The Spoken Nerd

You might know Martin Bach from his current role of talking about the new JavaScript engine in Oracle Database 23ai. But long before that, Martin has been a well respected professional in the Oracle community, with many a DBA being in debt to his knowledge and assistance. In the final part of this 3 part series, Martin and I talk about working for Oracle, the latest release Oracle Database 23ai, a...

You might know Martin Bach from his current role of talking about the new JavaScript engine in Oracle Database 23ai. But long before that, Martin has been a well respected professional in the Oracle community, with many a DBA being in debt to his knowledge and assistance. In this episode, Martin and I talk about the role of social media (blogs, video etc) in technical education, and cover the data...

You might know Martin Bach from his current role of talking about the new JavaScript engine in Oracle Database 23ai. But long before that, Martin has been a well respected professional in the Oracle community, with many a DBA being in debt to his knowledge and assistance. In this episode, Martin and I talk about the beginnings of his Oracle career and how we had a lot in common with our experience...

A common theme in my 30 years of using Oracle technology is that people love to label any and all things Oracle as "cool tech but way too expensive". But this argument is a reflection of a very dated view of Oracle, because times have changed. Nowadays there is a plethora of tools, platforms and initiatives provided by Oracle that are 100% free to take advantage of. In the same way that I don't ru...

A common theme in my 30 years of using Oracle technology is that people love to label any and all things Oracle as "cool tech but way too expensive". But this argument is a reflection of a very dated view of Oracle, because times have changed. Nowadays there is a plethora of tools, platforms and initiatives provided by Oracle that are 100% free to take advantage of. In the same way that I don't ru...

Login to a customer's Oracle Database and there are all sorts of permutations of how tablespaces are being used. Sometimes there is one giant tablespace for everything. Other times there are multiple tablespaces for different schemas, or different object types. The thinking on how tablespaces should be used has evolved over many years, and in this episode we'll take a look at the history of tables...

There's a reason we don't just lump all of our data into Excel, Word and other such tools. Databases exist to give rigour to our data. They are the "statement of record" - the proof that our applications are meeting any business and/or regulatory requirements. The data stored in the database is typically the evidence that we provide to auditors and legal representatives that we are not breaking an...

If you are the only person using a PC, then the concept of having to lock information is totally foreign, because all of the data is yours and yours alone. But databases were built for the multi-user world, where concurrent access to the data is the norm. To handle this, we sometimes need to lock the data to ensure it is controlled and updated in a way that guarantees integrity and correctness. In...

Known for many years as "the optimizer lady", there are very few people that can throw down with tech ubergeeks in the Oracle community whilst at the same time nonchalantly stroll into a meeting with Larry Ellision, but Maria Colgan is one of the select people that can do so. Maria has nearly 3 decades of experience with the Oracle Database, covering SQL, performance, and the optimizer and even OS...

Known for many years as "the optimizer lady", there are very few people that can throw down with tech ubergeeks in the Oracle community whilst at the same time nonchalantly stroll into a meeting with Larry Ellision, but Maria Colgan is one of the select people that can do so. Maria has nearly 3 decades of experience with the Oracle Database, covering SQL, performance, and the optimizer and even OS...

Known for many years as "the optimizer lady", there are very few people that can throw down with tech ubergeeks in the Oracle community whilst at the same time nonchalantly stroll into a meeting with Larry Ellision, but Maria Colgan is one of the select people that can do so. Maria has nearly 3 decades of experience with Oracle, covering performance, the optimizer and even OS/2. In this episode, M...

Known for many years as "the optimizer lady", there are very few people that can throw down with tech ubergeeks in the Oracle community whilst at the same time nonchalantly stroll into a meeting with Larry Ellision, but Maria Colgan is one of the select people that can do so. Maria has nearly 3 decades of experience with Oracle, covering performance, the optimizer and even OS/2. In this episode, M...

