Turning off Code Completion in SQLDeveloper – a Grumpy Old Man Fights Back

“You’re problem is you’re BBC”, a colleague remarked recently.
On further investigation, I found this not to be some reference to the British Broadcasting Corporation but rather that I had been “Born Before Computers”. Yes, I grew up – in computing terms at least – on the Command Line.
A number of things have changed since those dim and distant days.
Recently, I had a comment from Darryl claiming that chocolate bars had also been gradually reducing in size.
Damning photographic evidence of this scandal has recently come into my possession…

A Bounty Bar from 1980 together with it's modern counterpart

There’s more. My phone keeps insisting that I can’t spell and arbitrarily replacing words when I’m writing an SMS.
“You’re just the breast” took a bit of explaining to a rather skeptical Deb.
Having finally persuaded my phone that I really don’t require it’s assistance when composing a short missive, I have now turned my attention to SQLDeveloper.

Nested Tables – Flat-packed data in an Oracle Table

In the aftermath of the holiday season, there follows the inevitable January sales.
This year, I have been spared the inevitable trudge around the stores. Deb has hurt her knee and has therefore been restricted to browsing on-line.

I thought she “kneeded” cheering up, but to date, my attempts at lightening the mood, seem only to have given her the “kneedle”.

Sitting quietly, whilst Deb is wandering through various furniture store websites, I had cause to reflect on Oracle’s own version of Nested Tables.
These were introduced way back in Oracle 8, when Oracle confidently predicted that the Object-Relational Database was the way of the future.
Imagine if they were just bringing this feature out now. You can picture it. Larry would have spent months making disparaging remarks about IKEA’s occasional table range, before unveiling his own version, which was better, cheaper and more efficient.

Whilst you’re never going to be able to rest your pint on one, a Nested Table in Oracle may be useful on occasion.

Upgrading to APEX 4.1 on XE 11g

It’s that time of year. Slay bells ringing, children singing…and the UKOUG Conference.
This year, I was lucky to get along to attend the last day in the company of my good friend Alan.

I love going to the Conference. You get the chance to see lots of great presentations about all sorts of things in the Oracle world.
Takeaways from this year? Well, apart from the stress-ball and the cuddly Rhino ( yes, we did have a wander through the exhibition hall as well), I learned quite a bit about Application Express.

Just in case they’re struggling for an angle for APEX in the Oracle marketing department, how about :
“Application Express – Forms 3.0 for the Internet Age”

I suppose I’d better do some explaining fairly quickly before I am taken to task by any APEX aficionados who happen to be reading.

Back in the good old days, when I still had hair, Forms 3 was the character based interface for the Oracle database. A major advance on Forms 2.3, you were able to code actual PL/SQL right into the triggers. Of course, everything ran on the server back then. Forms, the database ( we don’t talk about SQL*Reportwriter…ever !)

APEX has certain similarities to it’s ancestor. The code is stored in the database itself and you can write PL/SQL in it. Of course, it is also “web-aware”. It could easily be thought of as a UI for SQL and PL/SQL…without all that mucking about with Java.

Enough of this Oracle Tech naval gazing. The point of this post is that, if you’ve downloaded Oracle 11g XE, you will have APEX4.0 included. Due to the tiresome reluctance of software vendors to use major release numbers, you may have been under the misapprehension that APEX 4.1 was just a minor tweak. The truth is a rather different.

APEX is maturing rapidly. So, if you’re running XE 11g on a Debian OS ( or even 10g XE), you may very well be interested in getting the latest version of APEX to have a play with…

NOTE – I ran this installation on 11g XE running on Mint.
I’ve tried to highlight any differences you may get when installing on 10gXE, but I haven’t actually done the installation on this database version.

Installing Oracle 11gXE on Mint and Ubuntu

Things have been a bit hectic lately. What with putting in a new kitchen, being insanely busy at work, and trying not to come out with embarrassing sheep jokes, I’ve ended up with quite a long list of things to do blog-wise.
Top of the list, until now, was installing the long-awaited Oracle 11gXE Release 2 onto one of my Linux machines.
Yes, the free version of Oracle’s RDBMS has finally had an upgrade from 10g and I really want to get my hands on it and have a good nose around.
As well as being based on the latest release of the RDBMS, the Express Edition has had one or two other improvements added. Maybe the most significant of these is that the limit for the amount of user data that XE can hold has been increased from 4GB to 11GB.
What I’m going to do here is :

• Go through the package conversion process
• Install the database using steps applicable both to Mint and Ubuntu ( and any other Debian based distro)
• Apply some finishing touches so that the menu items work as intended

Along the way, we’ll find out just why Oracle can’t speak English (and lots of other languages), where Mint has hidden the .bashrc, and how Aliens can be friendly.

Because I’m trying to cover both distros in this post, the installation process will be done entirely on the command line. Don’t worry, it’s not as bad as it sounds.

But first…a small morsel of Linux history. Debian, the distro upon which both Mint and Ubuntu are based, was named after a Deb. I had to mention that as this will cause my beloved to think that I’m writing about her ( again), and thus give me enough time to finish writing this !

What are we waiting for then ? Let’s get going.

