Revenge of the Multibyte Characters

In The Netherlands, where I'm from, we do have Multibyte characters. Names with diacritic characters occur frequently.
In a prior post I've written about using Oracle text to perform diacritic searches.

This post is about the table definition. Every now and then this problem rears its ugly head, that's why I decided to write this little note on it.

(Non Oracle): Shocking Truth

Do you know what it looks like when a couple of guys are trying out how much electricity runs through an electric fence?



The guys in this clip are my nephews Michiel, Randy, and Jesper. During a family reunion gettaway they couldn't resist trying out the electirc fence across the street... My brother just happened to be filming...

Planboard Symposium, the day after.

Yesterday the Planboard Symposium, a symposium for DBA presented by DBA, took place in Driebergen, The Netherlands.
The setup of this conference is a little different from what I'm used to. Only two parallel sessions to choose from with lots of time in between the sessions, which is nice for networking.
For everybody who attended my session, a big "Thank you". For everybody who decided to attend Harald's session, you missed out on something good, and I finished on time ;)
As a consolodation price for those of you that didn't attend the Planboard Symposium, here is my presentation.

Edition Based Redefinition

View more presentations from AlexNuijten.

An Empty Clob is not NULL, it's NOT NULL

Oracle recommends using CLOB instead of LONG for columns in the database. We all know this, right? Using CLOB is a lot easier than trying to manipulate LONG. Makes our life a lot easier.
But there is something about using CLOBs that I didn't know. As you might have guessed from the title it has to do with NULL...

Create Users with DBMS_METADATA

Not too long ago I wrote a blog on using DBMS_METADATA to extract DDL for tables, so when I got an assignment to migrate Users I immediately thought of using DBMS_METADATA to do this.

The User Migration would consist of all the users in the database being renamed following a new convention. Don't ask why they wanted this, they had some very good reasons to want so.
All the users had to be recreated along with all their privileges to their new name.
At first I thought of writing all sorts of queries against the datadictionary which sounded like a daunting task. On second thought it dawned to me that a CREATE USER statement is DDL and DDL can be extracted using DBMS_METADATA.
Google is your friend at times like that. Turned out you can use DBMS_METADATA to generate the CREATE USER statement, very easily.

Importing an Excel into an Oracle database

There are several ways to do this, but I will only show you how to do this using SQL Developer. Why? Because I just came across this functionality the other day.
However there are some things you have to pay attention to, you might get frustrated with it otherwise.

Oracle PL/SQL Programming Preview

This post will be mainly in Dutch. It's about a Preview we are doing in our office in Nieuwegein, The Netherlands.
The sessions will probably be in Dutch, but can be changed on the fly to English if desired.
If you are not able to make it to our office, you still have a chance to see Patrick do his presentations in Atlanta, Georgia during the Oracle PL/SQL Programming Conference, November 10 and 11.
You can register by following this link.

Our Event in Nieuwegein will be on October 20 (Thanks Erik for pointing out the date was missing)

Here is the agenda for this evening:

De Oracle PL/SQL Programming conference vind dit jaar in Atlanta, Georgia plaats. Patrick Barel is daarbij om een drietal presentaties te geven. Voor degene die niet aanwezig zullen zijn in Atlanta vind deze OPP-Preview plaats.
Tijdens deze KC zal Patrick twee van deze presentaties geven.
Na het diner zal Alex een re-run geven van zijn ODTUG presentatie: "SQL Holmes".

Het programma voor deze avond:
16:30
"Pipelined table functions" - Patrick Barel
Pipelined table functions offer an ideal convergence of the elegance and simplicity of PL/SQL with the performance of SQL. Complex data transformations are effortless to develop and support with PL/SQL, yet to achieve high-performance data processing, we often resort to set-based SQL solutions. Pipelined functions bridge the gap between the two methods effortlessly, but they also have some unique performance features of their own, making them a superb performance optimization tool.

18:00
diner: Chinees

Na diner (rond 19:00):
"SQL Holmes: The Case of the Missing Performance" - Alex Nuijten
During this presentation, a case study is unfolded to reveal the true cause of a slow performing query. Did the database just "have a bad day"? Was the evil DBA to blame? The PL/SQL developer who didn't get enough coffee? Or was it the application sending the "wrong" query in the first place?
In this classic "whodunnit" you will take a tour past the crime scene. Investigate the query, use the tools of the trade and collect all the relevant information. Follow the trail to uncover the truth and nothing but the truth...

20:00
Ter afsluiting:
"Optimizing SQL with Collections" - Patrick Barel
Collections (array-like structures in PL/SQL) are used in two of the most important performance features of PL/SQL: FORALL and BULK COLLECT. This session demonstrates the power of these features and offers in-depth guidance on how to apply them.