Joining on substrings

Jonathan Lewis shared an example of joining two tables where the joining field on table is comprised of two fields on the other table. The original poster thought he'd need to re-design his table, but Jonathan proved otherwise with the grace and efficiency of a true Englishman.Definitely good to know!... [Read More]

LOL/SQL?

It started with the LOLCATS. Then we had the ORLY thing and the "in ur base" thing. It's all one big conglomeration now, and it has belched forth LOLCODE. I'm told there is a parser/compiler for LOLCODE, but my head hurts just thinking about it.But it does beg the question... [Read More]

CSALTER requires a clean CSSCAN

Following up to my last post, it turns out that CSALTER requires you to have clean data and produce a clean CSSCAN within 7 days prior to running the character set migration script.If the CSSCAN isn't clean, you'll get this:Checking data validility... Exceptional data found in scanner result PL/SQL procedure... [Read More]

Changing Oracle Database Character Sets

Our big application database has a character set of USASCII7, something left over from before my time here (approaching 6 years now). We've recently seen "errors" in some of the applications caused by characters being loaded into the database that are outside of the USASCII7 domain, namely "ú" and "ñ".... [Read More]

An end to my Oracle listener hanging

Over the weekend I have become obsessed with two things: the Allman Brothers Band and Jeremy Schneider's diagnosis of the listener/ONS bug found in Oracle 10.2.0.2. The former due to "Jessica" being in the playlist for Guitar Hero II, the latter because not only did it provide me a rhyme... [Read More]