Courtesy of Jonathan Lewis, I present you with LNNVL(). For those of you who forget to consider the possibility of NULL values in your query predicates, this could be a godsend. Should clean up a lot of predicates that had to use OR cases just to separately check for NULLs.As...
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Data and Datatypes
Somehow while reading through some Oracle blogs this weekend, I found myself re-reading a post from Tom Kyte last year about mis-used datatypes. Such things as people using string datatypes to hold date values, or people using VARCHAR2(4000) for every field in every table. Tom does a fantastic job (as...
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Stealing My Material: or How I Though of Blogging About v$sql_bind_capture before hali did
This past Wednesday in #oracle, I asked how one views what values are being used in a SQL statement with bind variables. hali led me to v$sql_bind_capture. We played with some joins to v$sql and v$session and all was well. I immediately recognized the blog-worthiness of the discussion and tagged...
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Role Showdown: CONNECT vs RESOURCE
Today in #oracle, a question on privileges led me to discuss the Oracle roles CONNECT and RESOURCE. These two roles are often misused, especially RESOURCE. Jon Emmons highlights this in an old blog post. Important to note is that the CONNECT role contained a lot of dangerous extras up until...
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What is so special about SYSDBA?
Last night in #oracle, someone new to Oracle had some confusion with the SYSDBA privilege. I proceeded to drop some science on him, but here's a basic primer:Only a user with the SYSDBA privilege can startup or shutdown an instance.The oracle OS user can "connect / as sysdba" without providing...
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