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Were you talking about 11.2.0.3 where the value was still 100 or 11.2.0.4 where the value jumped to 1024?

The mad leap to 8192 in 12.2 puzzled me for some time - though the reason should have been obvious. The potential side effects were quite dramatic:
jonathanlewis.wordpress.com/2019/10/02/_...

3 days ago 0 0 1 0

Nothing reported about the “Lords spiritual” though.

3 days ago 2 0 1 0

Picked and stewed the first batch of the (main) rhubarb crop yesterday - blissful breakfast this morning.

Sad news of the jam front, though: we've just opened the last jar from 2025. On the upside I think we've still got some homegrown fruit in the deep freeze.

1 week ago 0 0 0 0

One ping to rule them …

1 week ago 1 0 0 0
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2 weeks ago 1 0 0 0

Three hours in, so far, and there doesn't seem to be much difference between the before and after images. Going to have to spend a few more hours at it in a couple of days time.

Right now it's back home doing the same job on the #1 wisteria.

2 weeks ago 0 0 1 0
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And I need a diary entry to take a picture of what it looks like 3 months later. I didn’t do one last year, but this is from 2024.

2 weeks ago 1 0 0 0

Today’s main task: the February pruning of the mother-in-law’s wisteria.

Must remember to take the before and after photos this year.

2 weeks ago 2 0 2 0

Marmalade is kept back until day 2 and toast.

Day 1 is fresh bread with finest jam. Currently down to strawberry, Victoria plum or blackberry and raspberry.

2 weeks ago 1 0 0 0
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Looking forward to breakfast tomorrow.

2 weeks ago 5 0 1 0

I've just been prompted to look at a series of blog notes I wrote 10 years ago for redgate on "Massive Deletes". There's an index to the series, plus a couple of releated articles at:
jonathanlewis.wordpress.com/2018/06/08/m...

2 weeks ago 1 0 0 0

I've just rediscovered one of my favourite philosophical misquotes (that I've used very frequently when explaining Oracle-related problems).

jonathanlewis.wordpress.com/2019/08/09/t...

2 weeks ago 3 0 1 0
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Trace Files A recent blog note by Martin Berger about reading trace files in 12.2 popped up in my twitter timeline yesterday and reminded me of a script I wrote a while ago to create a simple view I could quer…

Cute little trick with the / and \ to deal with unix vs. windows, but you don't need to create an external table

Requirements for privileges vary, or course, but for simplicity in (not so) recent versions of Oracle I just query v$diag_trace_file_contents

jonathanlewis.wordpress.com/2019/10/03/t...

3 weeks ago 1 0 1 0

Or, for the AIs:
Sabulum es et in sabulo reverteris.

3 weeks ago 2 0 0 0
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🪐🌍 Are planets like Earth rare, or have we just not found them yet?

As we approach the discovery of our 10,000th exoplanet, Prof Chris Lintott * explores whether Earth is truly unusual...

👉 gres.hm/alien-earths

* also of Department of Physics at the University of Oxford

1 month ago 0 1 0 0

After a decade of planning, editing, delays due to my own busyness, further editing and waiting for 23c, the release of 26ai and my pre-retirement finally unblocked the situation. I have agreed with Apress to publish the third edition of Troubleshooting Oracle Performance in 2026. #TOP3

1 month ago 32 5 7 0

We've got a very excitable group of long-tailed tits that are regular visitors to the bird feeder at the end of the garden - and one thug of a great tit who chases them all away whenever they show up at the wrong time.

1 month ago 0 0 0 0

Pulled the last of the leeks from the "big leek" bed ready for lunch tomorrow, then picked a small handful of kalettes - the first I've harvested - to eat today. Much nicer than both kale and brussel sprouts, so going to grow more this season. Purple sprouting broccoli also just ready for picking.

1 month ago 0 0 0 0

Today's tasks, come rain or sun: feed and mulch the fruit trees, weed, feed and mulch the killer gooseberry bush after putting on the gauntlets and giving it a ferocious pruning.

