September 16, 2003
Oracle 9i Goodies
I've started on working on yet another project at work, and this time we are using Oracle. Its been a while, and I thought it was about time I caught up with the state of the nation.
I then stumbled across Ask Tom, a question and answer session with one of the company's key technologists. They provide a variety of feeds and the recently updated one is now a feature of my Bloglines subscriptions list.
This morning I was glad that I did subscribe. This article filled in a gap in my knowledge about external tables and introduced me to a new SQL statement, the rather funky looking MERGE.
Its one of those things that you didn't know you needed until it arrived and will save an awful lot of coding in the future. Of course, if it was in DB2 it would lock the table whenever you execute it, but I'm sure that the Oracle implementation will be much more sensible.
<UPDATE>Its actually been around for a while, for a gentle introduction try this article.</UPDATE>
Posted by Andy Todd at September 16, 2003 09:47 AM
Andy - thanks for those two article links. For the update link, can you correct "a hef" to "a href"?
Posted by: Babu on September 16, 2003 12:06 PMHi,
I have enjoyed reading your blog; we stomp around in some of the same forests. I am genuinely curious as to whether your consistent use of "its" instead of "it's" as a contraction of for "it is" is an oversight, a part of your style, or evidence of a new trend that hasn't caught on yet in my neighborhood.
Truly, its a question, not a criticism.
DH
Posted by: Dave on September 18, 2003 10:19 AMDave,
Its pure lazyness on my part. Because I can never remember when it is correct to use an apostrophe and when its not I tend to avoid putting them in altogether.
Luckily, I only pretend to be the grammar police on my other blog ;-)
Posted by: Andy Todd on September 18, 2003 02:08 PM