January Blues?

Q: Erin, spell mouse.
A: M O U S.
Q: Yes–and what’s on the end of it?
A: A tail?

Happy New Year! We’re well and truly back into the swing of things and over half-way through January! Have the January blues? Read our first blog of 2019 and some of the latest news.

Blogs of the week

Installing Sample Data for Oracle Database

Jeff Smith blogs about the free data out there to play with, and you just have to go grab it! Like this and also this.

2. Basic SQL: All about Sequences

Sven Weller begins by saying:

“There are still a lot of misunderstandings about Oracle sequences. Sometimes even experts tell you things about sequences that are easy to misunderstand, especially if we look into the details. The following post wants to give a detailed overview about what are sequences, why they work as they do, and how we should use them.

There are also a lot of parameters that the sequence object has and that you can use to tweak the behaviour. I will cover the most common things here.”

3. Oracle VM 3.4.6 : Part 6 – OVM Block Storage

Ron Ekins says, “In this post I will show how block storage can also be configured for use with OVM.”

4. Jeux sans Frontières, Games without Borders, Dimensions without Surrogate Keys

Pete Scott introduces his blog by writing, “Last month I presented two talks at the UKOUG Tech 18 conference in Liverpool. In my first talk I discussed whether the star schema is a dead concept now we are in a world of multiple sources, event streams and status change tracking. I also attended a short talk on data warehousing “design mistakes” presented by David Kurtz of Accenture Enkitec. Now here is an interesting dichotomy between my (not necessarily Oracle) and David’s Oracle example world; the use of surrogate keys.”

5. Cloning Around

David Fitzjarrell writes, “Sometimes it’s necessary to clone an existing ORACLE_HOME; one case for this is when the business requires a new ORACLE_HOME when CPU patchsets are applied. With some operating systems cloning a home is simply a matter of creating a suitable archive (tar, pax, cpio) and extracting the contents to the destination directory. Some operating systems, however, aren’t as well-mannered. Linux is one such operating system and cloning an ORACLE_HOME requires the use the Universal Installer to set things ‘right’ once the copy has completed. Unfortunately this cloning process tends to have issues of its own; one such issue is the setting of the ddl_lock_timeout parameter. Let’s look at the process, the error and how to get around it.”

6. 2018 – what grabbed your attention?

Connor McDonald shares his most popular blog posts of 2018.

7. Data Guard – Unexpected Lag

Neil Chandler says, “When configuring a physical standby database for Oracle using Data Guard, you need to create Standby Redo logs to allow the redo to be applied in (near) real time to the Standby. Without standby redo logs, Oracle will wait for an entire Archive Log to be filled and copied across to the standby before it will apply changes, which could take quite a while. Which leads me to the problem I encountered a while ago, and due to being forgetful, still encounter today when creating standby redo logs in Oracle 12C and 18C.”

8. Connecting to Microsoft SQL Server database from Oracle SQL Developer

Norm Bowen says, “If you work primarily with Oracle databases, you may use SQL Developer. But you may also need to connect to Microsoft SQL Server databases and not necessarily want to install a new front-end database tool, such as Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS).”

He also links to this video

9. Visualization – Santa Style

Cathye Pendle writes about data visualization and wrapping presents!

10. Understanding, Building and Using Neural Network Models using Oracle 18c

Brendan Tierney says, “Oracle 18c Database brings prominent new machine learning algorithms, including Neural Networks and Random Forests. While many articles are available on machine learning, most of them concentrate on how to build a model. Very few talk about how to use these new algorithms in your applications to score or label new data. This article will explain how Neural Networks work, how to build a Neural Network in Oracle Database, and how to use the model to score or label new data. What are Neural Networks?”

He links to this post and shares this 2 minute Tech Tip video: