What should I know about SQL?

Chris Saxon from the Developer Advocates group asked the following question on Twitter.

What three things do you think every developer must know about #SQL ?

Reply and share yours!

— Chris Saxon (@chrisrsaxon) July 5, 2016

My immediate thought regarded features I'd be disappointed to live without. Looking at some other responses I realise that the answer matches Tom Kyte's creed: "it depends".

Here is a collection of responses that I think sums(sql) really well, syntax pun = intended.

What feature should I know, to be productive & efficient?
(me)
1. analytics
2. scalar subqueries
2. with clause

What fundamental principles should I understand?
(Stew Ashton)
1. DDL: data design is key to good SQL
2. ACID
3. Bind variables

What frequent mechanics/behaviour should I be consistently aware of?
(me)
1. null behaviour
2. date arithmetic
3. data type comparison issues, for lack of better desc

All the while remembering architecture is so important.
(Dani Schnider)
1. SQL is a set-based language
2. Clean data model is important
3. Constraints are not just for fun

and so is performance
(Draft A Center? Or Kyle Hailey posting from wrong account?)
1, Bitmap Indexes
2. Reading Explain Plans
3. SQL Tracing

Why there are often exceptions to rules:
(That Jeff Smith)
4. getting results back doesn't mean your code is right.
5. learning never stops

For the creative out there.
(David Fitzjarrell)
6. There is usually more than one way to write a query.
7. Sometimes you need to think 'different'

And there's always the "comedian".
(Connor McDonald)
select, from, where :-)

That's quite the collection!

Perth AUSOUG Conference - Day 3 options

This year's Perth AUSOUG conference doesn't end on day 2 - you are three options to extend your learning into day 3:

1. Oracle database technologists simply musn't miss the Real World Performance day with Tom Kyte, Graham Wood & Andrew Holdsworth. I attended this last year in Sydney and talk about value for money!
2. Oracle E-Business Reporting users might be interested in attending a breakfast thanks to LogicalTech.
3. Primavera users may be interested in an all day SIG to help them with a wide range of topics and find other Primavera users within Perth.

And if you haven't even registered for the conference yet, you have only a week to do so - this year is going to be a ripper! It's in the Perth CBD and we have a great line up, lots of exhibitors & I've heard about a few dinners being organised already ;-)

Scott

2012 Conference Program Announced

Today the program for the 2012 Perth AUSOUG Conference was announced.

First of all, I know it will be a Monday morning but there is a reason not to miss the opening address - we have invited ultra marathon runner Bernadette Benson to talk to us about the discipline it takes to stay focused.

Now  it's hard to limit to the just the highlights, but here goes:

Oracle

It's a conference talking about Oracle after all, and here are some of the strengths they're bringing to the table

• Tom Kyte - it doesn't matter what they are, and there's two of them!!! 
• Tom Kyte - did I mention he's doing two presentations?
• Chris Muir - with some JDeveloper 12c announcements and ADF new features
• Melanie Caffrey - talking DBA stuff on auditing with flashback and testing with edition based redefinition
• John Hansen - Fusion strategic roadmap
• Graham Wood - Active Session History (ASH)
• Keith Laker - settles the debate on Big Data
• Cliff Godwin - EBS strategy & GM update
• Chris Muir - Developing for smart devices - web & native 

Mobile

It seems the buzz-word this year is mobile development, and this offering won't drown you with it - but instead offers a great cross-examination of what's out there. These are on top of Chris Muir's smart-devices talk.

• Penny Cookson - with some help from Chris Noonan will impress us with JDeveloper ADF dashboards on iPads - yep, it'll be interactive 
• Scott Wesley (me) - another interactive foray into APEX mobile (powerpoint free)
• Kevin Payne - case study involving mobile development
• Mark Lancaster - bootstrapping APEX for all devices

Development

Are you a developer? I'm positive there is something for you in every time-slot - starting with these selections

• Matthew Carrigy - case study on government project converting Forms to JDeveloper ADF
• Jeff Kemp - guiding us through Alexandria, and another on some Oracle DB gotchas
• David Wilkes - beginner's guide to SQL, PL/SQL
• Connor McDonald - SQL Tuning 101
• Connor McDonald - Analytics
• Gabriel Ilarda - SQL Data Modeler

DBA

The community is strong in Perth, so we've got to cover many bases.

