In his paper "Using DBMS_STATS in Access Path Optimization", Wolfgang Breitling writes:Histograms are like drugs -- An overdose [of histograms] can kill [performance].I've gotten a crash course on this recently. More on that in a bit.
I'm Kind of a Big Deal Around Here
Yesterday Justin Kestelyn over at the OTN blog announced a re-org of the blogs.oracle.com homepage. I was pleasantly surprised to see my own name listed among the likes of Werner Puschitz, Jonathan Lewis, Howard Rogers and my new locker buddy Laurent Schneider. Jeremy Schneider is conspicuously absent, hopefully that gets...
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What Is NULL?
Today in #oracle, Burk0 asked:<Burk0> mmm... got another problem... I'm using a "insert or update" trigger for my previous task. When I'm inserting a new row, I'd like the varchar field "oldvalue" to report "NA". I put an IF inside the trigger, checking if :old.id=null but that doesn't seem to...
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Oracle Licensing (or: WTF Partitioning?!)
I came across this post about Oracle partitioning licensing a couple weeks ago (yes I'm catching up with all the blogging). In it, Mathias basically doesn't think that partitioning should be separately licensed at all, and included in ALL versions of Oracle.For those of you who haven't had the pleasure:To...
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Perils and Pitfalls in Oracle Partitioning: Bind Variables?
Recently one of my developers found some articles by Arup Nanda while researching a query performance problem. The articles were title "Perils and Pitfalls in Partitioning," parts 1 and 2.In particular he was curious about this statement in part 2:While using partitioning, should you use bind variables? This is an...
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