Obsessed with Oracle PL/SQL

In the first post of this "Joy" series, I explained the problem: a procedure that runs in a daily batch job threatening to take more than a day to complete. Not a good situation. I invited readers to analyze the situation and come up with their own solution before I continued.  Now I continue! My Dismay and My Delight – First, the Dismay I was dismayed when I saw the implementation of reset_meme_status because I found in that procedure a cursor FOR loop that contained two non-query DML statements (. That is a classic "anti-pattern", meaning a general pattern of coding that should be avoided. It should be avoided because the inserts and updates are changing the tables on a row-by-row basis, which maximizes the number of context switches and consequently greatly slows the performance of the code. Fortunately, this classic anti-pattern has a classic, well-defined solution: use BULK COLLECT and FORALL to switch from row-by-row processing to bulk proces...

I received this question in my In Box last week: In your PL/SQL 101: Working with Collections  article  in Oracle Magazine, the use of "TYPE ... IS ..." is demonstrated.  However I found it's not possible to instantiate an object of the TYPE. It seems that the use of "CREATE TYPE ... AS OBJECT" is required. What are the differences between the 2 ways of creating a user defined data type?  Yes, it can certainly be  confusing when you use the same TYPE statement for arrays and object types, but they cannot all be used in all the same ways in all the same places. So let's go over the differences. PL/SQL Within PL/SQL, you use the TYPE statement to define two different, ahem, types of user-defined types: record and collection. Record A composite datatype consisting of one of more fields. Each field may be of almost any PL/SQL datatype, including another record type or a collection type. You can use the TYPE statement to define a new recor...

For over a decade, PL/SQL developers have headed over to PL/SQL Obsession (on ToadWorld.com) to download my demo.zip file. They do this because all of my trainings references files from that zip by name. I use them to demonstrate  PL/SQL features, test performance of those features, and even offer some (potentially) reusable utilities. I have, as hopefully you know, moved on to Oracle Corporation. PL/SQL Obsession will still be in place for another year or so, and it will take me some time to construct a new portal for "all things PL/SQL". In the meantime, however, and going forward, if you want to download the very latest version of demo.zip, you can use either of these links: http://www.oracle.com/webfolder/technetwork/tutorials/plsql/sfdemo.zip http://goo.gl/FPG79Z If you encounter any problems with this archive or individual files within it, please don't hesitate to drop me a note .

I publish an article in most Oracle Magazine issues, focusing on the PL/SQL language. I love writing these articles and I enjoy getting feedback from readers, but I also feel constrained by the, well, constraints of the Oracle Magazine format (both in terms of length of the article and also the way we can present code). So I have decided to complement my articles (some, not necessarily all) with an extended, serialized treatment on my blog. In this first series, I walk through the refactoring of some code that has performance issues, and provide all the code for the initial, intermediate and final forms of the program here . I hope you find this format interesting and helpful. Please comment! Struggling to Keep Up I recently spent a few days with a team of developers at extremememe.info (all names changed to protect the innocent), an up-and-coming Web 3.0 paradigm shifter that analyzes Internet memes, tracks them to their source, and best of all predicts new, near-future me...