Patrick Barel

Patrick Barel

(0 comments, 18 posts)

Patrick Barel is a PL/SQL Developer for AMIS Services in the Netherlands. Besides working with SQL and PL/SQL did he co-develop CodeGen and wrote different plug-ins for PL/SQL Developer. He publishes articles on the AMIS Technology blog and on his own blog http://blog.bar-solutions.com/.

Posts by Patrick Barel
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AMIS proud sponsor of the SQL Challenge

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1 month ago
by Patrick Barel in , , , ,

PLSQL Challenge

SQL today is the foundation for any successful application. Whether it is a SOA implementation, an ADF or APEX application, a Forms application or any other usage of the Oracle Database (or any other relational database), SQL is key for the success. AMIS has embraced the evolution of SQL through the subsequent releases of the Oracle Database – trying to stay abreast of the latest features and adopting new functionality whenever it made pragmatic sense. In 2004 we developed the 7Up training – that introduced Oracle developers who started their Oracle careers with Oracle7 to the wonders of Oracle 9i. Through the years, this training evolved into a 7-11 training and we kept on presenting, demonstrating and writing about new ways of using SQL – through gems such as inline views and subquery factoring, analytic functions, the model clause, aggregations, multi-table DML, Flashback, intervals and many more. We must be one of the few companies in the world able to demonstrate all of the above using the DEPT and EMP tables in the SCOTT schema.

how-to-overcome-public-speaking-300x300In the month of April, we make another community contribution in the area of Oracle SQL: AMIS is the proud sponsor of the SQL Challenge – the world wide quiz for Oracle SQL developers that publishes weekly challenges, accessible via http://www.plsqlchallenge.com. Various SQL-smiths at AMIS gathered to produce five challenges to be published in five consecutive weeks. Challenges ranging from beginner level questions through the advanced level questions. Demonstrating the power of SQL and the fun of playing with it. Hopefully you find a mix of both easy and mind boggling questions. Maybe there are some things you had never thought of or even heard of and can be really useful in your day-to-day work.

CupAMIS provides prizes for contestants during AMIS April at the SQL Challenge. We will be selecting 2 winners from the people who have the highest score for all the quizzes. Besides that we will also select one random winner from all the people who played at least one of the five quizzes. Prizes include your choice of a SQL related eBook and for the first place winner also a SQL related book.

You can expect new quizzes every Saturday for the coming 5 weeks starting March 31st.

Update April 2nd 2012: Check out the SQL Challenge here.

OGh bijeenkomst 4 oktober

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7 months ago
by Patrick Barel in , , ,

Afgelopen dinsdag 4 oktober waren Andre van Winssen en ik de aangewezen personen om een presentatie bij de OGh te verzorgen. Andre vertelde in ongeveer een uur het een en ander over Application Contexts en het gebruik van DBMS Crypto. Een deel uit de masterclass die hij bij AMIS verzorgt.

Ik hield mijn presentatie over het oplossen van de puzzel SET door gebruik te maken van SQL. Door slim gebruik te maken van Query Factoring kan in 1 statement zowel de puzzel als de oplossing bepaald worden. Aan het einde van de presentatie werd het publiek uitgedaagd om de puzzel zelf op te lossen, waarbij voor een drietal gelukkigen een fysiek kaartspel te winnen was. Wil je meer weten over hoe het maken van dit soort puzzels je een betere ontwikkelaar maken, kom dan naar de masterclass van Steven Feuerstein bij AMIS.

De presentaties zijn te downloaden op de site van de OGh.

Oracle Scheduler, the things you ought to know

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10 months ago
by Patrick Barel in ,

At the KScope conference in Long Beach, CA one of the most interesting sessions I attended was a session called: Five Features You Ought to Know About the Oracle Scheduler by Eddie Awad. It was a nice presentation where I actually learned stuff I didn’t know. At least not in relation to the Scheduler.

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ODTUG KScope 2011

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10 months ago
by Patrick Barel in , ,

KScope11Last week I attended my very first ODTUG KScope conference in Long Beach, California. I have  attended conferences by ODTUG before, but they were never this broad.