Speed Dating – NLS_DATE FORMAT in Oracle

When dealing with dates in a program, I’ll tend to err on the side of caution and explicitly do the conversion from a varchar to a date, specifying the format so there’s no chance of anything unexpected happening if the program should run in a session with a different NLS_DATE_FORMAT from that I’m using.
However, if for example, I need to do a one-off data fix, sometimes, I just can’t be bothered with all that typing.

Help – DBMS_SCHEDULER keeps Spamming me…and can’t tell the time either

Sundays – a day of rest. Certainly true for me. Sunday morning is a time for lazing around leafing through the colour supplements and thinking about nothing in particular. Sunday 23rd October was a little bit different.
Wide-awake at 8 am ( I didn’t know that there was such a time as 8am on a Sunday), like several million others, I was wondering what would confront the All Blacks – the Gallic flair with which France had swept aside England or the Gallic shrug with which they had surrendered to Tonga ?
Look, I’m not really a New Zealander. Yes, I was born in Auckland but both my parents are English and I’ve lived most of my life in England. However, like anyone with a connection to the Land of the Long White Cloud, there is a part of my soul, however small, that takes the form of a Rugby ball.
At the end of the match, I was able to join my “fellow” Kiwis in, not so much paroxysms of joy as a huge collective sigh of relief.

On the whole though, I’d rather not have to see Sunday morning from that early on. So, if there is, for example, something that needs to run on my database on a Sunday morning, I’d rather the database just did it without my intervention.

What I plan to do here is :

1. set up a scheduler job
2. explore the ways in which we can control whether a class of job runs on a given database
3. stop jobs running on database startup
4. teach the scheduler how to tell the time – especially in terms of daylight saving

Oracle SQL and PL/SQL Coding Standards – Cat Herding for Dummies

Whilst in Montreal recently, Deb and I made a pilgrimage to the Circuit Giles Villeneuve, home of the Canadian Grand Prix. When not in use, the track is open to the public. It’s divided into two lanes – one for people to walk and cycle down down, and a one for people to drive down.
You can just imagine flying round in an F1 car. You come out of the excruciatingly slow L’epingle hairpin and build up to top speed as you tear down the Casino Straight. Ahead lies the final chicane before the start/finish line. A tricky right left combination with the treacherous curb on the inside of the last turn ready to spit the unwary into the Wall of Champions on the opposite side of the track.
At over 300 kph you start to think about spotting your braking point. Suddenly, this comes into view….

What do you think this is, a race track ?

… and now you know what it’s like to be a programmer, who has channeled raw inspiration through his or her dancing fingers to produce a thing of beauty and elegance…only to run into the QA person pointing out that the commas are in the wrong place according to page 823, paragraph 2 sub-section e of The Coding Standards.

Often measured in weight rather than the number of pages, Coding Standards documents are often outdated, arbitrary and just plain wrong.
On the other hand, their absence can cause much heartache, not least to those poor souls in support who are trying to maintain code where the Agilista philosophy of Code over Documentation has been taken to the ultimate extreme.

What follows is an attempt to make sense of the Coding Standards conundrum.
I’ll look at what I think a Coding Standards document should contain, and what it shouldn’t.
Then I’ll give some suggestions as to standards for Oracle SQL and PL/SQL which you can either embrace or throw rocks at, depending on your preference.
Before all of that however, I feel the need for some serious catharsis…

Anchored Declarations and the Brownie Point Economy

This week’s hot conversational topic in the Nut and Squirrel was the Global Economic Crisis, with particular reference to a little-reported side-effect that has huge ramifications. I am, of course, referring to the devaluation of Brownie Points.

Unless you’re English, I guess some explanation may be called for at this point. So, at the risk of getting all anthropological…
Brownie Points are awarded by females to their mate for certain actions. When enough brownie points have been accrued, the male of the species can have these converted into a Pass.

The Pass can be used for a night out with the lads, at the footie, or whatever other pursuit is of interest.

This system is instinctively understood by females, although, due to the sudden and unexpected fluctuations in value, less so by the males.

You will often hear conversations such as :

“We’re going to Luton Saturday, their playing Mansfield, you reckon you can get a pass ?”
“Sorry, we’re at the Garden Centre on Saturday, need to earn some brownie points.”

This system goes under many different guises but is essentially the same the world over.
Lately however, it has become apparent that males are having to work harder for their brownie points than previously. The suspicion is that this is related to the retail price of women’s shoes.

What a mess. Where can you put your hard earned savings to ensure an index-linked return ?
Well, if you really want to know, you’ll have to read the Financial Times. Variables in PL/SQL, however, can be indexed-linked to database columns by the simple expedient of an anchored declaration.

ROWNUM, Random updates and the Alert Log – A trip down Memory Lane

I met up with an old friend recently. Deb and I were in Toronto, hometown of a certain Simon Jennings.
Apart from being a top bloke, Simon was also my first mentor in the mysterious ways of SQL, a sort of Obi-Wan Kenobi to my Anakin Skywalker, but without the light-sabers.

Ah those heady days when the world was young…and I first discovered ROWNUM.
That pseudo column was one I used often when investigating the structure and data within tables. It was also, the source of some confusion.

Oracle External Tables or What I did on my Holidays

This week’s missive is coming to you from the netbook. Deb and I have pushed the boat out this year and we’re currently in Canada for our holiday.
This has nothing at all to do with Oracle External Tables, but does explain the flavour of the examples that follow.