die Seilerwerks

Count me among the many who naively assumed that using count(1) instead of count(*) was somehow faster or less resource-intensive when counting the number records in a select query. Herod over at Yet Another Oracle DBA provides some more evidence on top of Tom Kyte's previous smackdown.

I've got a backlog of Oracle stuffs to blog. In the words of my Data Structures professor at UW, "moer later."

Jonathan Lewis has a great piece on the importance of using bind variables in INSERT statements as well, avoiding expensive check constraint revalidation.

There is never, NEVER, N E V E R a reason to store passwords as clear text in a database. No matter how convenient it is for your own personal preference.Any aspiring application developers reading this: NEVER. Salt-n-hash is such an easy thing to do in most any language now,... [Read More]

Back when I was researching how to format strings in java, I was dismayed that there wasn't built-in sprintf() functionality. There was a non-standard class written by some folks at Sun called PrintfFormat. Still, not the same.Yesterday I was reminded that such a thing was supposed to have been implemented... [Read More]