No surprises with Oracle 12c Identity Column performance

Oracle 12c introduced the Identity Column. You can find out more about this feature in the new features guide and within the CREATE TABLE documentation. In this article I will use Tom Kyte’s run stats utility to compare the performance of the IDENTITY column with the explicit use of a sequence object. The script below will be used to […]

The most important reason why you should know how to use PL/SQL Conditional Compilation.

….is that when you really need to, it allows you to turn up your applications instrumentation  to 11. A 30 second PL/SQL Conditional Compilation overview PL/SQL Conditional compilation was introduced with Oracle Database 10gR2. The official documentation  explains how to use the Conditional Compilation constructs but doesn’t give too many use cases. Fortunately the Oracle White Paper […]

An introduction to Application Context

The inspiration for this article came from reading Mark Hoxey excellent post on avoiding ORA-04068: existing state of packages has been discarded One of the potential solutions to this problem suggested by Mark is to use Application Context. I didn’t know too much about Application Context so this post is my way of documenting and sharing what […]

Oracle PL/SQL Compiler warning PLW-06009

The PL/SQL Compiler warning “PLW-06009: procedure “string” OTHERS handler does not end in RAISE or RAISE_APPLICATION_ERROR”  was introduced with 11g release 1. It’s purpose is to alert you to the fact that you have a WHEN OTHERS exception handler and the last statement within it doesn’t contain a RAISE or a RAISE_APPLICATION_ERROR statement. The first example […]

Instrumenting your PL/SQL code

Introduction As an exceptional Oracle Developer you already know the value of instrumenting your code. You have read enough of Tom Kyte, Cary Millsap & Steve McConnell to understand that with the correct instrumentation diagnosing problems especially time critical problems (are there any others?) becomes much easier. So the question is not why you should instrument your […]