Welcome to the 68th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs. Thanks to Paul and everyone else who contributed comments and links to LB#67 (a.k.a., the Log Buffer of Love) when I was down with the common cold. My rhinoviral guest has not abandoned me just yet , but I’m grimly [...]

I’m not sure how long this has been out there, but there is a new (to me) headline on Oracle’s support website, announcing that next month, they will be phasing out “manual configuration” information for service requests. Customers are now required to download and install something called Oracle Configuration Manager (OCM), which will gather their system/database [...]

Hello everyone, I think this will be a great log buffer. Dave has been sick these past two days and as a result, we do not have a comprehensive log buffer ready the way we or a volunteer usually do. This was bound to happen to log buffer at some point and today it has happened. So I [...]

Welcome to the 66th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs, raking up the blogs like so many fallen leaves. Fall back, spring ahead… Remember all the fuss last spring about the change in Daylight Saving Time? Well, it’s back, at least if you neglected it the first time. Thanks to [...]

I was very pleased when I heard about Oracle adding pivot functionality in select statements. Finally — we wouldn’t have to copy the data to a spreadsheet or code a ton of sum(case when col1 = 'X' then amount else 0 end) total_X for each column we would want to display.

I am basically looking for three things in a pivot-style query:

1. the ability to specify which column will be pivoted as one or more columns in the resulting query
2. row subtotals
3. column subtotals

The first item is the only one that really matters. I can work around the other two, so let’s get started.

Create a test table with a few rows:

create table bob_pivot_test( id number, cost number, tx_date date, product_type varchar2(50));
insert into bob_pivot_test values (1,10.99,sysdate-10,'Toy');
insert into bob_pivot_test values (1,10.99,sysdate-9,'Toy');
insert into bob_pivot_test values …

Well, it’s better late than never! Frank Wiles has published the 65th edition of Log Buffer the weekly review of database blogs, on the Revolution Systems Blog. For the record Frank published it right on time on Friday - it’s just us that’s late. Sorry about that. Log Buffer #65.

Keith Murphy has published the 64th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs, on Diamond Notes. Frank Wiles is standing by to do LB#65 next week on his Revolution Systems Blog. Everyone’s doing it, and you can too! Read the Log Buffer guidelines and send me, the LB coordinator, a note [...]

Craig Mullins has weathered a very heavy week in the ’sphere and published the 63rd edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs, on Data Management Today. Log Buffer’s dance-card is almost empty now. LB wants your attentions! If you’re a new database blogger, editing and publishing an edition of LB on your [...]

As stated on my first post on this blog, I’m a MySQL DBA trying to draw a map of this new (to me) world called Oracle. The other day I was trying different things with Oracle, like (but not limited to) issuing kill -9 to random Oracle processes to see what would happen (on my own box of course!). The purpose? To study STARTUP statements and recovery techniques, and to get to know a little better the Oracle SQL dialect.

I was a little surprised by the results. They’re probably no news for most of you guys, but it is new to me, and I’d like to share my findings with other MySQL guys around the planet.

I created a simple test table:

SQL> CREATE TABLE names (
name_id NUMBER NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY,
name    VARCHAR2(6) NOT NULL
);
  2    3    4
Table created.

So far, so good, until I saw a …

Welcome to the 62nd edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs. You know, I haven’t actually written one of these since LB#46, way back in May, so I hope I haven’t lost my touch. I guess we’ll see, eh? An item in last week’s Database Column by Mike Stonebraker, a guru [...]