Author: user

I’ve uploaded the MS Word and PDF versions of a new paper about CASE expressions, which is really just a replacement for the earlier DECODE paper. This one has been an unexpected trial, probably because it was a bit of a chore that I knew I had to get round to because the DECODE approach… Continue reading CASE Article

A couple of days ago one of my colleagues raised the question – ‘ANSI join syntax, does anyone actually use that?’ I have pretty strong views on this and so a brief dynamic conversation followed (and that isn’t a euphemism for ‘stand-up row’, I should add!) So, what about ANSI join syntax? To give the… Continue reading ANSI Join Syntax

I’ve received several emails pointing out Don Burleson’s apology for calling me British instead of Scottish that was on his website (but has been removed now). I asked Don to take it down for a few reasons :- I was born and remain British. I was born and remain Scottish. The two are compatible. I… Continue reading Another Apology

Well, I might as well put my hand up now. I don’t like Indian food. The fact is I just don’t like spicy food much (and I once described a poppadom as being a bit spicy!) which is largely down to being spoiled rotten when I was a kid by a mother who wouldn’t force… Continue reading Indian Food

Yesterday I attended the one day OUG Scotland conference in Glasgow. I think there must have been 200-300 attendees and there were three streams of presentations. I was immediately impressed at the organisation and venue. It felt like a proper conference rather than just a slightly bigger user group meeting. After the usual opening from… Continue reading OUG Scotland 2005 Conference

One of the reasons I moved over to Blogger was because Jeff had problems posting a comment. When I started work at a new site recently, I bumped into an old colleague who had mentioned that he’d posted a comment on the old blog. I was surprised because I would never fail to notice a… Continue reading An Apology

Today I had one of those minor buzzes of excitement when I started to play around with Oracle’s hosted HTML DB environment. Without wanting to go into my current feelings about work, you could say things are a little quiet. I’m trying to find things to do but I’ve joined just when there’s a serious… Continue reading HTML DB

Over the past few months I’ve occasionally pondered what to do about the DECODE paper on this site. On the one hand, it was written 6 years ago when DECODE was more prevalent than CASE so it’s out of date. On the other, it’s popular and is the main reason by far that people visit… Continue reading DECODE paper

(Trying this one again to see if it appears on Orablogs) SQLLDR has the following command line option EXTERNAL_TABLE = GENERATE_ONLY which, when you give it an old-fashioned SQLLDR control file, will spit out the External Table equivalent in the log file. e.g.Control File LOAD DATAINFILE ‘test.txt’TRUNCATEINTO TABLE doug_testFIELDS TERMINATED BY “”(pk,test_value CHAR “TO_NUMBER(:test_value, ‘999,990.90’,’NLS_NUMERIC_CHARACTERS… Continue reading Nice SQLLDR option for external tables

I noticed from Niall’s blog that he was having trouble with his feedburner feed that supplies Orablogs. Looks like there’s a problem with mine, too.