New Dog, Old Tricks – how to save yourself some typing with sed

We have a new addition to our household –

Teddy

Cute and fluffy he may be, but he’s got to earn his keep. He can start making himself useful by helping me with this post.

It begins one Friday afternoon when an urgent request lands on my desk with a large splat.

The requirement is that some csv files be uploaded into the Oracle 11g Datbasae serving the UAT environment to facilitate some testing.
There are around 20 files, each with a slightly different set of attributes.
The files are currently sitting on the on the Red Hat Linux Server hosting the database.
I have sufficient OS permissions on the server to move them to a directory that has a corresponding database object in the UAT instance.
Nevertheless, the thought of having to knock out 20-odd external tables to read these files might leave me feeling a bit like this…

Fortunately, a certain Lee E. McMahon had the foresight to predict the potential risk to my weekend and wrote the Stream Editor (sed) program…

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Read Only Access for providing backend support for an Oracle Application

The World Cup is finally over and “It’s Coming Home !”
For quite a long time, we English laboured under the illusion that “it” was football.
Fortunately for Scots everywhere, “It” turned out to be the World Cup which, like so many international sporting competitions, was conceived in France.

Another area that is often subject to flawed assumptions is what privileges are required to provide read-only access for someone to provide support to an Oracle Application.
So, for any passing auditors who may be wondering why “read only” access to an Oracle application sometimes means Write, or even Execute on certain objects…

ORA-06592 and the Case of the Happy Australians

Another Ashes Tour to Australia has come and gone and the home team once again hold The Urn.
For any non-cricket fans, I should probably explain.
Every four years, England sends their Men’s and Women’s Cricket Teams to Australia on a goodwill mission.
The object of the exercise is to make Australians feel good about their country as their teams inevitably triumph.

These recently concluded contests provide the theme for the illustration of the less-than-straightforward circumstance surrounding the ORA-06592 error which follows.
When encountering this error, you’ll probably see something like

ORA-06592: CASE not found while executing CASE statement

06592. 00000 -  "CASE not found while executing CASE statement"
*Cause:    A CASE statement must either list all possible cases or have an
           else clause.
*Action:   Add all missing cases or an else clause.

Despite this apparently definitive advice, you don’t always need to cover any possible case, or include an ELSE clause…

Private Functions and ACCESSIBLE BY Packages in 12c

My recent post about PLS-00231 prompted an entirely reasonable question from Andrew :

“OK so the obvious question why [can’t you reference a private function in SQL] and doesn’t that defeat the objective of having it as a private function, and if so what about other ways of achieving the same goal ?”

I’ll be honest – that particular post was really just a note to self. I tend to write package members as public initially so that I can test them by calling them directly.
Once I’ve finished coding the package, I’ll then go through and make all of the helper package members private. My note was simply to remind myself that the PLS-00231 error when compiling a package usually means that I’ve referenced a function in a SQL statement and then made it private.

So, we know that a PL/SQL function can only be called in a SQL statement if it’s a schema level object or it’s definied in the package header because that’s the definition of a Public function in PL/SQL. Or at least it was…

In formulating an answer to Andrew’s question, it became apparent that the nature of Private functions have evolved a bit in 12c.

So, what I’m going to look at here is :

• What are Private and Public package members in PL/SQL and why you might want to keep a package member private
• How 12c language features change our definition of private and public in terms of PL/SQL objects
• Hopefully provide some up-to-date answers for Andrew

In-Line Views versus Correlated Sub-queries – tuning adventures in a Data Warehouse Report

Events have taken a worrying turn recently. I’m not talking about Kim Jong Un’s expensive new hobby, although, if his parents had bought him that kite when he was seven…
I’m not talking about the UK’s chief Brexit negotiator David Davies quoting directly from the Agile Manifesto and claiming that the British were “putting people before process” in the negotiations, although Agile as a negotiating strategy is rather…untested.
I’m not even talking about the sunny Bank Holiday Monday we had in England recently even though this may be a sign of Global Warming ( or possibly a portent for the end of days).
The fact is, we have an Ashes series coming up this winter and England still haven’t managed to find a top order that doesn’t collapse like a cheap deckchair in a light breeze.

On top of that, what started out as a relatively simple post – effectively a note to myself about using the row_number analytical function to overcome a recent performance glitch in a Data Warehouse Application – also seems to have developed an unexpected complication…

REGEXP_LIKE – Happy thoughts whilst searching for multiple substrings in Oracle SQL

International relations seem to be somewhat tense at the moment with various World Leaders being publicly grumpy with each other.
To keep my mind off damoclesian digits dangling dangerously over Big Red Shiny Buttons, I really just want to hear some nice news to help me think happy thoughts.

I’d like to read about Luton Town because they’re doing quite well, or the England Cricket team winning a Test Series. I might even treat myself to a random Cat Video…

Dude, Where’s My File ? Finding External Table Files in the midst of (another) General Election

It’s early summer in the UK, which means it must be time for an epoch defining vote of some kind. No, I’m not talking about Britain’s Got Talent.
Having promised that there wouldn’t be another General Election until 2020, our political classes have now decided that they can’t go any longer without asking us what we think. Again.
Try as I might, it may not be possible to prevent the ear-worm phrases from the current campaign slipping into this post.
What I want to look at is how you can persuade Oracle to tell you the location on disk of any files associated with a given external table.
Specifically, I’ll be covering :

• getting the name of the Database Server
• finding the fully qualified path of the datafile the external table is pointing to
• finding other files associated with the table, such as logfiles

In the course of this, we’ll be challenging the orthodoxy of Western Capitalism “If You Can Do It In SQL…” with the principle of DRY ( Don’t Repeat Yourself).
Hopefully I’ll be able to come up with a solution that is “Strong and Stable” and yet at the same time “Works For The Many, Not the Few”…