bobwatkins, Author at TechRepublic

bobwatkins

Latest from bobwatkins

Project Management

A change management primer for IT consultants

Determining the ability of the client organization to cope with a major IT project can help consultants find the most appropriate solution. Learn how evaluating the client's roles, resistance, and resilience can help you gauge their capacity for change.

Data Management

What does a DBA do all day?

Data integrity is a DBA's number one responsibility, but do you know what else they do all day? Bob Watkins outlines some of the basic duties of a DBA.

Banking

Practice using Oracle’s Remote Diagnostic Agent before you need it

Oracle provides a tool called Remote Diagnostic Agent that documents your Oracle installation. Becoming familiar with this tool before you need it can save time when you work with Oracle Support.

Data Management

Avoiding TOO_MANY_ROWS errors in PL/SQL

Oracle’s PL/SQL language has two basic mechanisms for getting data from the database: SELECT and cursors. SELECT is designed to return a single row into local variables; cursors give you the ability to select multiple rows (i.e., a “rowset”) and process them one at a time. When you use SELECT in a PL/SQL block, it’s ...

Cloud

Round and truncate dates in Oracle

Oracle's TRUNC and ROUND functions apply to date and time values as well as to numbers. Here are some examples of date manipulation using these Oracle functions.

CXO

Compute the percentage of a total with Oracle’s RATIO_TO_REPORT

Computing a percentage of the total report usually requires a subquery. Oracle's RATIO_TO_REPORT analytic function does it in one step.

Storage

Copy Oracle’s Automatic Storage Management files with DBMS_FILE_TRANSFER

Oracle’s Automatic Storage Management (ASM), introduced in Oracle 10g, provides an alternative to raw disk devices for storing Oracle-related files. Like raw disks, ASM volumes (called diskgroups) have no filesystem and cannot be browsed directly at the operating system level. This makes maintenance a challenge because you cannot use the normal commands to copy and ...

Data Management

Multi-dimensional modeling in Oracle SQL

A spreadsheet is often used as an example of a relational table. Its rows and columns are similar to the rows and columns in a database table. At the intersection of each row and column is a value. The difference is that, in spreadsheets, each cell can also contain a formula that calculates the value ...

Enterprise Software

Control null data in Oracle using the ORDER BY clause

NULL data, which is sometimes called “absent” data, can be difficult to work with in relational databases. When a query contains the ORDER BY clause to sort the output, NULL data will sort to the bottom if the sort is in ascending order (ASC) and to the top if the sort is in descending order ...

Data Management

Explore Oracle 10g’s updated sample schemas

Each new release of Oracle database brings with it new features to explore. It can be a challenge to create adequate sample tables to play with a given feature. But since Oracle 9i, Oracle has had a robust set of sample schemas you can use to learn new features. The Oracle Documentation also uses these ...

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bobwatkins

A change management primer for IT consultants

What does a DBA do all day?

Practice using Oracle’s Remote Diagnostic Agent before you need it

Avoiding TOO_MANY_ROWS errors in PL/SQL

Round and truncate dates in Oracle

Compute the percentage of a total with Oracle’s RATIO_TO_REPORT

Copy Oracle’s Automatic Storage Management files with DBMS_FILE_TRANSFER

Multi-dimensional modeling in Oracle SQL

Control null data in Oracle using the ORDER BY clause

Explore Oracle 10g’s updated sample schemas

Hiring kit: Community engagement manager

Hiring kit: Chief experience officer

Hiring kit: Automation specialist

Hiring kit: Cybersecurity engineer