In the high energy world of modern IT, it has become commonplace to float between companies on a regular cadence, which can result in diluting your skillset across an ever broadening landscape. But occasionally you'll have the good fortune to encounter someone who has expanded their breadth of skills almost entirely within a single organisation, giving them a incredibly in-depth knowledge of the p...

In the high energy world of modern IT, it has become commonplace to float between companies on a regular cadence, which can result in diluting your skillset across an ever broadening landscape. But occasionally you'll have the good fortune to encounter someone who has expanded their breadth of skills almost entirely within a single organisation, giving them a incredibly in-depth knowledge of the p...

In the high energy world of modern IT, it has become commonplace to float between companies on a regular cadence, which can result in diluting your skillset across an ever broadening landscape. But occasionally you'll have the good fortune to encounter someone who has expanded their breadth of skills almost entirely within a single organisation, giving them a incredibly in-depth knowledge of the p...

Databases are incredibly sophisticated pieces of software, and hence as they mature, the algorithms and logic behind what at first glance would seem to be trivial functionality are often amazing in their cleverness and cunning. In this episode we'll explore the complexity and sophistication around what would seem to be the simplest of questions: When I want to insert a row into a table, where shou...

It is easy to be "too close" to things that you are familiar with, and thus become jaded and disenchanted with all of the minor frustrations one encounters over a long period of time. Frequent travellers revel in grumbling about the delayed take-off, the size of the plane seat, the annoying passenger, the slow arrival of baggage etc, at the same time losing sight of the wonder of flight. In the in...

It is easy to be "too close" to things that you are familiar with, and thus become jaded and disenchanted with all of the minor frustrations one encounters over a long period of time. Frequent travellers revel in grumbling about the delayed take-off, the size of the plane seat, the annoying passenger, the slow arrival of baggage etc, at the same time losing sight of the wonder of flight. In the in...

It is easy to be "too close" to things that you are familiar with, and thus become jaded and disenchanted with all of the minor frustrations one encounters over a long period of time. Frequent travellers revel in grumbling about the delayed take-off, the size of the plane seat, the annoying passenger, the slow arrival of baggage etc, at the same time losing sight of the wonder of flight. In the in...

I first met Jackie McIlroy a few years back where she was an attendee at a pre-covid conference. Since then she has gone from strength to strength in the Oracle community, being a much-sought after speaker, an Oracle Ace, ODTUG committee member and chair for the Kscope APEX program. I caught up with her at the Kscope22 conference in Dallas Texas to chat about the impact of APEX and Community on he...

Databases are incredibly complex pieces of software, which can come as a surprise given that anyone can throw together a few lines of C code to read and write data from a file. What differentiates a database from simple file read/write is how databases handle concurrent access to the data. For many years, the feature that has set Oracle Database apart from all others is its "read consistency" impl...

Parsing is the act of preparing to execute a SQL statement on your database.  It would seem to be a necessary activity - after all, that is what databases are designed to do - execute SQL.  But the topic of parsing requires a more nuanced look, because a high transaction frequency database typically succeeds or fails based the amount of SQL parsing it does. In this episode, I'll take you on a trip...

No topic quite gets emotions rolling as much as the Oracle Query Optimizer. Thus you might expect that one of the least enviable jobs in the database world would be being the public face of the database optimizer. But since 2014, Nigel Bayliss has regularly fronted the community and shared the depth and breadth of his optimizer knowledge, whilst entertaining us with his sardonic wit on the challen...

No topic quite gets emotions rolling as much as the Oracle Query Optimizer. Thus you might expect that one of the least enviable jobs in the database world would be being the public face of the database optimizer. But since 2014, Nigel Bayliss has regularly fronted the community and shared the depth and breadth of his optimizer knowledge, whilst entertaining us with his sardonic wit on the challen...

No topic quite gets emotions rolling as much as the Oracle Query Optimizer. Thus you might expect that one of the least enviable jobs in the database world would be being the public face of the database optimizer. But since 2014, Nigel Bayliss has regularly fronted the community and shared the depth and breadth of his optimizer knowledge, whilst entertaining us with his sardonic wit on the challen...