• Tim Middleton - Web Logic Server 12
• Yury Velikanov - Direct NFS
• Damon Grummet - Case study on ODA
• Barbara Rabinowicz - Oracle VM for beginners
• Marc Fielding - Large scale consolidation
• Arjen Visser - Replication concepts
• Gavin Soorma - 11g Optimizer plan stability

EBS

E-Business Suite and other Fusion applications are another must.

• Dr Patricia Dues - BI case study in the public sector; and EBS R12 upgrade
• Howard Ong - looking at the current state of Business Intelligence
• Tony Scholefield - R12 upgrade case study
• Valery Hickey - Cloning EBS
• Andrew Howard - Oracle Spatial case study
• Jags Jawalekar - Oracle iProcurement

And then some...

In addition to the standard schedule, we have some other events over the 3 day period from 29th-31st October

• Full day (day 3) - Real World Performance with Tom Kyte, Andrew Holdsworth & Graham Wood. I went this last year in Sydney and it's a must for DBAs and developers. Not only that, it's great value.
• Half day (day 2) - Sysadmin training workshop on Linux / Solaris 
• Primavera SIG (day 3)
• Exhibitors - we have regulars, plus Amazon Web Services will have a booth to answer your cloud questions
• Welcome reception (day 1) - Let of some steam and enjoy some drinks & nibbles with speakers, delegates, exhibitors & user group committee members.
• WIN - a trip to attend Collaborate 2013

There's even more, and no doubt I've forgotten some sessions that will be a highlight for you.

We'll close off day 2 with some thanks from Susan Rooney, Cancer Council CEO & the prize draws.

Register now! Early bird special finishes next week.

Scott Wesley

Program Chair

2012 Perth AUSOUG Conference

2012 Perth Conference Abstracts

Just a quick note - abstract submissions for the 2012 AUSOUG Perth Conference have been extended to the 27th August... just say'n.

Head here for more info
http://www.ausoug.org.au/2020/

---

In other news, Penny & I will be at the Insync conference next week. I'm on Wednesday afternoon - but I think my different presentation technique should keep you sustained after the lunchtime feast. Not sure when Penny is, but be sure to seek us out and say hello. We look forward to seeing friends and meeting new ones.

If you're on twitter, I'll leave the green pigs up so keen an eye out for them @swesley_perth
And I'm sure @InSyncEvent will liven up shortly.
I might have some pigs with me, but they'll certainly be at the booth in Perth.

Also check out for the Western Australian Oracle User Group twitter feed - be gentle, it's still learning

Anyone considering attending, consider this - 2 day 5 stream Oracle conference, third day Real World Performance with Tom Kyte, Andrew Holdsworth and Graham Wood. Speakers at the conference will include local regulars Penny Cookson, Connor McDonald, Chris Muir (& myself), plus some of those not native to the Australian continent. We will announce those as we confirm them.

Plenty going on with the user group over next next few months. Wednesday's breakfast double header was a success - well done Anita, Kevin & Andi.
Another interesting topic next month by Jeff Kemp, plus I saw a few e-mails announcing other events. Get involved!

Scott

Turning maths into spelling with SQL

Awareness is fantastic.

I was aware that somehow in Oracle you could transform a number value into words. I googled a similar phrase and found a reliable location in seconds.

my sql*plus output:

SQL> column word format a10
SQL> /

    ROWNUM WORD
---------- ----------
         1 one
         2 two
         3 three
         4 four
         5 five

5 rows selected.

SQL> l
  1* select rownum, (to_char(to_date(rownum,'j'), 'jsp')) word from dual connect by level < 6
SQL>

I figure it would be a more hyperlink clickable option for displaying a small number of people. Might allow the mind to comprehend the number quicker, too. Neuroscientists?

I think it's also having important the awareness and quick access to trusted sites supporting your various hypotheses, therefore to round off this thought crumpet...

