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About Normalization in Oracle Database Application Design

Relations between countries, or between departments in a company, or between users and developers, are usually the product of particular historical circumstances, which may define current relations even though the circumstances have long since passed. The result of this can be abnormal relations, or, in current parlance, dysfunctional relations. History and circumstance often have the […]

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About Materialized Views in Oracle

To improve the performance of an application, you can make local copies of remote tables that use distributed data or create summary tables based on GROUP BY operations. Oracle provides materialized views to store copies of data or aggregations. Materialized views can be used to replicate all or part of a single table or to […]

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Columns, Group Functions, and ORDER BY in Oracle 12c

The ORDER BY clause is executed after the WHERE, GROUP BY, and HAVING clauses. It can employ group functions, or columns from the GROUP BY, or a combination. If it uses a group function, that function operates on the groups and then the ORDER BY sorts the results of the function in order. If the […]

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The Power of Views of Groups in Oracle 12c

Let’s take a moment to discuss the real power of a relational database. Once you’ve created a view with the count by category, and a second view displaying the count for the entire table, you can join them together to reveal information never before apparent. For instance, what percentage of the books are in each category? […]

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Using Temporary Tables in Oracle 12c

You can create a table that exists solely for your session or whose data persists for the duration of your transaction. You can use temporary tables to support specialized rollups or specific application-processing requirements whose results will not persist beyond the session or even past a COMMIT statement. To create a temporary table, use the […]

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Complex Groupings in Oracle 12c

Views can build on each other.  You can easily join views to other views and tables to produce additional views to simplify the tasks of querying and reporting. As your groupings grow more complex, you will find that views are invaluable to your coding efforts; they simplify the representation of data at different grouping levels […]

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Oracle PL/SQL Performance Tuning and the Unknown UNDO

Scaling of existing software solutions is never a linear process. Contemporary database systems consume different kinds of resources (CPU time, memory, I/O channels) and behave differently when some of these resources become sparse. Considering that hardware is always limited by available budgets and technologies, it is critical to understand potential bottlenecks. Typically, this is accomplished […]

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Measuring Web Application Performance in Oracle Databases

Simply understanding a nine-step tuning process is not enough to be able to make a system work efficiently. You need a formal, quantitative way to measure performance. You also need some specific vocabulary to avoid any possible misunderstanding. The vocabulary list may vary somewhat, but the following terms are fundamental: Command. An atomic part of […]

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Family Trees and CONNECT BY in Oracle 12c

One of Oracle’s more interesting but little used or understood facilities is its CONNECT BY clause. Put simply, this method is used to report, in order, the branches of a family tree. Such trees are encountered often—the genealogy of human families, livestock, horses; corporate management, company divisions, manufacturing; literature, ideas, evolution, scientific research, theory; and […]

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Tablespaces and the Structure of the Oracle Database

People who have worked with computers for any period of time are familiar with the concept of a file; it’s a place on disk where information is stored, and it has a name. Its size is usually not fixed: If you add information to the file, it grows larger and takes up more disk space, […]

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