FORALL was introduced into PL/SQL in Version 8i. It is a fantastic feature; you should use it in place of all loops that contain DML statements performing row-by-row processing. You will generally see performance improvements of at least an order of magnitude. 

If you are not familiar with FORALL, make it a priority to get familiar. You can start with my brand new 5th edition of Oracle PL/SQL Programming,...

Quest Software has two of the most powerful tools for PL/SQL development: Toad for Oracle and SQL Navigator for Oracle. Personally, I spend more time working with Toad for Oracle and I truly enjoy the solution. Before I proceed any further, I want to clarify a point. I am not advocating one solution over the other for PL/SQL development. That’s a conversation I refuse to have, because it borders on arguing which religion is...

We are pleased to provide two new command-line utilities that were developed for the next version of JProbe. The first can be used standalone to obtain basic memory usage reports from JVM memory dumps. The second can be used for controlling a JProbe Analysis Engine in a headless environment or for scripting JProbe actions.

This blog is the fifth in a series about misconceptions surrounding SQL tuning that are quite common.

 

Around 15 years ago, when I was a DBA both for Oracle and Sybase, a lot of SQL came from my colleagues which I needed to tune.  Initially, I enjoyed the satisfaction of tuning a SQL statement that ran in a few minutes down to a...

I recently published the following puzzle in the ToadWorld newsletter:

Which of the following queries return the names of programs (without duplication) defined in the currently connected schema whose source contains a call to DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE (assume that this program name does not appear inside comments)?

A.   SELECT name FROM USER_DEPENDENCIES     WHERE referenced_name = 'DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE' B.  ...

It’s been a while since I wrote my data warehousing book, so I wanted to read something hip and new on the topic. Lucky for me someone suggested that I examine “Oracle Warehouse Builder 11g: Getting Started”...

Quick, what’s the number one complaint about Toad for Oracle?

“The User Interface is waaaaaaaaay too complicated!”



Out of the box, Toad’s setup to pretty much have everything enabled. If we hid stuff, there’s a good chance users would assume the functionality just wasn’t there to be taken advantage of.  And, as John so elegantly put it in his latest whitepaper on QuestDotCom,...

Many people these days have to work on both traditional “online transactional processing” (i.e. OLTP) systems as well as data warehouses. But just what is a data warehouse? Generally speaking a data warehouse is nothing more than a specialized business reporting system used by mid to senior level management to research and develop a tactical plan and/or true long term strategy. Thus in many cases while these systems may be considered mission critical, they are not really true 24 X 7 systems. Often data warehouses are utilized during normal to extended business hours, with some batch activities for data loading and aggregation/summary calculations.

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Did you know that in Code Tester 1.8.5 you can now perform in-line validation of your customization code? For more complex tests, this will save you lots of time and make it easier to build your regression tests.

 

The ultimate objective of Code Tester is easy to state: allow developers to test arbitrarily complex PL/SQL programs without writing any test code....

I want to start by thanking everyone who participated in the free TOAD book contest by submitting new feature ideas or enhancement requests. I received numerous good ideas. I also received about a third that were already in TOAD – and have been for a long time.  I actually can benefit from those emails too, since Quest can probably better expose and/or offer training on those issues. Remember too this was an entirely subjective...

I was recently in Germany, and did an interview with Erik Franz of database|pro. One of the questions he asked me was: "Which programming language would you recommend a college student learn to give them the strongest chance at a good job upon graduation?" I would have loved to be able to answer: "Learn PL/SQL!