(Zohar Elkayam) Here is a common question I get from junior DBAs (and operating system who tries to help by installing the Oracle Home themselves).

(Gokhan Atil) The notifications emails of a “planned” downtime is one of the annoying things of monitoring systems. You forget creating blackout and you start a maintenance work, and you get lots of notifications mails.

(Michael McLaughlin) It’s always a challenge when you want to build your own Oracle SQL Tools. I was asked how you could synchronize multiple cursors into a single source. The answer is quite simple, you write an Oracle object type to represent a record structure, an Oracle list of the record struct

(Ben Brumm) Are you wondering if you should name your Oracle database tables in the singular form or plural form?

(mdinh) catoctk.sql: Oracle Cryptographic Toolkit package

(Jeff Smith) Thanks to an update in a 12c JDBC driver for Oracle Database, we can now update a password natively, without being connected to the database.

(Brendan Tierney) A new Oracle Data Mining algorithm in the Oracle 12.2c Database is called Explicit Semantic Analysis.

(Uwe Hesse) Hot cloning PDBs is new in 12.2, so you don’t have to put the source PDB into READ ONLY mode before the cloning if you have it in local undo mode. I suppose shared undo mode will become very unpopular.

(Zohar Elkayam) Starting Oracle 10g, the old export/import tools were replaced by a newer, more sophisticated tool: the data pump.

(Ben Brumm) In this article, I’ll explain what all of the variations of the INSTR function (INSTRB, INSTRC, INSTR2 and INSTR4) do, and show you some examples.