14 June 2010

Analytic Function bug and National Championship

Yesterday there were the "NL Masters" in my hometown Oosterhout, The Netherlands. This two day track and field event was the National Championship for Athletes in the Master Class.
While volunteering (I was running around all day as a courier) I noticed a familiar name on the list. Toine van Beckhoven, currently ranked first in the PL/SQL Challenge. Small world. Toine finished first on the 400m hurdles in his category and is now the official Dutch National Champion. Congratulations, Toine.
Being involved in this event triggered a question regarding ranking. And we're back to analytic functions... ;)

10 June 2010

Analytic Function bug?

Last Tuesday we had an ODTUG Preview mini-conference at our office in Nieuwegein, The Netherlands. Nine presentations with nine fine speakers. Too bad the session were in parallel, and thus you had to pick and choose which session to attend. Oh well, that's always the case with conferences, even tiny ones like this one.
Because I'm doing a presentation during the ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2010, I also did my presentation last Tuesday.
The feedback I got was good, and I also got some pointers to make the presentation better.

04 June 2010

Check your Datatype, also in Check Constraints

A question came up at the Oracle discussion forum on SQL and PL/SQL regarding not being able to see any data even though the table did contain records. My lesson from this question was to pay close attention to the datatypes and implicit conversions taking place. What still puzzles me is a way to detect the mistake made apart from looking closely.
Anyway these queries didn't return any records:

SELECT * FROM problem WHERE solved = '0';
SELECT * FROM problem WHERE solved = 0;