References:
I chose the AskTom result for the SQL, which I couldn't locate on the relevant documentation page.

The OTN thread I compared it to really started to nerd up on page 2/3...

Insync 2011 Day 3

First you may be thinking - hang on, there was only 2 days in the Insync conference, wasn't there?

Just like a PL/SQL boolean, there is true, false, and unknown to that statement.
Ooh, did I really go there?

True - there was two days of scheduled presentations.

False - like any conference, there are often fringe events scheduled before or after the main event.

Unknown - for those unfortunate enough not to have heard of the event, in the Sydney Convention & Exhibition Centre there was an extra day-long session entitled "A Day of Real World Performance". More information can be found here.

It was co-presented by

• Tom Kyte - author of AskTom - directing the core of the discussion with slides in a centre screen, providing a developer perspective.
• Graham Wood - Oracle Database Performance Architect - dishing out Enterprise Manager output as an Exadata box is manipulated
• Andrew Holdsworth - Head of Oracle's Real World Performance team.

It was less of your usual seminar style format, more of a conversational piece - which made it much easier to concentrate after two days of conference presentations. This style also made it more engaging. There was a general script, but Graham mentioned to me at one point that after nine roadshows, none ever really come out the same - I'm not surprised!

They kicked off by loading a terabtye of data into a remote Oracle Exadata box, then used that as a platform to discuss performance issues from compression to statement parsing to index use - but nothing like you've ever really seen before. Andrew kept tweaking settings in the exadata machine to show how they can affect performance - accompanied by a screen full of numbers whaling up and down; Graham showed pretty graphs that illustrated what was going on post-change; and Tom get adding his pearls of wisdom with his easy listening voice.

Mark Lancaster also described the event in his blog and I must agree - if this roadshow comes to a town near you, it is a must see. If you can't, try out the videos. They don't do it any justice, but apparently they have been used to sway decisions by the powers that be in the correct direction.

A little tip - don't book flights for conferences without checking/looking out for these events - I know a few people who missed out because they booked flights too early. Mind you, I also know there are a few people who flew up from Melbourne specifically for this day.

And to cap it off - Tony, Barbara & I finished the day with a beer overlooking Darling Harbour in a wonderful sunny Sydney afternoon.

... but then we had to head to the airport to go home...

Scott

Insync 2011 Day 2

My tip for surviving an interstate conference - sleep in the second day until as late as possible.

I walked in with time to grab a cup of tea and walk up to the first session. I chose Alex Peattie talking about an introduction to SOA for application integration to see where Oracle are pitching these days for their grand world of SOA. It was fairly entry level, but a thorough overview - a nice way to warm up.

It certainly would have been tough to warm up with Shan Nawaz talking about the top ten 11g features that aren't your usual top ten. It was a good idea for a presentation as one does get bored with hearing about the same glossy features all the time. For those curious, here are my interpretations of my quick scratches on the day

1. DBMS_PARALLEL_EXECUTE
2. DBMS_COMPARISON
3. Reproduce SQL test case (DBMS_SQL_DIAG)
4. Advanced compression (costed option)
5. Diagnose/Resolve failure with DRA
6. Multi-section backups
7. Database resident connection pool
8. Server consolidation
9. SQL*Plus error logging (sperrorlog)
10. Preprocessor

And yes, some of those are very cool.

The post-morning tea slot saw me torn again between Francisco Munoz on Oracle security tips and Marcelle Kratochvil convincing us to store unstructured data in the database. I ended up in Marcelle's, and while I can't compare to Francisco's session (Barbara thought it was excellent), I think Marcelle's was up there for the most engaging and thought provoking of the conference. It reminded me of Guy Harrison in Perth last year - his was less Oracle and more commentary on the direction of the computing world, but Marcelle really hit the nail on the head for the issues of tomorrow. Our technology isn't there yet for searching videos/images, protecting copyright etc, but Marcelle certainly convinced me by not putting this information into our database, we aren't exactly heading in the right direction! 

