Local weather forecast said it was going to rain today, starting at 3:00 am, non-stop until 3:00pm TOMORROW - so I worked at home, raking, shredding and bagging a huge pile of decomposing oak leaves, repotting plants ... no rain Got ready to head out to the allotment at 3:00 pm: it started to rain.

Went to an excellent @greshamcollege.bsky.social lecture by Prof. Chris Lintott on Exoplanets last night. Informative and entertaining; including an introduction to the Planet Hunters - allowing to find potential exoplanets by analysing data from TESS. science.nasa.gov/citizen-scie...

It's not quite what you would write manually The QUALIFY clauses get wrapped as a Boolean expression. So if you have QUALIFY p1 AND p2 AND p3 it becomes SELECT * FROM ( SELECT ( p1 AND p2 AND p3 ) qexpr ... ) WHERE qexpr IS TRUE So yes, a manual rewrite may give better optimizations

I've finally taken advantage of one of the most significant benefits brought to us by Brexit. I've bought a packer of TimTams from the local supermarket.

The QUALIFY clause enables you to filter rows using window functions e.g. get the top ranked rows with SELECT ... FROM ... QUALIFY RANK () OVER ( ORDER BY ... ) = ... @danischnider.bsky.social looks at how it works in Oracle AI Database 26ai

1Password not mincing words here: "If you are experimenting with OpenClaw, do not do it on a company device. Full stop." "If you have already run OpenClaw on a work device, treat it as a potential incident and engage your security team immediately." 1password.com/blog/from-ma...

Congrats to the winners in the Oracle Dev Gym championships! 1st Andrey Zaytsev 2nd mentzel.iudith 3rd [email protected] 🏆🍾 👏 to all competitors; we hope you enjoyed the challenge Thanks to @kibeha.dk and @anthony-harper.bsky.social for writing & reviewing quizzes blogs.oracle.com/sql/announci...

For those unfamiliar, this arrived in 26ai

It's been a while but I've just written a new blog note. Still subject to checks of typo and grammar, but that will have to wait a couple of days. Effects of "column is null" on an indexed column, multi-column inlists and index iterators, and an upgrade. jonathanlewis.wordpress.com/2026/01/27/c...

It's been a while but I've just written a new blog note. Still subject to checks of typo and grammar, but that will have to wait a couple of days. Effects of "column is null" on an indexed column, multi-column inlists and index iterators, and an upgrade. jonathanlewis.wordpress.com/2026/01/27/c...

Oh dear, I can feel a new blog note about indexes, inlists, and "is null" predicates on its way. Still, it's going to rain (here) all day tomorrow so I won't be going out to dig.

Hidden behind shopfronts on Holborn is a rare survivor from medieval times, Barnard's Inn Hall. Anyone can visit this incredible building, and below its ancient rafters watch a free Gresham lecture about life, the universe and everything londonist.substack.com/p/inside-hol...

If you want an education in unicode then you should read this thread on the Oracle Developer forum: forums.oracle.com/ords/apexds/...

Loved this comparison from Ric van Dyke. "Parallel lines never meet**, you can't say the same about parallel execution (PX) processes". ** in Euclidean space Also very keen on his point about distinguishing between parallel and simultaneous (concurrent). ricramblings.blogspot.com/2026/01/para...

I've just been browsing through a (private) blog page where I've listed a lot of links to "must-read" articles dating back to the start of the millenium, and it's a bit disappointing how many now point to sites that don't exist - or redirect to domain name sellers.

Today's sourdough loaf may look a little different from usual. I got distracted at a critical moment by the need to scare a parakeet off the bird feeder and tipped the flour bowl into the starter/water bowl BEFORE mixing the plain and wholemeal flour. Now wondering if the loaf will turn out marbled.

One for @martinwidlake.bsky.social : science and cats, what more could he want: x.com/OxUniMaths/s...

Today is the last marmalade day of 2025 - a bit later than in previous years - using up the frozen Seville oranges before the new season's oranges are in the shops. (Also making a sourdough loaf - because the best marmalade deserves the best bread.)

Ever had a good idea you wanted to type up, so put the video on hold, stepped into the "office", sat down ... and forgotten what you were going to type? It's the "Doorway Effect" - though it's not just doorways, and might need more than just a doorway to trigger it It's the brain's context switch

Why are brussel sprouts like books? (Possibly only in the UK). They're available all year round but a ridiculously large percentage of the annual sales happen around christmas.

Running a giant software business used to be fun. Artificial intelligence is now turning that model on its head. Nowhere has the transition been as unsettling as at Oracle

So how many seconds does the battery last when you're running the whole lot concurrently?🙂

It’s taken ages to prepare my Dahlia tubers for winter storage. Down to the last set at last. 4 x Thomas Edison. I started with 3 last year, split off 3, gave way 2, at the start of this year and may have to split off 2 more next year.

The internet remembers everything: Middelfart, Denmark, 2006:

Only 48 hours until UKOUG Discover 2025 starts. I'll be in the audience for "Super Sunday", and presenting at the break of day (nearly) on the Monday. jonathanlewis.wordpress.com/public-appea...

Lifted all my dahlias a few days ago, just before the overnight temperature dropped to -4C. It's taking ages to clean off all the earth so that they can dry properly for overwintering.

Here's a golden oldie that MIGHT still be causing some errors in early versions of 19c - a POSSIBLE case appeared a few days ago on the Oracle database forum: jonathanlewis.wordpress.com/2015/11/09/w...

