Blog Aggregator - Amardeep Sidhu

This is the first place I am announcing this: The Pythian Group has made me a Team Lead. I am extremely honored and somewhat humbled by this, and I am determined to do a good job. I started officially on Monday, March 3rd, and my first week went pretty well.
On […]

For many years I had an interest in non-standard indexing and exotic data types, that is things that weren’t NUMBER or VARCHAR2. In fact before I came in to data warehousing I was involved in indexing free text such as conversation transcripts and and narrative reports; some of this was pushing the technology of the […]

Some of you might be aware that apart from chairing the UKOUG Business Intelligence & Reporting Tools SIG, I also co-chair (with Kent Graziano) the Oracle Developer Tools User Group (ODTUG) BI & Data Warehousing SIG, which meets every few months at events such as ODTUG Kaleidoscope, Oracle Open World and so on.
One thing Kent, […]

I’ve already written a few posts regarding concatenated indexes and things to consider (and not consider) when deciding the column order of a concatenated (composite) index.
A comment I see from time to time is that the whole question of column order within an index is now somewhat redundant anyways as Oracle since 9i has introduced the Index […]

The document below contains patterns of bad SQL and PL/SQL code that Gojko Adzic has repeatedly found in various applications and databases. Some of the bad practices include:

Use of WHEN OTHERS in exception handling.
Embedding complex SQL inside PL/SQL code.
Poor PL/SQL error handling.
Hardcoding the size of PL/SQL variables.
Not using bind variables.
Storing ROWIDs for later reference.
Storing […]

From time to time I’ve commented on the fact that setting cursor_sharing to force or similar may be a temporary workaround to bad coding practises, but that it can introduce problems, has a few associated bugs, and shouldn’t  be viewed as a guaranteed, or long-term, solution.
I don’t think I’ve ever published any specific examples, though, […]