Before lunch, again two slots I wanted to see. I ended up with Connor McDonald talking statistics, which I will say is my favourite from his catalogue. I saw it previously in Perth, but was more than happy to be entertained once again. If you've never seen one of his presentations - it doesn't matter what the topic - you must see him at least once.

After lunch, torn again - sense a trend? I almost went to see an Australia Post case study on SOA, which apparently was packed - but I thought I'd learn a thing or two about Exadata from Tony Jambu, and get myself a mintie. Tony assessed the facts and myths to see if Oracle was pulling the wool over our eyes or if they really have the beez neez of hardware/software integration - turns out Oracle really does have the right stuff.

And we all saw some magic that involved Guy Harrison wondering if he was going to walk out of that session with a cup of water drained over his head. Great work, Tony.

After three sessions of indecision, I found myself struggling to pick something in the penultimate session. I ended up seeing Clancy Bufton introduce flashback queries and total recall. Not a new topic, but one I'm not completely familiar with. 

Now for the biggest scheduling issue of the conference - we had Mark Lancaster talking advanced Apex 4 UI; Tim Hall on edition-based redefiition; and Tom Kyte on SQL techniques.

I went the big name, which is a shame because it turns out I had seen this one before, and was very happy with my use of his suggested better practice. I was however glad to see and hear the younger generation (did I really say that?) talk about some of his suggestions and seek clarification with Tom afterwards. To me that indicates some success and progress within a conference. 

Tom certainly drew the crowd as Marc and Tim suggested afterwards some smaller than expected numbers. But that's ok, those who were there got an up close & personal, interactive discussion with them both.

So that concluded the conference proper - however I still had the evening and an extra day to survive. The evening made it easy. After a quick revival back at my room, 14 of us headed out for dinner. We tried once place only to find we wouldn't fit, but plan B was superb. We headed to South Styne - a floating restaurant in Darling Harbour. I enjoyed perfectly cooked kangaroo fillet with lovely spices and mash, chased down with a few king browns and good company. Thanks people, and I remember someone taking a group photo so no doubt I'll stumble across that in the near future - hopefully I can post it up.

Stay tuned, I have some more thoughts on this week to come.

Insync 2011 Day 1

Yeah, these posts are a little late, but boy - what a busy week it's been!

After a delayed flight from Perth (isn't that the norm?) I spent me late hours on Monday night tidying up my presentation. Unfortunately that lead to me staying up waaay past my bedtime, but nothing a fresh morning and a cup of tea wouldn't fix...

That, and a pretty sizzling conference intro by Dan Thurman! The introduction from Martin Power and Ian White was relatively brief, then John Bushell introduced Dan and advised us to sit back and enjoy. When Dan came out with his strut, Bill Paxton sounding accent and unwavering zeal, I think most of the audience was wondering what sort of cheesy slop were we in for.

It was however a very thought provoking display by a man who knew exactly who he was and how he was probably being judged. He tied in his thoughts and messages with the IT world quite well, no doubt with as much practice as he spends on his juggling and unicycling. Kudos to the user groups involved in bringing him over.

To the real content, however:
Tim Hall showed a decent group a new hidden way of cheaply cloning your database. The content was somewhat outside my area of expertise, but I enjoyed it regardless. I enjoy Tim's presentations and I'm glad he made it back to Australia.

Damien Bootsma from Embarcadero followed morning tea with a reminder to all about the best practices of capturing meta data for productive database development. That was pretty much his title, and while some of his messages may not have been new material for many, I'm never opposed to drilling into people the better ways of designing and managing your database.

Which is exactly what Tom Kyte did in his "Efficient PL/SQL" presentation before lunch. I heard a few people commenting afterwards that there wasn't the sizzle and awe they expected from and Oracle celebrity, but I thought Tom's message was loud and clear, and always needed. So many times do I see people coding without contemplating the messages Tom was delivering. I had seen a similar presentation from him before, but I didn't mind seeing it again and I hoped some of the newer Oracle people in the crowd took many notes!

