Category Archives: SQL

SQL macros and the WITH clause

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SQL macros and WITH clause are not known to be great friends: you cannot call a SQL macro in a WITH clause and if you want to define a table macro returning a query containing a WITH subquery(ies), then you won’t be able to use scalar parameters in this subquery. In the previous post I tried to explain another restriction from the technical perspective looking at the SQL macro expansion trace information. In this post I will try to understand the WITH clause related limitations using the same approach.

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SQL Macros – Changing The Query Shape Using Parameters?

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One thing I learned early on when I was getting to know SQL macros is that we cannot replace each and every part of a SQL statement with a macro. In the same way, working with table SQL macros, we cannot represent just any part of the result string by referencing parameters inside it. Sometimes we need to use string concatenation. But why it behaves this way? In this post I will look at the available trace information about SQL macro expansion during hard parse and try to understand its impact on this restriction. After that we’ll also look how to overcome it and what to consider.

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Parameterized Views with SQL Macros (Part 2)

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One of the most mentioned use cases for table SQL macros is the implementation, which works like a parameterized view. My first post on this is from 2020 and it ends with a thought that we have many advantages here but no real view at all. And indeed, I have heard this argument several times since then. Views are schema objects that we have been familiar with for decades, they are very easy to develop and deploy, and their query code is easily accessible via data dictionary. On the other hand, maintaining query code within SQL macros can be a bit more difficult and understandably not to everyone’s preference. But what if you could have a cake and eat it too? Here is how…

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SQL Macros – Some Less Obvious Facts (Part 2)

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This second part of the “less obvious facts” series is about the COLUMNS pseudo-operator. It has been introduced in 18c as one of the variadic pseudo-operators, intended to operate with a variable number of operands. Unfortunately, no other pseudo-operators have been introduced since then, so that it is worth looking at what exactly the COLUMNS operator is, how to use it and how it can potentially be “misused”.

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SQL Macros – Some Less Obvious Facts (Part 1)

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Since I have written a lot about SQL macros, I have tested some less obvious, sometimes surprising cases. But expanding about them in the original posts would just overload them, so I decided to make a dedicated post for that. The other good reason for this is that the SQL macros are, in my opinion, not documented in enough detail. So additional research and testing can be useful.

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Beware of NO_DATA_FOUND in your PTF!

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A few days ago I received a comment/question on the older post about dynamically transposing rows to column with Polymorphic Table Functions (PTF). Back then I overlooked a bug in the example code, but the explanation takes a bit longer, so i decided to write a new post about it. The PTF was working initially but after inserting new data started to return wrong results – all NULL’s for some columns where we know there are actually values present. So, what’s going on?

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How to get the final SQL after macro expansion

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In my very first post about SQL macros, I mentioned that for table macros, there is a simple way to see the SQL statement after macro expansion using dbms_utility.expand_sql_text. However, for scalar SQL macros, there is no such straightforward method. We can activate a CBO trace (also known as event 10053) and find the final statement in the trace file. This approach works for both scalar and table SQL macros. In this post, we will explore how to do this, and we will use… a SQL macro for that! Well, at least we will give it a try…

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Null Values? NOT IN my Subquery! #JoelKallmanDay

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I had to learn from this mistake more than once in my SQL career, until it became a kind of reflex: always think about the NULL values when you are writing a NOT IN subquery. Well, you should ALWAYS keep the NULL values in mind as a SQL developer, but in this case the consequences can be really nasty! And it drives me crazy how many times I’ve seen this error in my consulting life, even in production code. So, what is the point here?

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