What I’m hearing: Instagram’s Trust and Safery org absolutely gutted the last few weeks. ~60% of the org gone - between layoffs and forced reassignments to data labelling. All while “AI maxxing” pushed a bunch of bugs to prod. And hence why today’s massive Instagram account takeover happening.

P99 Conf from @scylladb.com is looking for talks on eBPF 🐝 I've seen quite a few impressive talks there from the likes of Liz Rice, Tanel Poder, and Jose Fernandez. CfP is open until May 29th, let me know if you need help

Almost Summer Sale 2026: All my flagship video courses discounted until end of May! Plus *free* Exadata Internals & Advanced Performance Metrics seminar videos! tanelpoder.com/posts/almost...

Almost Summer Sale 2026: All my flagship video courses discounted until end of May! Plus *free* Exadata Internals & Advanced Performance Metrics seminar videos! tanelpoder.com/posts/almost...

The LONG data type in Oracle Database is tricky to work with Sadly the partition high value column uses LONG 26ai eased this by adding CLOB and JSON versions of this But what if you're on older releases? @tanelpoder.com shows how to convert LONG to VARCHAR2 with PL/SQL

A pretty recent summary article from Oracle on enabling and getting SQL monitoring reports in various ways (including historical captures): Real-Time SQL Monitoring: a MUST for SQL Tuning blogs.oracle.com/coretec/orac... (I'm working on something new & related too ;-)

A pretty recent summary article from Oracle on enabling and getting SQL monitoring reports in various ways (including historical captures): Real-Time SQL Monitoring: a MUST for SQL Tuning blogs.oracle.com/coretec/orac... (I'm working on something new & related too ;-)

🚨 periodic reminder for macOS computer havers: System Settings > General > Login Items & Extensions 1. Go through the entire list 2. Remove stuff + Toggle stuff off (or on) 3. Breathe a bit easier Tahoe: support.apple.com/guide/mac-he... Sequoia: support.apple.com/guide/mac-he...

I've been busy in the last months! Announcing a brand new "Practical Exadata Performance" training course! I'm not aware of any other training *like this* offered in the world. 😎 Also, a *free* seminar! Exadata is an awesome platform, if used right! learn.tanelpoder.com

Fresh vid! The new SQL History feature in Oracle Database 26ai lets you track every single execution in your session. So why is it empty all of a sudden? youtu.be/XKN-SjrpzLc

I've been busy in the last months! Announcing a brand new "Practical Exadata Performance" training course! I'm not aware of any other training *like this* offered in the world. 😎 Also, a *free* seminar! Exadata is an awesome platform, if used right! learn.tanelpoder.com

Was doing some Exadata performance work and this question came up: "Where does the Exadata storage() predicate come from?" I wrote about it a while ago 😎 tanelpoder.com/2014/03/05/w... The inmemory() predicate works using similar logic: access_predicate on INMEMORY full table scan.

Was doing some Exadata performance work and this question came up: "Where does the Exadata storage() predicate come from?" I wrote about it a while ago 😎 tanelpoder.com/2014/03/05/w... The inmemory() predicate works using similar logic: access_predicate on INMEMORY full table scan.

Get Oracle Partition High Values as VARCHAR2 types instead of LONG in Oracle 19c and earlier (new blog). There's also some data 23/26ai data dictionary internals! tanelpoder.com/posts/oracle...

Blog greatest hits :-) . The death of the demo script. https://connor-mcdonald.com/2016/03/23/the-death-of-the-demo-script

Imagine your team doing agentic coding in the codebase serving mills of customers without understanding how it works, and you get paged at 2 am, and since no one knows how the system works you need to ask LLM to tell you, and it gives you, wait for it... a PLAUSIBLE answer what might be wrong.

Get Oracle Partition High Values as VARCHAR2 types instead of LONG in Oracle 19c and earlier (new blog). There's also some data 23/26ai data dictionary internals! tanelpoder.com/posts/oracle...

Jan Nidzwetzki - pg_plan_alternatives: Tracing PostgreSQL's Query Plan Alternatives using eBPF jnidzwetzki.github.io/2026/03/04/p...

My observation is that AI has sped up development of mainline, never before seen features at the median shop by ~1.2x. Undifferentiated backlog items move much faster, so does any new product line with no customers or load bearing infrastructure yet. Bottleneck is verification and review

Another old but interesting blog post (2008!) An Oracle database may have duplicate (non-unique) ROWIDs (and data object IDs) when using transportable tablespaces. That's not a bug, Oracle guarantees ROWID uniqueness only at table level, not at DB level. tanelpoder.com/2008/10/21/t...

Another old but interesting blog post (2008!) An Oracle database may have duplicate (non-unique) ROWIDs (and data object IDs) when using transportable tablespaces. That's not a bug, Oracle guarantees ROWID uniqueness only at table level, not at DB level. tanelpoder.com/2008/10/21/t...

Oxide and Friends is back, at a special time! @ahl.bsky.social and I will be joined by Oxide engineers Andrew Stone and Finch Foner to talk about how we build a quorum of trust in the distributed system that is the Oxide rack. Join us today at 2p Pacific/5p Eastern! discord.gg/QrcKGTTPrF?e...

