The longer an application has been successfully run, the more likely you are to have indexes that are no longer used or beneficial. Removing these indexes not only saves space but can also improve the performance of any DML operations. But knowing which indexes can be safely dropped can be tricky. In Oracle Database 12c ..read more

When diagnosing and correcting a performance regression for a SQL statement, it can often be challenging to find out what is happening during the execution and why your corrective measures are not working. In today’s blog, I want to share several enhancements introduced in recent Oracle Database releases to help you better understand how to ..read more

There is only one day to go until Oracle CloudWorld in Las Vegas, the largest gathering of Oracle customers, partners, developers, and technology enthusiasts of the year! Of course, the database team will be there, and this year, we will have our conference within a conference called DatabaseWorld. You will have multiple opportunities to meet with ..read more

Last week Juan Loaiza introduced the latest generation of Oracle Exadata, X10M, , and with each new release comes more powerful compute power and larger flash and disk capacity. Along with all of the hardware improvements come a bunch of software enhancements that transparently accelerate your database workloads (RDMA, Smart Scan, Storage Indexes, Smart Flash ..read more

Database views are a handy tool to help obfuscate complex joins from developers and analysts. However, knowing which view to use can be tricky, especially when faced with multiple views with similar-sounding names. After all, you don’t want to join various tables only to discover that all the information you needed was in just a ..read more

Over the last couple of releases, Oracle has added several handy PL/SQL packages and procedures you might not know about. So, I put together a short blog series highlighting some of my favorites. First up, DBMS_SESSION.SLEEP(). Oracle has always enabled you to add a sleep command to your stored procedures to suspend a session for ..read more

Database views have been used for decades to help simplify both ad-hoc queries and reporting for developers, analysts, and end-users. But the problem with defining views is they tend to be either too specific (not easily reused) or not specific enough (too generic to be performant). Imagine we need a view to help developers quickly ..read more

Over the last two months, Oracle has taken our Database World Conference on the road with events in San Francisco, Singapore, Toyko, London, and São Paulo. The Oracle Database product management team delivered these one-day technical events and covered a variety of topics, including giving folks a sneak preview of Oracle Database 23c. If you ..read more

In 11g, Oracle introduced the DBMS_STAT.DIFF_TABLE_STATS functions to help you compare two sets of statistics for a table along with all its dependent objects (indexes, columns, partitions). There are three versions of this function depending on where the statistics being compared are located: DBMS_STAT.DIFF_TABLE_STATS_IN_HISTORY (compares statistics for a table from two timestamps in the past ..read more

Today I had an opportunity to catch up with old friends and colleagues when my local Oracle User Group –  Northern California Oracle User Group (NoCOUG), held its first in-person event in three years. In my session, we looked at five things you might not know about the Oracle Database or might have forgotten. For each ..read more