Throughout the history of relational databases, the issue of denormalization has never been settled. Theoreticians still continue to argue about it, but from the practical point of view, most database systems are denormalized to some extent. For example, about 99.9 percent of address records in the United States have the ZIP code, city, and state […]
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Sometimes performance problems are initiated by requirements beyond the control of an average database developer. For example, in a number of front-end environments, you cannot use DMLs against a table or view if it does not have a primary key. With tables, that kind of problem is taken seriously and constraints are not added indiscriminately. […]
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Too many DBAs insist that DDL commands should never be fired in a production environment. Therefore, they often try to prevent DDLs from happening by any means, whether technical or organizational. In addition to strict internal policies, the authors have encountered database-level triggers that limit the whole system to only basic DML operations. Of course, […]
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The biggest challenge in learning Dynamic SQL is to get past your initial fear of this feature. Of course, with any advanced technology comes risk with its misuse. In the case of Dynamic SQL, the chances of encountering security or performance issues often outweigh the potential benefits. With proper understanding of the underlying mechanisms, you […]
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In the 1990s and early 2000s, it was considered common knowledge that Oracle databases were not very good at pure number crunching. As a result, many people used C-based and other external methods to perform extensive calculations. Eventually, Oracle introduced a group of datatypes that could finally provide the required level of performance: BINARY_INTEGER, BINARY_FLOAT, […]
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One of the most typical problems when processing textual information is filtering out good characters from bad characters. The approach of splitting strings into single-symbol arrays and validating them against a given list was outdated many years ago. But even when using the built-in functionality provided by Oracle, you need to understand the strengths and […]
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