Toad World Pipeline

September 2008 Issue

PIPELINE is the monthly newsletter of Toad World – your trusted source for Toad and database knowledge for Oracle, DB2 and MySQL professionals.

Toad World Events

Gain valuable insight through webcasts, seminars, trade shows and user group meetings held around the world.

Sept 17, U.S.
Steven Feuerstein Webcast: How to Write Easily Maintainable Code With Less Effort
Sept 21-25, U.S.
Oracle Open World
Oct 13-16, Poland
IDUG – 2006 Europe
Oct 21-22, U.S.
Speak-Tech: Best of Oracle PL/SQL Seminar
Oct 29-30, U.S.
Oracle PL/SQL Programming 2008 Conference

Click here for a full list of worldwide events

"Best Toad® Story" Winners Announced

The "Best Toad® Story" contest is complete and the five top stories have been selected. Thanks to everyone who submitted an entry. We received many excellent stories and the judging was quite difficult. Stories covered a range of topics, from Toad saving the day to fondness for a particular Toad feature, or the first time the Toad "croak" was heard at start up.

As a prize, each winner received a 4GB iPod® Nano with the Toad logo etched on its cover. The winning stories were submitted by:

Gary Lynch, Toad user for nine years
Kelly Mello, Toad user for six years
John Oakley, Toad user for ten years
Sree Reddy, Toad user for nine years
Roger Sayles, Toad user for seven years

>Read the winning stories

Oracle: Enabling Archive Logs in a RAC Environment
by Jeff Hunter

Whether a single instance or clustered database, Oracle tracks (logs) all changes to database blocks in online redo log files. In an Oracle RAC environment, each instance will have its own set of online redo log files known as a thread. Each Oracle instance will use its set (group) of online redo logs in a circular manner. Once an online redo log fills, Oracle moves to the next one. If the database is in "Archive Log Mode", Oracle will make a copy of the online redo log before it gets reused. A thread must contain at least two online redo logs (or online redo log groups). The same holds true for a single instance configuration. The single instance must contain at least two online redo logs (or online redo log groups). >Read full article

DB2: DB2 LUW V9.5 SQL Cookbook
by Graeme Birchall

This book, which originally began as a series of notes for Graeme's own use, has become an essential go to guide for all things DB2 (except z/OS), including quick find concepts and explanations for quirks in SQL. Over the years, new versions and chapters have been added as DB2 has evolved and Graeme has worked out better problem solving strategies. >Read the book

MySQL: A Look at Falcon Diagnostic Tables
by Robin Schumacher

Performance tuning is one of the top disciplines (if not THE top discipline) that database professionals want to excel at. Being able to take a system that's running sluggish and turn it into one that's running as fast as a scalded dog is a talent that's part art and part science, but whatever the combination necessary to make it happen, there will always be strong demand for folks who are good at it. >Read full article

Software Development Tips & Techniques: Monitor Your Solution Before Turning Over to Support
by Tom Mochal

One of the main definitions of a project is that the work has a definite beginning and ending. However, the end date is open for interpretation. Let’s assume that you have finished your project and implemented the solution in production. In some cases, this would be the end of the project and the responsibility for the solution would now fall upon the support organization. >Read full article

Test Your PL/SQL Knowledge

Nulls and Numeric FOR Loops
Assuming that there are no rows in the employees table with department_id = -15, what will happen when I execute the following block of code?

DECLARE
   TYPE employees_array_t IS TABLE OF employees%ROWTYPE 
      INDEX BY PLS_INTEGER;
   l_employees employees_array_t;
BEGIN
   SELECT * BULK COLLECT INTO l_employees
     FROM employees where department_id = -15;

   FOR indx IN l_employees.FIRST .. l_employees.LAST 
   LOOP
      DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE (l_employees(indx).last_name);
   END LOOP;
END;

NO_DATA_FOUND exception is raised.
VALUE_ERROR exception is raised.
The last names of all employees are displayed.
No exception is raised, no information is displayed.

Please send your responses along with your name, city and country, to Puzzler@toadworld.com by September 15, 2008. We will randomly select four winners who submit the correct answer, and each winner will receive a Toad World t-shirt!

August's Puzzler Answer:

B. You can tell when you've got an explicit cursor when you see the declaration of a cursor with the CURSOR <name> IS syntax. That is precisely an explicit declaration. All other SQL statements are implicit cursors.

Winners:

Iain Blacklaw from London, England
Ivor Blackmore from Bristol, England
Phil Gingras from Texas, USA
Eric L. Thompson from Kansas, USA

Click here to review August's puzzler.

Do you have a paper or article that you'd like to share? Maybe a favorite utility or snippet of code? Have you found an ingenious way to use a feature in Toad? Send them to us at Feedback@toadworld.com.

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