A few more of the latest…

Did you hear about the monkeys who shared an Amazon account?

They were Prime mates.

Onto this week’s blogs, news and videos…

Blogs of the week

pgbench retry for repeatable read transactions — first (re)tries

Franck Pachot begins by saying, “In a previous post I was running pgBench on YugaByteDB in serializable isolation level. But Serializable is optimistic and requires that the transactions are re-tried when failed. But pgBench has no retry mode. There was a patch proposed in several commit fests for that, but patch acceptance is a long journey in PostgreSQL.”

2. Financial Services Company Saves more than $2M in Oracle Related Costs with VXFLEX Integrated Rack

This blog starts with, “For four years, this financial services company had been running Oracle Exadata on their Oracle databases. During that time, database administrators managed the Exadata infrastructure themselves but as the environment grew to six Exadata systems they struggled to keep up with the day-to-day care and maintenance of those systems. Having experienced multiple performance inconsistencies, the lean IT team of eight people required the infrastructure team to become involved…”

It then links to the case study here.

3. Oracle APEX Radio Group null option fix

Scott Wesley shares, “APEX 5.1 introduced a template option that transformed radio groups into pill buttons. I love this concept, it makes for a pleasant UI – an easier target for mouse clicks and finger taps.
I liked it so much I tried to do this myself prior to 5.1.”

He shares his problem – an issue with the way the null option presents for these radio groups – it’s not in the same row and gives a possible solution – but asks, is there a better way?

4. Autonomous Database – for APEX developers

Webinar Registration (October 3rd) – Not to be missed if you are an APEX developer!

The topics and exercises:
1. Adding machine learning to an APEX application. Make your application intelligent!
2. Leveraging important enterprise database features: Auto-scaling, security, automatic performance tuning, et cetera.
3. Adding Analytics to an APEX application. Learn the basics of analytics and how to deeply integrate it with your application.

Each participant will receive a trial cloud environment to do the exercises.

5. REST Enabled Views & Primary Keys

Jeff Smith writes, “Got this question from a friend late last week…

I created a new schema (API) and within that schema a view based upon a table…like

create view my_data as select * from hr.data

/

I REST enabled my API schema.
I REST enabled my_data view

Calling /ords/api/my_data/1 returns a 500

And my reply was, it’s a bug.

He says that his real answer should have been: Your VIEW needs a Primary Key.”

6. SOASuite Composite Sensors: The Why and How…

This blog starts with, “Long time ago BPEL PM was acquired by Oracle, and as part of the first release of SOA Suite (10g), it was a more or less standalone component. For initiated BPEL flow instances in the soa infrastructure database there were 2 tables:

cube_instance: bpel flow instances
ci_indexes: 6 indexes related to the bpel flow that can be set with an embedded java call

It also links to these docs.

7. Parameter REMOTE_LISTENER pointing to a TNS alias? Beware of how it registers

This blog begins with, “On an Oracle Database instance, if I set:

1	alter system set remote_listener=‘cluster-scan:1521’;

The instance tries to resolve the cluster-scan name to detect if it is a SCAN address.
So, after it solves, it stores all the addresses it gets and registers to them.
I can check which addresses there are with this query:

SQL> select type, value from v$listener_network where type=‘REMOTE LISTENER’;

TYPE VALUE

—————- —————————————————————————————————

REMOTE LISTENER (DESCRIPTION=(CONNECT_DATA=(SERVICE_NAME=))(ADDRESS=(PROTOCOL=TCP)(HOST=10.0.0.1)(PORT=1521)))

REMOTE LISTENER (DESCRIPTION=(CONNECT_DATA=(SERVICE_NAME=))(ADDRESS=(PROTOCOL=TCP)(HOST=10.0.0.2)(PORT=1521)))

REMOTE LISTENER (DESCRIPTION=(CONNECT_DATA=(SERVICE_NAME=))(ADDRESS=(PROTOCOL=TCP)(HOST=10.0.0.3)(PORT=1521)))

In this case, the instance registers to the three addresses discovered, which is OK: all three SCAN listeners will get service updates from the instance.”

8. OML Notebooks Interpreter Bindings

Brendan Tierney shares, “When using Oracle Machine Learning notebooks, you can export and import these between different projects and different environments (from ADW to ATP). But something to watch out for when you import a notebook into your ADW or ATP environment is to reset the Interpreter Bindings.”

9. More VR Misdirection

Stephen Few writes, “Since writing the short article that appeared in this blog a week ago titled “The Incompatible Marriage of Data Visualization and VR,” I learned indirectly that my skepticism about VR’s role in data visualization was opposed by Erin Pangilinan, the chief editor of a new book about VR titled Creating Augmented & Virtual Realities: Theory & Practice for Next-Generation Computing (O’Reilly Media, 2019). Pangilinan wrote chapter 9 of the book, titled “Data and Machine Learning Visual Design and Development in Spatial Computing,” which promotes VR’s usefulness for data visualization.”

He ends his blog by saying, “As I see it, there’s a long list of ways in which flat-screen data visualization tools could be improved that would offer known benefits. For now, isn’t that where our focus should remain? If we really want to “become closer to our data and solve humanity’s problems,” we must focus on what actually works.”

10. New Sailing League Takes Off, Powered by Oracle Technology: