(mdinh) Confession: I have not been using OEM for decades since there was never a real need for it and it’s starting to take its toll on me.

(Ben) In this article, I’ll explain what the Oracle SESSIONTIMEZONE function is, and show you some examples.

(advait) Sometimes we end up in a situation where our long running transaction is not completing and we are also not sure how much further time it’s going to take. This happened with one of our DBA where they found MLOG to be bloated because of one orphan snapshot entry.

(Randolf Geist) This is just a short 12c update on my post about gathering statistics on tables with many columns from some time ago.

(stewashton) In my previous post I used XMLTABLE and ora:tokenize to split a comma delimited string. Now I’ll apply that technique to multiple rows, and show that it’s faster than other methods.

(David Fitzjarrell) A useful new feature in Oracle 12c (12.1.0.2) is the Hybrid histogram, a new type of histogram that uses a reduced number of buckets compared to the number of distinct values in the table data and utilizes the repeat frequency of the endpoint values.

(Frits Hoogland) This is a blogpost about how I setup my test virtual machines. The seasoned sysadmin and DBA will notice that the techniques used here are perfectly usable for real production environments. The most important thing is there is no need to download or stage any software for installing

(Martin Bach) Some time ago I wrote a post about using OSWatcher for system analysis. Neil Chandler (@ChandlerDBA) rightfully pointed out that although OSWatcher was cool, TFA was the way to go. TFA can include OSWatcher, but more importantly it adds a lot of value over and above what OSWatcher does

(Richard Foote) One of the very cool new features introduced in Oracle Database 12c Rel 1 is the ability to store JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) documents within the database.

(Ben) Oracle 12c is Oracle’s latest version of their database engine. Learn about all of the new Oracle 12c new features for developers in this massive guide.