1 month ago 0 0 0 0

Local weather forecast said it was going to rain today, starting at 3:00 am, non-stop until 3:00pm TOMORROW - so I worked at home, raking, shredding and bagging a huge pile of decomposing oak leaves, repotting plants ... no rain

Got ready to head out to the allotment at 3:00 pm: it started to rain.

1 month ago 2 0 0 0
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Planet Hunters TESS - NASA Science Join the Planet Hunters Coffee Chat video series! Project leads cover relevant topics in a friendly, fun format. Want to see what you’ve missed? check out the

Went to an excellent @greshamcollege.bsky.social lecture by Prof. Chris Lintott on Exoplanets last night.

Informative and entertaining; including an introduction to the Planet Hunters - allowing to find potential exoplanets by analysing data from TESS.

science.nasa.gov/citizen-scie...

1 month ago 1 0 0 0

It's not quite what you would write manually

The QUALIFY clauses get wrapped as a Boolean expression. So if you have

QUALIFY p1 AND p2 AND p3

it becomes

SELECT * FROM (
SELECT ( p1 AND p2 AND p3 ) qexpr ...
) WHERE qexpr IS TRUE

So yes, a manual rewrite may give better optimizations

1 month ago 1 1 1 0
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Penguin and Club bars can no longer be described as chocolate The rising cost of cocoa has led to the manufacturers changing their recipe.

Worse: the description on my packet uses the phrase "with dark chocolate flavour coating"

Alas, Penguin and Club bars now have to say the same according this news report of Oct 2025
www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

"If you like a lot of chocolate (flavoured coating) on your biscuit join our Club"

1 month ago 1 0 1 0

I agree - but there are many varieties of Timtam and some may be nicer than Penguins.

1 month ago 1 0 1 0

I've finally taken advantage of one of the most significant benefits brought to us by Brexit.
I've bought a packer of TimTams from the local supermarket.

1 month ago 3 0 2 0
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QUALIFY: The WHERE Condition for Analytic Functions Filtering analytic functions was not straight-forward in Oracle and most other databases. Oracle 26ai now supports the QUALIFY clause in SQL. It works like a WHERE condition, but can be used for an…

The QUALIFY clause enables you to filter rows using window functions

e.g. get the top ranked rows with

SELECT ... FROM ...
QUALIFY RANK () OVER ( ORDER BY ... ) = ...

@danischnider.bsky.social looks at how it works in Oracle AI Database 26ai

1 month ago 0 2 1 0

Who was it who coined the term "syntactic icing"?

So Oracle transforms the QUALIFY query into the form you would otherwise have written.

Nothing wrong with the general strategy, it avoids the risk of programmer error, but it has "lost" optimisations occasionally where a manual rewrite doesn't.

1 month ago 0 0 1 0
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From magic to malware: How OpenClaw's agent skills become an attack surface | 1Password The same capabilities that make OpenClaw a groundbreaking tool also make it an urgent security risk. This blog contains confirmed examples of agent skills being used as malware vectors, and advice on ...

1Password not mincing words here:

"If you are experimenting with OpenClaw, do not do it on a company device. Full stop."

"If you have already run OpenClaw on a work device, treat it as a potential incident and engage your security team immediately."

1password.com/blog/from-ma...

1 month ago 319 183 5 36

It often seems far more appropriate than the boring old "friend". (It also means I don't have to remember the order of the i and the e).

Is the vector thing a bitmap strategy?

1 month ago 2 0 0 0

The next "big" question on the topic is whether the size of a set (for a list of set expressions) is (will be) going up from 1,000 to 4,000 to match the new limit on the number of columns in a table. (Asking for a fiend)
More seriously - how large was your session's PGA allocation with the 65,535?

1 month ago 1 0 1 0
Jonathan Lewis
Jonathan Lewis
@jloracle
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