Enhanced Partitioning Metadata in Oracle 23c

Oracle 23c has a lot of small, but useful enhancements that makes life of developers easier. For example two new columns in the data dictionary views for partition metadata.

Star Schema Design in Oracle: Partitioning

Partitioning is one of the most powerful features for data warehouses in Oracle databases. In this blog post, I explain how it can be used for the physical design of star schemas. What is the recommended partitioning strategy for a star schema, and what are the advantages of partitioning?

Housekeeping in Oracle: How to Get Rid of Old Data

Have you ever tried to delete a few million rows from a table with several hundred milllions of rows with a DELETE statement? If yes, then you know that this is a very bad idea. With Oracle Partitioning you can do this more elegant and much faster.

Behind the Scenes: Preparing a Live Demo

One of the extensions in Oracle 20c is the possiblity to use the In-Memory Database option for Partitioned External Tables and Hybrid Partitioned Tables. In my opinion, this opens up many possibilities to perform efficient ad-hoc queries on Data Lakes. That’s why I prepared a demo script for my DOAG presentation about SQL features in Oracle 20c. Unfortunately, it turned out differently than planned. A drama in four acts.

Partition Pruning and NLS Settings

NLS (National Language Support) parameters are very useful for multilingual applications in an Oracle database. But it is important to understand their impact on query performance. I was aware that NLS is important for indexes, but never thought about its impact on partitioning.

Oracle 19c: Auto-List Partitioning HIGH_VALUE Bugs fixed

New features are one reason to upgrade to a new Oracle release, bug fixes of known bugs are another one. With Oracle 19c, at least two bugs related to Automatic List Partitioning were fixed. I did some tests with Auto-List Partitioning on an Oracle 19.3 database.

Having Fun with Auto-List Partitioning

I just wanted to write a small demo script for Auto-List Partitioning in Oracle 12.2. Instead, I spent an entire evening finding a bug in the Oracle data dictionary. Fortunately, it’s not a dramatic one.

Incremental Statistics – A Real World Scenario

Incremental statistics reduce the time to gather global statistics for a partitioned table. Really? In some situations it may happen that incremental statistics slow down statistics calculation dramatically. An example of a real project in Oracle 12.1 and how it can be improved with Oracle 12.2.

My Sessions at DOAG 2017

This year, I had the opportunity to present three sessions at the DOAG conference in Nuremberg – one on each conference day. Here a short summary of the sessions and links to the downloads.

Partition Exchange in Oracle 12.2

There are many new extensions for Partitioning in Oracle 12c Release 2 (12.2). One of them is the CREATE TABLE FOR EXCHANGE statement. Some years ago, I wished to have this feature for a particular problem with hidden columns.