Be sure to read

Your Mission: Go fix ALL of the slow SQL in your application ASAP.

I use Toad® for Oracle almost everyday to tune and optimize problematic databases for customers, partners and friends. And I noticed that I followed a pattern – which seemed consistent across all such attempts. And although I wrote the whitepaper “

To read part one in this series on O ...

I offer in this Quseful (Quick and Useful) a package that you can use to dynamically retrieve the value of almost any column from any table. I created this package as a "helper" utility for Quest

What the heck is that?

Probably the single most painful task in data modeling (or any modeling for that matter) is switching tools. Forget the high direct costs like purchasing licenses and the obvious indirect costs of retraining your staff, because it’s the migration of all your meta-data from one tool to the other that looms large on t ...

Hypocrisy has got to be one of the most infuriating traits of human beings.

Quest Recursive SQL Transformation technology is an innovative AI technology that simulates human SQL transformation technique. It incorporates a set of transformation rules to transform SQL statements on a section-by-section basis. This replaces the trial and error method used by human to rewrite the syntax of a SQL statement. Each t ...

Qusefuls #1 and #2 were published on Steven Feuerstein's personal blog at feuerthoughts.blogspot.com.

I’ve been searching for a definitive answer to the question: “What is the cost of poor database design?” No doubt you have all seen the cost/benefit graphs for fixing application problems and the pyramid showing how up to 90 percent of performance issues in a running database are SQL and ind ...

For those of you w ...

It is Wednesday, May 09, 2007 and I am sitting in the Admiral's Club at the Buenos Aires airport. I just finished two days in this lovely city. My first day was spent enjoying the chilly, but very sunny afternoon, walking for four hours around the city. It is a busy, busy place with many buses throwing way too much gritty exhaust into the air (hey, ...

You’ll have to forgive me for spoofing the famous movie line “We don’t need no stinking badges” (Treasure of the Sierra Madre, 1948 and Blazing Saddles, 1974), it just seemed quite apropos

In my last blog entry we looked at sizing tables in 10g, of course the other side of that coin is the sizing of indexes. As with tables the Oracle8 manuals had an explanation of how to size indexes, but manuals since then have been strangely silent on the subject. In this blog I will address the sizing of normal, b-tree ...

In

I rediscovered the joy of writing to myself a week ago, and I also was reminded of the danger of coding in isolation (that is, working by oneself).

In this blog, I want to introduce you to a little known feature in Toad for Oracle called the PL/SQL Profiler. Believe it or not, the profiler has been in Toad since September 1999 (Version 6)!

In this installment I thought I'd write about the exciting, and soon to debut, Toad Data Modeler 3.0 release rather than yet another boring academic or technical topic on data modeling. TDM 3.0 is quite exciting. While it has not yet been made available for public beta – it will be very soon (so please email the product manager

On one of my first Oracle consulting assignments I had to come up with the sizing estimates for tables for a data warehouse for a telecommunications company in California. At that time, (1994) there were few products that provided sizing al ...

Two weeks ago, we held the second annual Oracle PL/SQL Programming conference (I talked about it in last week's

A couple months ago as ODTUG was working out the final details for the Oracle PL/SQL Programming 2007 conference 

I have been asked many times that why there are some dummy SQL transformations/rewrites that look meaningless, but it works in certain situations.  Let me give you some examples that may help to explain what theory on behind of Quest SQL Optimizer.

This blog entry o ...

One of my favorite things to do (when I am not tuning and managing Oracle databases) is to don a scuba tank, mask, and exposure suit and slip beneath the waters surface. For a long time I wondered how to reconcile these two interests and then it came to me.

Over the decades I’ve worked with many data modelers – and I’ve learned something key to building a great model that is not always intuitively obvious: spend at least 50% of your data modeling time on the relationships. Often modelers are so overly concerned with the entities, attributes and unique identifiers or keys ...

The Major Enhancements in the 1.5 Release

Of course, we spent lots of time just fixing bugs and making lots of small changes. But there were some very critical "big ticket" enhancements that were requeste ...

In Quest SQL Optimizer, transformation rules relating to index usage are designed to guide the database SQL optimizer as to how it should use the indexes for a specific SQL statement.  Although those rules may familiar to most of SQL developers, but it is still worth to illustrate some commonly used rules for SQL beg ...

I hope that you have already heard about this new testing tool. If not, I offer a quick intro/overview ...

Now, for sure, we need really good tools to help get the job done, but we also need to think abo ...

Many times I am asked how to tailor the initialization parameters for a specific process or user. Essentially the easiest way to set custom initialization parameters for a particular session is to use the ALTER SESSION SET command in a logon trigger keyed to a specific schema or schemas. For example, say we had an application where we wanted to set ...