The Case for the Case Statement

Oracle 9i introduced the CASE Statement and CASE Expressions.
Some say that the CASE statement is a drop-in replacement of the IF statement, but there is a subtle difference between these two.
In this post I will explain the difference between the Case statement and the IF statement. Sometimes it's "better" to change the IF statement to a CASE statement.

Best Wishes

Let SQL do the talking:

select decode
      (sign (floor (maxwidth/2) - rownum)
      ,1, lpad (' ', floor (maxwidth/2) - (rownum -1))
         ||rpad ('*', 2 * (rownum -1), ' *')
      ,lpad ('* * *', floor (maxwidth/2) + 3)) "Merry Christmas"
from all_objects
,    (select 40 as maxwidth from dual)
where rownum < floor (maxwidth/2) + 5

... and in case your wondering what the result would be, I added a screenshot.

ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2010: Accepted Abstract

My presentation on Analytic Functions is accepted for the ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2010 conference. The other abstract that I sent in is an alternate, standby if you will. As you can see on the right side, I have attended (and presented) at the ODTUG yearly conference since 2005.

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...