I recently found out (again) how to default argument values in a shell script, so I thought I’d write it down this time.
The ABBA flavour in what follows is because we’re talking about BASH – the Bourne Again SHell and Bjorn Again are an ABBA tribute band. This is quite handy because the ABBA back catalogue is rather versatile having already lent itself to an explanation Oracle password complexity.
Welcome to the inside of my head. Sorry about the mess…
Continue readingDespite all the hype, it turns out that Football was coming home only to change it’s underwear before going out again.
As the Azzuri may have said, “Veni Vidi Vici (ai penalti)”…or something like that.
Look, I’m over it, there are far more important things in life than football and it will not impinge further on this post. Well, not much.
What I’m going to explore here how you persuade Oracle to report the count of chained rows for a table in the _tables dictionary views. The examples that follow were run on Oracle 19c Enterprise Edition. I have observed the same behaviour all the way back to 11gR2.
Continue readingLooking after an overnight batch process can be a big fraught at times.
If it’s a good day, you might begin the morning with a nice cup of coffee and a leisurely scroll through the logs to confirm that all is well.
In contrast, if the batch has overrun you may well find yourself scrambling through those same logs whilst gulping down large quantities of caffeine in a desperate attempt to hot-wire your brain into working out the elapsed time between each entry. Not great. Especially when you consider that, as Terry Pratchett put it,
“Coffee is a way of stealing time that should by rights belong to your older self”.
A better approach might be to get Oracle to do it for you.
What we’re going to look at here is :
It’s not a good time to be English, not in my house. That’s right, the Six Nations is in full swing and my Welsh wife and her family are once again indulging in the time-honoured practice of taunting the English.
As deployment of my emergency backup nationality ( “born In New Zealand, I’m neutral, honest !”) has failed, I’m reduced to keeping a low profile until the Brains Bitter runs out.
Fortunately, there’s excellent Wi-Fi reception in the cupboard under the stairs, so I can drown out the sound Welsh Nationalism and concentrate on the topic at hand.
Whatever language you’re coding in, however sophisticated you’re IDE, sooner or later you will likely revert to the time-hounoured debugging technique of writing out messages or variable values at runtime in an effort to find out what the heck is going on.
PL/SQL is no exception and DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE is the procedure that facilitates this practice.
However, whilst it’s a simple matter to view the messages interactively, how can you retrieve them if you are running the program as part of a batch process, where attaching a client to the session is not an option ?
WARNING – the code that follow may contain (memory) leeks…
Continue readingNow we have our backlog, it’s time to finish our setup and then get on and knock out some code…or maybe not.
Remember, we’re using APEX as part of our technical solution and we’re going to let it do some of the heavy lifting, at least to start with.
What we’re going to cover here is :
But first…
The reason for this series of posts is to explore how both the methodology used for development and later enhancements to the application affect the finished product.
The requirements for this initial version of the application cover Football only up to the end of the 1888/89 season. For the purposes of this exercise, we’re trying – for the most part – not to anticipate developments after that date. So, whilst we may reasonably take steps to future-proof our application, we’re not going to indulge in clairvoyance by predicting the advent of VAR, for example.
Right…
Continue readingAs threatended promised, I’m going to look at the first phase of my Application – recording the results and outcomes of Soccer tournaments from the first days of the sport in 1871 through to the culmination of the first Football League Championship in 1889.
I’ll begin with a narrative description of the functional requirements of our application. OK, it’s more like a potted history of the early days of Association Football, but I’ve got to start somewhere.
I’ll use this to extrapolate some user stories, which I’ll then drop into Altassian Jira having taken advantage of a free Jira account.
If you’re an Oracle developer and reading this is your first experience of Scrum, then you may feel that it’s not an obvious fit for developing a data-centric application.
On the other hand, if you’re a Scrum officianado, you may be faintly horrified by the “free-form” way I’m approaching Scrum. So, something to annoy everyone then…
I just can’t get the hang of Fantasy Football.
I’ll do all the right things, like swapping out striker A because of that tough away game coming up and bring in striker B who is bang in form and playing against a team struggling at the foot of the table.
Then I’ll look on helplessly as striker A bangs in a hat-trick whilst striker B scores an own-goal and manages to get sent-off.
Therefore, I’ve decided to stop worrying about how my pretend football team is getting on and do something a bit more useful, like undertaking a pretend development project. Yep, welcome to Fantasy Software Development.
The primary reason for doing this is to explore how an application evolves over it’s lifetime.
A huge amount has been written about how to develop applications from scratch but not so much about how they grow once the initial release is in production and the enhancement requests start coming in.
In other words, how is it that an application which, if you were writing it from the ground up right now would look like this :
…actually looks like this :
This is quite a sprawling project and my intention is to tackle it through several posts. This one is simply to give and overview of where I might be headed.
Continue readingThis article is about how Indexes and Histograms may be used to view data to which a user does not ordinarily have access. It includes details of how these objects can be used to circumvent both Virtual Private Database and Database Vault restrictions.
If you want a serious and thorough exploration of these issues then I’d suggest you take a look at Alexander Kornbrust’s recent DOAG Presentation.
However, if you like your infosec to come with cute puppy pics, read on…
Continue readingI’m not a hardware specialist, but I’m not averse to prizing open a laptop case occasionally when the need arises. Most of the time.
This, however was an exception. This is one view of my XPS13 that I never wanted to see :
What brought me to this point was the untimely demise of the battery.
What follows is not a blow-by-blow account of how I changed the battery, with all of the attendant nervousness that practically everything I was looking at was rather expensive and no doubt quite important.
Incidentally, if you are looking for that sort of thing then there are several helpful videos available, like this one, for example.
Rather it is an exploration of some of the advice around about ensuring your battery has a long and happy life. Specifically, it is an attempt to divine which advice is still relevant to the Lithium Ion (Li-Ion) Polymer batteries of the sort that power modern laptops…
I recently updated my blog profile picture. Let’s face it, it was about time. The old one was taken 14 years ago.
This time, I thought I’d go for a contemporary portrait, which has the added benefit of being less likely to frighten animals and small children.
Unfortunately, it is also crying out for a caption :
Just popping into the bank. Keep the engine running
One or two alternatives captions may well crop up in the following paragraphs.
Primarily though, I’ll be talking about the file watcher capabilities of DBMS_SCHEDULER.
Introduced in 11g, it enables developers to trigger actions when a file arrives without having to leave the comfort of their database.
There are a few moving parts and getting them to work together can take a bit of, well, fiddling.
Specifically, we’ll be looking at :
Before we get into all of that, we need to have a quick chat about environments…
