Oracle at Home: The Results

Almost 70% of you responded that you do not have Oracle installed at home. That was a bit of a shocker to me.

I figured that it would be the other way around; people who read blogs, Oracle blogs specifically, would be more likely to have Oracle installed at home.

So, why not?

Oracle at Home

I participated in an interview today. One of the questions I usually ask is "Do you have Oracle installed at home?"

It's more a question to gauge their nerdiness than anything, see if they're obsessed like me. Does it always mean that they aren't smart or capable? No, not really. That will come out through the other technical questions. For me at least, it does indicate a curiousity about how the software works.

So, do you have Oracle installed at home?

Oracle Docs New Look

Oracle Docs New Look

Today I opened my List of Books page, opened up the Java Developer's Guide and voila!, a new look:



I had seen this in the 11g documentation but this was the first time I had seen it spread elsewhere. I can't say I like it either. Too fancy.

That's scary...change scares me? What? Oh well, I'll get used to it and someday wonder how I lived without it, just like the iPhone!

Validating a Process Part II

Continued from my previous post.

While discussing external tables with my feisty colleague some time back, I explained that I liked using them but I couldn't figure out how to change the file name to match that of what was defined in the table definition.

Colleage to the rescue:

ALTER TABLE table_name LOCATION ( 'new_file_name.csv' );

Cool!

As I mentioned before, I had 4 files types I had to read: 820 and 835, both of the x12 format and two custom file layouts (flat files essentially). Since no one in the group knows Java yet, I wanted to keep the Java portion of the application as small as possible. So with the two custom files, I decided to use external tables. I could then put into practice the above ALTER TABLE statement.

As I looped through the list of files to be processed, I would issue an EXECUTE IMMEDIATE so that I could then SELECT from the table in the next step. It worked like a charm.

As I was doing some testing, I would issue the ROLLBACK statement to clear the tables for the next run. When I verified, there was still data there. WTF?

Oh wait, there's an EXECUTE IMMEDIATE...which runs DDL...which COMMITs...barnacles!

So I couldn't use that new thing I learned, oh well. Fortunately UTL_FILE does have the ability to rename files so I picked a name like 'external_table_file_name.txt' and rename the incoming file to that, then SELECT. Works like a charm.