Server 8.0 is now available here: http://sqloptimizersqlserver.inside.quest.com/index.jspa.

To be honest, I was primarily focused on the Oracle version of SQL Optimizer previously. Consequently, we sometimes received complaints from our SQL Server users saying that our tuning engine had not caught up with the SQL Server upgrade. I am confident that the new version of SQL Optimizer will satisfy most SQL Server users’ expectations. 

...

原文：“SOME COMMON SQL TUNING RULES - 10 COMMON MISCONCEPTIONS IN SQL TUNING #7” 原文投稿日期：2010年5月28日
作者：虹天软件(珠海)有限公司 杜伟业(Richard To）

原文：“NO MANUAL SQL TUNING IS REQUIRED SINCE DATABASE SQL OPTIMIZER IS GETTING BETTER - 10 COMMON MISCONCEPTIONS IN SQL TUNING #6” 原文投稿日期：2010年3月26日
作者：虹天软件(珠海)有限公司 杜伟业(Richard To）

原文：“SQL BEST PRACTICE IS SQL TUNING? -10 COMMON MISCONCEPTIONS IN SQL TUNING #5 ”    原文投稿日期：2006年12月7日
作者：虹天软件(珠海)有限公司 杜伟业(Richard To）

原文： “A SQL THAT RETURNS RECORDS FASTER IS NOT NECESSARILY BETTER-10 COMMON MISCONCEPTIONS IN SQL TUNING #4” 原文投稿日期：2009年8月14日
作者：虹天软件(珠海)有限公司 杜伟业(Richard To）

原文：“NO SINGLE SQL SYNTAX IS ALWAYS THE BEST - 10 COMMON MISCONCEPTIONS IN SQL TUNING#3”    原文投稿日期：2009年6月16日
作者：虹天软件(珠海)有限公司 杜伟业(Richard To）

原文：“10 COMMON MISCONCEPTIONS IN SQL TUNING #2”    原文投稿日期：2009年4月28日
作者：虹天软件(珠海)有限公司 杜伟业(Richard To）

If you need to bring together data from disparate databases, try Cross –Connection queries in Toad for Data Analysts!  This blog includes a video to show you how.

原文：“10 COMMON MISCONCEPTIONS IN SQL TUNING #1” 原文投稿日期：2009年3月13日
作者：虹天软件(珠海)有限公司 杜伟业(Richard To）

Oracle PL/SQL provides the RAISE_APPLICATION_ERROR built-in procedure (actually defined in the DBMS_STANDARD package) so that we can communicate application-specific error messages back to our users. When you call this procedure, you provide a negative number between -20999 and -20000, as well as your error message.

Here's an example of calling RAISE_APPLICATION_ERROR from inside a trigger, ensuring that employees...

I have seen examples of sites with over 50 million rows in the fnd_concurrent_requests_u1 index; a huge waste of space! More importantly however is the problem of poor performance in such a core OEBS activity.

In my last post I outlined the method for accessing and using Quest Software’s Toad for Oracle Freeware and Toad for MySQL Freeware AMI, available at aws.amazon.com. I explained in detail how to start the instance, how to download and install an Oracle client, and how to make sure Toad Freeware recognizes the client....

Written by Bert Scalzo

As a long time student (BS, MS, PhD and MBA), educator (teaching assistant and adjunct professor) and author (9 books) I’ve spent years championing good database design, administration and development practices. Two tools that I’ve always seen as the “one two punch” to successful database work are Toad Data Modeler and Toad for Oracle. Toad Data Modeler permits one to design a database that’s effective (i.e. meets business requirements) as well as efficient (i.e. performs well). Toad for Oracle then educates and empowers one to both administer and develop successful databases. In fact the Toad family mantra is to increase database productivity with easy to use tools.

...