One of the headline recommendations during the Real World Performance groups presentations at Openworld 2007 was to review your parameter files as part of your upgrade process. It sounds like simple common sense, but they suggested that inappropriate parameter settings that had been implemented during version 7 days for long forgotten reasons were often the root cause of performance problems on 9i or 10g databases that they were asked to investigate. One of their first actions was to review the parameters carefully and question them.

After my last post about SQL*Net message to client wait event I had a follow-up question about what’s the difference between SQL*Net message to client and SQL*Net more data to client wait events.

In a recent Oracle Forum thread a question came up how to use SQL*Net message to client wait events for measuring network latency between server and client. The answer is that you can’t use it for network latency measurements at all, due how TCP stack works and how Oracle uses it.

Just how popular is PL/SQL? And how many PL/SQL developers are there “out there”? These are surprisingly hard questions to answer. Officially and even unofficially, Oracle Corporation’s point people on PL/SQL do not have any idea (or refuse to say) how many PL/SQL developers there are.

I have so far avoided writing such pointer blog posts which only refer you to another article, but I have to do it with this one. Adrian Billington has written an excellent article on performance of Oracle 11g PL/SQL function result cache.

I read this post by Laurent Schneider yesterday. In the comment section Tom Kyte already explained what the issue was about, but I’ll expand this explanation a little.
The question was why should the apparently invalid statement below work? I mean there is no such column nor number as “1.x”), yet the statement works ok:
SQL> select [...]

That number in the title is not a joke or an attempt to drag out the pain. However, OraNA has been flooded with ‘8′ posts this week, so I thought it worthwhile to post a quick list of some really nice technical posts I’ve noticed over the last couple of weeks. I was just waiting for a weekend opportunity to clean out my pockets, so to speak.

Oracle has evolved over time to much more than just a plain relational database. One option is to use Oracle as an expensive calculator.
When researching or demoing Oracle, it’s quite convenient to do number calculations directly on sqlplus prompt, especially if dealing with internals where lots of stuff is about addresses and offsets shown in [...]

You will find below an excerpt from my latest publication: the 2^nd edition of Oracle PL/SQL Best Practices. This edition is a complete rewrite of the 1^st edition. I decided that since software is still, for the most part, written by humans, I would create a cast of characters who write the software I reference and critique in this book.

I was once asked a question, why does Oracle change its parameter count during session lifetime?
The question arose from the following observation that v$parameter shows more parameters after you adjust some hidden parameter value:
SQL>
SQL> select count(*) from v$parameter;