Only two weeks to go #ukougdiscover25 - don't stay up too late on Sunday night if you're thinking of coming to this one:

Now reading: "Blue Machine - How the ocean shapes our world" by @helenczerski.bsky.social A fascinating mix of scientific and historical detail, told in an enjoyable narrative style. Bought it after attending the 2nd in her series of lectures at Gresham College: www.gresham.ac.uk/watch-now/se...

Reference point for @oraclebase.bsky.social and @martinwidlake.bsky.social : the 2017 Ig Nobel prize for Physics was awarded to the author of a paper discussing whether cats are solids or liquids or both: live.stemfellowship.org/the-ig-nobel...

Thinking small but useful RESETTABLE, a recent (23.26, maybe older) v$ view seems to list resettable parameters: GV$SYSTEM_RESET_PARAMETER Name ------ INST_ID NUM NAME TYPE RESET_VALUE DISPLAY_RESET_VALUE ISSYS_RESETTABLE ISPDB_RESETTABLE ISINSTANCE_RESETTABLE UPDATE_COMMENT CON_ID

Small change, but so useful. RESETTABLE Clause to in Oracle AI Database 26ai oracle-base.com/articles/26/... @OracleDatabase #database #26ai

Special day on the allotment tomorrow. My order of raspberry canes has arrived from James McIntyre james-mcintyre.co.uk/product-cate... so I'll be hard at work in the fruit cage 5 x Glen Doll (floricane) 5 x All Gold (primocane) 8 x Joan J (primocane) with 2 "spare" Joan J for my old raspberry bed

Golden oldie time. From 2007 - and nearly answering a recent question about index sizing: thoughts about space and I/O requests when you are heading for billions of rows in the database. jonathanlewis.wordpress.com/2007/03/18/t...

How do you truncate a partition at the parent end of a referential integrity constraint? You can't (error ORA-02266) but someone asked how today so I pointed them to a workaround I described in 2012 (after testing to see if it still worked on 19.11) jonathanlewis.wordpress.com/2012/06/05/t...

Someone has just sent me a communication through chat. It must be someone I know because I've set chat to respond only to people I follow, and I don't follow many. But I can't use chat unless I supply my credit card number or a view of my face to an organisation I've never heard of - so no thanks.

Here's an article I published 12 years ago about rowids and sorting - if you store and report rowids the you will find that a columnn of type rowid sorts differently from a column where the rowid is stored in its character format. See: jonathanlewis.wordpress.com/2013/12/01/r... (Last tested 23.6)

Heads up VirtualBox. If you've updated to 7.2.4 and found that your VMs will no longer start (Error: Failed to load R0 module), then uninstall your existing installation first (or uninstall the 7.2.4 you just installed) and then install 7.2.4 from scratch

In the multitenant architecture in Oracle AI Database, the container database is essential. If you create it the right way, you can avoid some difficulties later on. Here's my recommendation for creating container databases.

Since last week, I can finally use the QUALIFY clause in Oracle. If you never heard of this SQL extension, read my newest blog post: danischnider.wordpress.com/2025/10/24/q...

Today I revisited a 4yo post on one of SQLcl’s underrated features: autotrace — shows full session stats for a SQL statement (way beyond SQL*Plus). Still works in latest release. Updated prereqs too. More details here 🔗 martincarstenbach.com/2021/06/10/s... #Oracle #SQLcl #performance #IKYK

A new post about parallel DML and how to waste huge amounts of space in your database in no time at all. jonathanlewis.wordpress.com/2025/10/10/m...

If you're in the mood to read a long and detailed article about shrinking indexes, here's one from 2022 that should meet your requirements: jonathanlewis.wordpress.com/2022/09/02/s...

Here's a note I wrote for redgate / simpletalk a few years ago about basic index compression - costs and benefits: www.red-gate.com/simple-talk/... It's part 5 of a series; part 4 was the technical bit about the mechanics of (basic) index compression. There's a link to it at the start of part 5.

Are you making any of these common #SQL mistakes? Forgetting about NULL Processing data in Java memory Using JDBC Pagination to paginate large results Using aggregate instead of window functions @lukaseder.bsky.social explains what to do instead & lists 7 more

Looks like it's not available anymore, my SR regarding this was closed with something like "Internal bug was submitted for investigation, but hey, we got that alternate features "Look-up By Error or Error Code's First Argument" or "Search by Stack Trace" added which replace it. For real?🤦‍♂️

This forum thread might be useful if you're playing around with 23ai and ONNX models (whatever they are) that don't come from Oracle Corp. forums.oracle.com/ords/apexds/... - particularly the comment from "Peter"

I'm on the agenda for the #ukoug conference 2025. 9:00 a.m. on Monday morning (I tell myself that that's to encourage people to be on-site early enough to attend the opening keynote afterwards) Abstract at: jonathanlewis.wordpress.com/public-appea...

A variant of this topic just appeared on one of the Oracle forums - what do you get for the rowid in a join view where you haven't explicitly selected any rowids? (In my case - which table gets the delete when you delete from a join view) jonathanlewis.wordpress.com/2022/05/31/j...

There are two ways I suprise myself when thinking about Oracle puzzles: 1) Struggling to unravel some internal detail then finding that I wrote about it 20 years ago 2) Discovering a "new" detail I should have noticed 20 years Here's an example of (2): jonathanlewis.wordpress.com/2025/09/29/r...