After lunch I was torn between a database security talk by Victorian AUSOUG president Barbara Rabinowicz and 10 things I possibly didn't know about Oracle indexes by Canberra ACE Richard Foote. Tony Jambu somehow leaned me towards seeing Richard's show - which I must say was really interesting. A little esoteric, but I learned a few things to think about in future. Having met Barbara during the welcome reception later, I was a little disappointed I didn't see her security talk - but isn't that the peril of having many streams at a conference!

There was one more session before mine, and I ducked my head into Angus MacDonald from Oracle talking about what's next. I couldn't find the abstract, and it was quite hardware centric so I ducked back out to run through my "slides" before I was up.

I'll suspend commenting on my own presentation until another post - I'd like to go into some detail on things and not let it get lost amongst this commentary. The turnout was unfortunately a little low, I'm curious where all the people were - although Craig Shallahamer was on at the same time...

Afterwards I steeled myself for the final keynote of the day on cloud computing strategies by Roland Slee and Doug Hughes. I hadn't seen Doug speak before, and I liked his attitude. Let me suggest it was one of the least cliche Oracle keynotes I've attended ;-) I look forward to him coming to Perth soon.

As usual, the welcome reception was a welcome end to the first day. I found the right position to get quick dibs on the beer trays, although the food was a little exotic for my simple tastes. I formally met Barbara who was a delight to communicate with and get to know for the remainder of my time in Sydney. I also caught up with other interstate fellows such as Tony Scholefield & Tony Jambu - and we ended up deciding to meet up for dinner with some Oracle specialists who had earlier snuck away for a Sydney Meetup, which I meant to attend but got lost in the mayhem.

So we had a nice dinner with a group of very skilled technologists. I enjoyed some spanish cuisine sitting nearby Connor McDonald, Marcelle Kratochvil & Barbara. However Tony, Barbara and I thought we'd nick away afterwards to the IBM/RedRock party down the road. It had quietened by the time we got there, but it was a good opportunity to wind down after a very long day. Yep, that was only day one.

A mash of Oracle related thoughts

It's been almost a month since my last confession. I have plenty I want to say!

Australian Oracle User Group
As usual, there is various activity going on around the country.

July 14 2011 there is a one day Northern Region Conference at Jupiters Townsville. Kudos to Mark Lancaster et al for that one. It's a shame I can't be there.

August 16-17 2011 is this year's InSync conference. My paper has been accepted so I look forward to seeing & meeting old & new members of the Oracle community from around Australia and the world. This will be the largest Oracle event I've been to so far.

August 18 2011 there will be a Day or Real World Performance with Tom Kyte, Andrew Holdsworth & Graham Norwood. This has recently been announced and looks very attractive. I'll be looking out for more details on this - a similar event was recently at UK-OUG.

November 3-4 2011 will be my hometown's conference - Oracle with 20:20 Foresight, of which this year I have taken the reigns from Penny Cookson as the Program Chair. It will be an interesting and challenging task, and I look forward to what should be an even better event than last year. The call for papers is now open, so get your submissions in by August 10th.

In between all these events will be the regular branch meetings where you can catch a local presenter talking about anything Oracle. Aussie Oracle technologists - get in there!

And if you're not from Australia, I hope this isn't the only sort of plane that will get you here (think volcanic ash...)

So when you sit down to write or update your presentation, keep an eye out for tips such as these to create something outside the square.

Keep Yourself in the Loop
Oh so tempting to throw a PL/SQL pun in there, but I'll leave this the exception.
Steven Feuerstein and his team have been doing such a great job moving forward with the PL/SQL Challenge website, it's now in version 2.0.
In addition to a daily PL/SQL quiz, Steven has now launched a weekly SQL quiz and a weekly Apex quiz.

Now you don't have to play competitively or publicly rank yourself amongst the few thousand active players - but it is a great place to spend 5-10 minutes every day testing yourself on your general knowledge of Oracle technology. When I was first learning Oracle I spent a fair bit of time at asktom.oracle.com, this is another location you should bookmark and visit regularly. And on top of all this, Steven has given away almost US$30k in prizes - and it's not just for the winners. Granted, US$30K just isn't the same as AUD$30k these days, but it's worth the effort ;-)

And more kudos to Aussies Gary Myers and Jeff Kemp for ranking highly in the recent quarterly playoffs.

