(Lucas Jellema) Some of my recent experiences with the Oracle Cloud left me less than wildly enthusiastic. Actions seemed to take long in a non-responsive, non-intuitive UI and I was required to go through too many configuration steps to get various cloud services to work together.

(connormcdonald) I didn’t see a PL/SQL version on https://rosettacode.org for the Haversine formula so here’s a version for anyone that needs it.

(amitzil) In the previous part (you can find it here) I discussed the character sets Oracle supports and the length limits. In this part I’ll show how it is actually stored and discuss some more topics that are relevant to using different languages with Oracle.

(raysmithace) Some of our named credentials use a privileged account to perform root actions via sudo. That account is not the same as the OEM agent binary owner and does not belong to the binary owner’s o/s groups for security reasons.

(Brendan Tierney) In my previous blog post I introduced the new Explicit Semantic Analysis (ESA) algorithm and gave an example of how you can build an ESA model and use it. Check out this link for that blog post.

(Uwe M. Küchler) When you have to troubleshoot blocking locks in your Oracle DB, you might be lucky enough to have a GUI tool handy that helps you with that (e.g. Enterprise Manager or TOAD). Otherwise you’ll likely have to resort to Oracle’s pre-installed script “utllockt.sql”.

(Ben Brumm) Have you seen ROWNUM and ROW_NUMBER in Oracle and wondered what the difference is? Learn what they are and the differences between Oracle ROWNUM vs Oracle ROW_NUMBER in this article.

(Randolf Geist) Here is a recording of a session I did a while ago, covering how to understand the essentials of Oracle Parallel Execution and how to read the corresponding execution plans.

(Syed Jaffar Hussain) In Part 1, I have outlined a few (my pick) 12cR2 new features useful for Developers and DBAs. In the part 2, I am going to discuss a few more new features.

(connormcdonald) If you are on any version of the database past 10.2.0.4, then savvy DBA’s may have noticed the following message popping up occasionally in their trace files