Views have always been an efficient tool for encapsulating complex logic, creating defined access structures and so on. But there is one thing views cannot do: accept parameters. And this is unfortunately a big disadvantage in terms of flexibility. As a result, there are a number of workarounds, none of them without their drawbacks.
Continue reading
In the next post about SQL macros in Oracle 20c we look at how they could be useful for building hash keys. If you are familiar with Data Warehousing and Data Vault modelling approach, you will probably know why it can be a good idea to build hash keys or hash diffs. Anyway, we will not discuss whether or not you should use them, but rather how you can do this in Oracle in a consistent and performant way.
Continue reading
In this part we will keep focus on scalar macros going into more detail and look at parameter passing and parsing.
Continue reading
The preview version of Oracle 20c is now available in the cloud and I got the chance to test some new features there. I start with SQL macros, a feature that I think could well become a kind of game changer: let’s just look at the long-awaited parameterized views.
Continue readingPerforming an ETL with large data sets, it is often a good idea to run DML in parallel. But, in contrast to parallel query or DDL, parallel DML has to be explicitly enabled. You had to issue ALTER SESSION ENABLE PARALLEL DML in the past. Starting with 12c you can enable parallel DML specifically for each query using the hint ENABLE_PARALLEL_DML. For a few years now, I’ve been using the hint now and then and was quite happy. An observation I made a few days ago can lead to a rethinking. What I could observe is that for the SQL with embedded hint a new child cursor was created each time. Let’s test it!
Continue reading
LiveSQL is great place to start playing with new features. It provides a couple of very helpful demo scripts explaining how polymorphic table functions work. There I found a new script few days ago which uses PTF for dynamic pivot! WOW! According to my subjective perception, it seems to be one of the most desired features in Oracle SQL! But let’s have a closer look. Is this really feasible and mature enough to be used in production code?
Continue reading
In the first three parts of the series we have seen how a PTF basically works, but we have focused on row-semantic PTF only. In this part we’ll look at the table semantic PTF. As a reminder, the main difference to row-semantic PTF is that it is not enough to look at the currently processed row to produce the result. With table semantic PTF we often also need some summarized state from the previously processed rows. They are useful to implement user defined aggregate or window functions. Let’s first try to implement a very basic example of table semantic PTF and learn more theory as we go. Continue reading
In the third part of the PTF-series we learn how a PTF can change the cardinality of the input data flow: return more or less rows as in the input. We’ll use the same simple table as in the part 2 and our new task will be column transposing. We’ll still define, which columns have to stay unchanged (as we already did using the parameter cols2stay). All other columns should be displayed as key-value pairs. Continue reading
Preparing my session on Online Statistics Gathering for ETL for the DOAG conference, I noticed some points that I didn’t covered in the previous two blog posts. The first point is showing the problem that may arise if indexes are involved. The second one is about partition exchange load and it completes the topic of partitioned tables started in part 2. No blog posting on Oracle products is nowadays complete without mentioning the cloud. The third point is about Autonomous Data Warehouse Cloud Service and Online Statistics Gathering improvements. Continue reading
In the first part of PTF series we went through a very basic example removing some columns and adding a new column with a constant value. Starting from the same example we’ll do something more meaningful in the second part. How about concatenating the values of the removed columns as CSV in a new column? Continue reading