Oracle Training
What has been keeping my working life busy recently - in between the regular consulting - has been the influx of training request around the country. I only hope that planes will be flying regularly once the volcanic ash has settled down, otherwise I might have some disappointed customers!

It's end of financial year time, and it's great that so many companies out there want to keep their team skilled. I've been keeping our Apex notes up to date with all things Apex 4.0; our own Oracle Ace Director Chris Muir has been hitting it hard with numerous JDeveloper ADF workshops; plus we have our regular SQL training to keep your queries sharp, amongst our other courses.

If you're on the lookout for exceptional Oracle training, hit up Sage's website.

My Blog Layout
While nothing has changed yet, I plan to give this site a little revamp and bring it into 2011. I've learnt a few things along the blogging path, so keep an eye out for additions such as Google +1. It's such an interesting concept, and I'll be keeping an eye out to see where it goes down the rabbit hole. I read an interesting analysis at Phandroid, and webmasters can learn more about it at Google.
I also want to make it a little less clunky & boring and perhaps show that I have some of my sister's graphic design genes.

I'm even tempted to go Apex.

Around the Oracle Community
There have been a number of great posts by Oracle bloggers recently that I'd like to share if you haven't seen them already, or in case you missed them.

• Eddie Awad shared a short video by Tom Kyte talking about Oracle. It's good to see the occasional video instead of faceless text - it's just a shame our Australian networks just don't make it easy to see this content smoothly on our smartphones.
• Speaking of mobiles, Peter Raganitsch has been talking about theming on Apex for mobile devices.
• Apex 4.1 is moving forward, and one of the features I'm looking forward to working with is the Error Handling Improvements. If you haven't upgraded from Apex 3.x, why not?!
• Plug-ins is one area that I really need to catch up on, experts like Dan McGhan are doing all sorts of crazy work with Apex Plug-ins, demonstrating Apex as the flexible tool it is.
• And if you haven't heard or have forgotten, Oracle XE 11g has been released in beta. The world keeps on spinning

An Apex Book Everyone Must Have

And I simply can't go by without mentioning the latest Apress book Expert Oracle Application Express.

I had the wonderful opportunity of being a technical reviewer for this book, and it's simply stunning. You might see my ugly mug somewhere in the first few pages.

Not only that, as you've probably heard, proceeds of this book help support the families of Carl Backstom and Scott Spadafore.

Keep an eye out for other Apress books that are in the works, too. I have a feeling there are a few other good ones on the way ;-)

Now, back to the business of real(ish) work. I should be back to more regular postings from July.

ScottWe.

Insync 2010 - I wasn't there.

Hello everyone

I'm starting to see a bit of feedback from the Insync Conference 2010 in Melbourne Australia.

It seems Down Under we're still working on creating the conference vibe, but I'm impressed to find a dedicated (yet thin) blog for the Melbourne leg. Here I found interviews with Connor McDonald & Tom Kyte.

http://insync-conference.com.au/blog/?p=211

I'll note that video of Connor confirms that I'm not the only one that seems to associate alcohol consumption with Oracle. I noted in the latest AUSOUG Foresight Magazine, Marc Lancaster gave a warm review of my appearance at a Brisbane branch meeting - apparently I commented how wonderful the beer & pizza concept is, or something along those lines!

Congratulations to Jeff Kemp, who took out Steven's live PL/SQL Challenge.
http://feuerthoughts.blogspot.com/2010/08/plsql-challenge-live-event-in-melbourne.html
I was looking forward to the live challenge this Friday when Steven comes to Perth, but alas - I have a previous date with our wonderful coastal isle - Rottnest.

Next time, Kempy... next time ;-)

I do look forward to catching up with friends this year at the Perth's leg of the conference series in November, perhaps I'll see you there.

Friday Musings

I think it may have been Tom Kyte that originally got me onto Seth Godin, but Seth's latest post caught my eye. I'm furiously finishing off my latest presentation, while trying (and failing) fire up a HTTP server on my new laptop.


A slide every 12 seconds. 200 slides in all.

