If you try to import large Excel files to SQL Developer, it may hang for a long time. But let say you like SQL Developer very much, or you are too lazy to find another tool, here is a way to load large Excel files. By converting the Excel files to CSV SQL Developer can load it much faster.

Here is the link to my presentation at POUG 2018 in Sopot, Polen

Epoch time is common in some situations because it is easier to do date calculations than with normal dates. The most popular is UNIX Epoch time which is the number of seconds since the start of January 1, 1970.

I’m writing this post so it can be found by googlers struggling with ORA-01861. Usually, ORA-01861 means that you missed something when using a date conversion function. But, here the other day I had created a table using some code generation tool, and I had accidentally declared a column with datatype DATE instead of NUMBER.

In an attempt to compare how long it will take to build a Docker image of Oracle XE (11.2) vs EE (12.2) on my Mac I ran into a problem. The building of XE failed, it complained that only 1023 MB swap space was available. I thought that adding swap during build with this workaround would do, but it turns out that with Docker things are different.

Queries from monitoring software like BMC are not supposed to be among Top SQL, but that was happening in many databases at one site. This may happen if the dictionary statistics are not updated, leading Oracle to choose the wrong plan. Document with ID 1328789.1 on MOS shows an example of this.

It is probably the developers' responsibility to run tests, but they may not be aware of features in the database that makes the testing easier. Here the other day an ETL developer asked for help with resetting tables after ETL-testing. But there was no need to create complicated scripts to do so. I showed him flashback tables so he could easily fix it himself and run the tests over and over again without any pain.

A colleague said that he had some tables that showed up in one tool, but not in another, I think it was Enterprise Manager/Cloud Control. This is easy to forget if you don’t work with non-relational tables regularly. What happens is that only relational tables are listed in DBA_TABLES or USER_TABLES, but all tables can be found if you search DBA_OBJECTS / USER_OBJECTS for objects with OBJECT_TYPE=TABLE.