Old but gold (2024): Oracle Hint Scopes and Join Level Cardinality Hint: tanelpoder.com/posts/oracle...

Old but gold (2024): Oracle Hint Scopes and Join Level Cardinality Hint: tanelpoder.com/posts/oracle...

If you use GitHub (especially if you pay for it!!) consider doing this *immediately* Settings -> Privacy -> Disallow GitHub to train their models on your code. GitHub opted *everyone* into training. No matter if you pay for the service (like I do). WTH github.com/settings/cop...

And just like that, it's time for March's Interesting Links in the Data and AI World! 👉🏻 rmoff.net/2026/03/25/i... With links from great folk including @gunnarmorling.dev, @tomcooper.dev, @sqlliz.bsky.social, @tanelpoder.com, @eatonphil.bsky.social, @larahogan.bsky.social, @almog.xyz, and more!

Old but gold! (2025) Find which Oracle SQL_ID hits the SQL*Net break/reset to client event: tanelpoder.com/posts/find-w...

Old but gold! (2025) Find which Oracle SQL_ID hits the SQL*Net break/reset to client event: tanelpoder.com/posts/find-w...

The number of citations in my Google Scholar profile just reached a new order of magnitude! 100 citations! 😅 The most cited item is a patent from 2015 about *transparently* offloading parts of RDBMS SQL exec plans to distributed engines & hybrid cloud. scholar.google.com/citations?us...

The number of citations in my Google Scholar profile just reached a new order of magnitude! 100 citations! 😅 The most cited item is a patent from 2015 about *transparently* offloading parts of RDBMS SQL exec plans to distributed engines & hybrid cloud. scholar.google.com/citations?us...

Reasons why SELECT * is bad for SQL performance: An old blog (with Oracle-specific examples) with a whole range of reasons why. It's not only about network traffic and SQL plan execution, but client side processing and memory usage as well. tanelpoder.com/posts/reason...

Reasons why SELECT * is bad for SQL performance: An old blog (with Oracle-specific examples) with a whole range of reasons why. It's not only about network traffic and SQL plan execution, but client side processing and memory usage as well. tanelpoder.com/posts/reason...

I wrote an Oracle "ash_index_helper.sql" script 5 yrs ago, trying to pull all relevant info of top time-consuming *access paths* into one place, as a single SQL script. Summarize access paths to a schema or just one table/SQL. Too complex for a single script, time for AI? 😎

New blog: Testing the Datadog Explain Plan Visualizer with Oracle execution plans tanelpoder.com/posts/testin...

New blog: Testing the Datadog Explain Plan Visualizer with Oracle execution plans tanelpoder.com/posts/testin...

Discovered an awesome article (and the entire site) via HN. Example: "How is data stored?" www.makingsoftware.com/chapters/how...

Over two decades ago, the only reporter to really dig into what we had done with DTrace was @ashleevance.bsky.social at @theregister.com -- so it is unsurprising that the best reportage on @oxide.computer is from El Reg's @tobiasmann.bsky.social www.theregister.com/2026/02/13/w...

Vinicius Grippa has created a cool implementation of SQL Flamegraphs for MySQL: MyFlames. GitHub repo here, look into demos/mysql-*.svg files for more examples: github.com/vgrippa/myfl...

Vinicius Grippa has created a cool implementation of SQL Flamegraphs for MySQL: MyFlames. GitHub repo here, look into demos/mysql-*.svg files for more examples: github.com/vgrippa/myfl...

A free SQL explain plan visualizer tool by @datadoghq Currently for PostgreSQL, MySQL, MSSQL and MongoDB explain.datadoghq.com

If you clone the same (cat) photo into 360 versions, each rotated by one more degree, then put all these versions through a ViT embedding model, should the resulting cat-vectors look at least somewhat similar? I used a heatmap to answer this question! tanelpoder.com/catvector/

The view GV$SYSMETRIC_HISTORY in Oracle AI Database shows all the database metrics available This can be useful to help troubleshoot performance issues @tanelpoder.com has built scripts to display these with 1-minute granularity in a tabular way

A free SQL explain plan visualizer tool by @datadoghq Currently for PostgreSQL, MySQL, MSSQL and MongoDB explain.datadoghq.com

modern-sql.com now covers DuckDB.

Happy Thanksgiving! Need a pod while washing dishes? New Oxide and Friends examines a bug introduced over 18 years ago. Performance is great but not—it turns out—without correctness oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/gro...

(3 days left until the end of Black Friday Sale of my online training courses!) Also, an old post for Oracle nerds: "Oracle Shared Pool Internals: List Chunk Position in the LRU List" tanelpoder.com/posts/oracle...

When tuning #SQL, focus on the estimates for how many rows each operation will return If these are off by an order of magnitude or more, there's a good chance a different plan is faster @tanelpoder.com has built scripts to show misestimates in Oracle plans

One week left till the end of the Black Friday sale of my self-paced video learning courses! 🤓

cool job at a very special computer company - write TypeScript and Rust - everyone makes $235k - fully remote - everything is open source

Biggest takeaway from KubeCon: People want Neki badly. We're building the solution for scaling and managing huge Postgres databases. More to come, but in the meantime: neki.dev