This blog is the beginning of a series that will cover the optimization process in the Batch Optimizer and the Tuning Lab modules of Quest SQL Optimizer for Oracle.

When writing a SQL statement, it is easy to ...

One of the highlights of Oracle Open World 2008 for me was the presentation by Bryn Llewellyn (PL/SQL Product Manager) on “Doing SQL in PL/SQL.”

 

Bryn surely has the most thorough and clear understanding of the PL/SQL language of anyone I have met (definitely including me).

 

His talk was detailed ...

We often spend a lot of time trumpeting the sexy little widgets in our database tools and overlook the little things that really aid in the development of our applications or even just writing the mundane queries that fill up our day.

I’d like to just spend a quick 10 minutes on letting you know about a cool little feature that Toad for Data Analysis offers for writing your querie ...

So, another version of Toad has been released. It happens a few times a year. If you’re lucky it’s up to you if and when you want to upgrade to get your bug fixes or new features. If you’re in a larger organization, there’s a standards committee that decides who gets what when. I thought I’d spend a few minutes to document what I see to be the key features available in v9.7 t ...

With Toad for Oracle 9.7 now available, I thought I’d cover how to configure and use Subversion with Toad’s code sharing utility – Team Coding. We had a lot of requests for this integration and here it is !
 

The Subversion implementation in Toad allows you to use the conventional file-based check-out and check-in via the Editor’s File Open bu ...

I have generally recommended in the past that whenever you are writing code to iterate through the elements of a collection, you should use a while loop, combined with the FIRST-NEXT or LAST-PRIOR collection methods.
 

The key advantage of this approach is that the code will not raise a NO_DATA_FOUND exception if your collection is sparse (there is an index value be ...