I’ve been looking into how Vagrant and/or Docker can be used to improve the life of DBAs and maybe others, too. I did this mostly to practice using these tools – especially Docker – that are becoming more and more important…

I’ve written previously about “Oracle Live SQL”, a free service from Oracle where you can try your coding skills and learn using its vast code library. Today I want to mention one of its other features which may not be…

It was a Thursday morning. I started my day at work and found out that I was tasked with running a test upgrade to 11.2.0.4 right on Friday. This is just to make clear that I did not have much…

My colleague and friend Gleb Otochkin has already blogged about installing 18c – Installing Oracle 18c using command line – but I thought that I would share my experience. My plan was to upgrade my 12.2 pluggable database to 18c…

If you’re not familiar with the Oracle Live SQL environment, then you should definitely try it. I wrote a blog some time ago on what it is and how to work with execution plans there. Here I will provide an…

This is the same plugin that Alex Gorvachev created back in the day. I’ve simply modified it to be compatible with both 12c and 13c versions. I created this in response to a comment on the blog about issues deploying…

A recent Twitter thread had an interesting test case of the optimizer choosing sub-optimal skip scan over range scan. I’ve checked what’s going on, and it happens to be a known bug. Here’s a slightly simplified test case: We have…

It has been almost a year since the last Open World where Oracle CTO and founder Larry Ellison proclaimed the new upcoming fully autonomous cloud database service. It created a lot of attention and almost everybody in the Oracle community…

Welcome to Part 6 of the series. The USE_PARTITION_WISE_GBY hint is “brand new,” introduced in 12.2. I personally welcome this hint as I’ve cursed many times in the past due to the lack of control for this aspect of parallelism…

Recenty, Oracle EBS ATG’s team announced a new certification: “Oracle Grid 12c Release 2 (12.2) Certified with RAC 12.1 and EBS 12.2“. This is a very new kind of certification, which is different from their previous certifications related to RAC databases….