I tend to read most of his. They're succinct, precise, thought provoking. Creating a 200 slide presentation for a 40 minute block is quite a feat. I know Connor McDonald to have handed a stunned HR girl an eighty slide presentation for a 5 minute segment. He assured her it will take five minutes. It was a stunning presentation. His conference presentations are deserved winners.

I've tinkered with his style, which he picked up long ago from I can't remember where and made it his own. I've been trying to add in that style in my latest masterpiece, balance it with regular diagrams and code segments - which normally slow things down a touch.

If you can make it...
Apex and Oracle Text - Advanced Indexing Techniques Integrated with Application Express
From 16:15-1800, 14th Julye - Central TAFE, 140 Royal Street, East Perth
RSVP: WA AUSOUG President

It's a great time to learn about PL/SQL!

Yesterday I talked about a few good links I've seen for people who are interested in or want to learn more about Apex. Another good place to start is documentation.

Today I thought I'd offer some of the developer blogs that have stimulated my interest recently.

I think it was through Tom Kyte that I found Seth's blog. This entry about deadlines typifies his style - concise thought experiments to make you think about either your work or home life, however you'd like to apply it.

Tom also mentioned if you're in contact with 11g, it's simply amazing some of the neat little features popping up. You may only use these once in a blue moon, but if you're aware of it, I bet sometimes you're proud how elegant it is.

Even if you're not yet in reach of 11g, it doesn't hurt to learn about it in places such as the PL/SQL Challenge (but don't cheat, I think yesterday's question on bulk collect semantics was either aimed at the speed readers or ...) And you can start using these features today with features such as condition compilation.

Speaking of Steven, here's his new presentation "Golden Rules for Developers". In the vain of 2nd rule of Fight Club... perhaps an addition I'd like to suggest is "being able to explain your interpretation of the reason why these are golden rules" - especially before you read his presentation, based on the list Eddie Awad summarised.

For the visual people, Jeff Kemp reminded me me of the Volkswagen VW that was photographed with "Feature" as it's number plate. And for a random afternoon quiz, local Gary Myers offered this titbit.

For something deeper, Dutchman Alex Nuijten offered this about a bug bear of mine - implicit data-type conversion, well, how it can impact check constraints. Steven talked about another preach I practice - not using select  * in my code.

It's awesome how much good content there is out there, this just scratches the vast Oracle community.

How Developers should ask for help

Back in October ZDNet Australia posted a brief video interview of Tom Kyte describing How developers should ask for help (linked by Eddie Awad). I thought I'd mention it now since I was talking to a few colleagues at the recent AUSOUG Conference and they don't recall seeing the video.

When I was first learning Oracle, I spent about 20 minutes every morning reading entries on AskTom and learned a lot! You also get a feel for someone's personality when you continuously read responses to questions posted by all varieties of people. Frankly, Tom's a witty fellow. I especially like his oft used analogy of comparing apples to toaster ovens.

I also empathise with some of his pain in responding to questions that simply don't provide enough information. I must say I particularly agree with Dan Wilson's reply in the comments section. Regardless of the forum to which you may be posting a question, it's so important to provide a context, frame of reference, ins and outs etc.

Put yourself in Tom's shoes - what information would you like to receive from someone asking you a question about a technological problem? Do you want to hear "Why doesn't this query work?" or would you like to be provided with a really simple test case that provides you the ability to tinker straight away?

I also liked Tom's explanation of why he doesn't respond with RTFM. Not only is it important for everyone to learn by doing, it's also important for people to learn how to effectively find the correct documentation themselves - which should be the first step to nutting out a problem before you even consider approaching anyone. I'm passionate about documentation, and technical queries on Oracle functionality spurred me into writing my presentation on documentation usage.

Another analogy I find is when my eldest child tries to tell me about something in a book he's reading. Unless he puts it in context for me, I'm not really going to understand why it's funny. Or perhaps when I ask my father how to do some handy work around the house. I might ask him specifically how to do something, but if I don't even give him the bigger picture, he may not know to explain the even easier solution using different tools I wasn't even aware of.

This concept applies true to so many fields and situations.