Sunday

On Sunday I attended the APEX symposium. It was nice to see that APEX is being developed by a rather small, but geographically dispersed, group of people. Between them, there is always someone awake during the 24 hour cycle of a day ;-) . Biggest news on APEX 4.1 is that is will include better error handling possibilities. On a less bight note, 4.1 will probably not include the JQuery Mobile framework, because that is still in it’s alpha of beta phase when APEX 4.1 is to be released.

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Replace by position

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11 months ago
by Patrick Barel in ,

Have you ever wanted to replace a character in a string just by position? I needed this the other day and IMHO there is no way in Oracle PL/SQL to do this, so I decided to write this my self.

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Pipelined Table Functions

1 year ago
by Patrick Barel in ,

I have had trouble with a certain view I have to create at the customer site I am currently working at. The view involves 3 SQL
queries combined by using a UNION ALL, since the separate queries are mutually exclusive. Using the UNION ALL makes it a bit faster since
Oracle doesn’t have to do all the work of sorting and checking for duplicate rows.
Retrieving data from this view resulted in memory errors since there is too much data for the server to come up with and to return to me.
After checking all kinds of initialization parameters I decided to try and build a couple of pipelined table functions that would retrieve
the same data for me, but I assumed it wouldn’t put such a big pressure on my memory usage.

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Dynamic Actions in APEX

1 year ago
by Patrick Barel in ,

After visiting the OPP/APEXPosed conference in Brussels I decided to write a post on how to create a relatively simple dynamic action in APEX. When you are working with password fields your only visual check to see if the entered text in both fields match may be the number of characters entered. Of course you can check for equality on submit but that may be a bit too late for the user.
For this post I will work with a textfield instead of a password field, but both will work the same.

OPP is coming to Atlanta

2 years ago
by Patrick Barel in ,

OPP2009I have been invited to deliver two talks on performance at the OPP conference, November 10th and 11th in Atlanta. The topics I will address are Pipelined Table Functions and Optimizing SQL with Collections. I will be among some of the best experts in the PL/SQL world, including Steven Feuerstein, Bryn Llewellyn and many others. You can checkout the complete agenda to see what other subjects are covered.

At the same time, at the same location, the APEXposed conference will be held as well. Speakers at this conference will be Scott Spendolini, David Peake and also many others.

If you have a chance to join me there, be sure to do so. Early Bird registration ends September 30th. And the nice thing is: Sign up for one conference and you can attend session at either conference. So you get two conferences for the price of one.

As the website states: Join PL/SQL and Application Express experts Steven Feuerstein and Scott Spendolini for two days of Seriously Practical training that can immediately be applied to your daily duties at work.

Quest Software’s Toad and Oracle Performance Seminar

3 years ago
by Patrick Barel in ,

Last Wednesday Quest organized a seminar in Amsterdam on the performance of the Oracle database and the programs you write for it.

There were three presentations.

  • Development
  • Application Testing
  • Database maintenance

Development

The main issue in this presentation was that you should care about performance as early as possible in your development. It is much cheaper (time and money wise) to tune your code early in the process than when it’s all on production and when there’s lots of lines of code to check. 60% of the performance issues can be found in the SQL statements used. Another 30% can be found in the indexes used. That makes up 90% of the performance issues.

Quest has a couple of tools available that can help you with solving these issues. You can use the code Xpert or the profiler (and their front-end to it). But you can of course also ask the database (inspect the SGA) or, if all else fails, ask your users or your DBA. Another tool they promote is the SQL optimizer for Oracle. This tool rewrites the SQL statement you provide it (more times than you could do yourself in the same time) and looks for the best execution plan (it doesn’t actually execute the statements). Chances are this will come up with a better statement than the one you wrote.

Application testing

This was mainly a presentation on Firefighting performance problems in production. Not really testing your application, but responding to issues raised by the users, like ‘The application is slow’, or (worse) ‘The application doesn’t work’ (don’t be too specific, please…). What is mostly done is monitoring alarms, thresholds being exceeded, for instance high CPU usage or the amount of memory available is low. For this Quest offers different tools too, for instance Spotlight on Oracle.

Database maintenance

Then there was a presentation on what a presentation on what a ‘hobby DBA’ can use to trouble shoot a production application. You don’t have to be an expert on Oracle DBA tasks to be able to see where a bottle neck is present. As long as you have the right (monitoring) tools in place. This way, everybody can identify such issues and take appropriate action, that is, have the right people do their thing.

All in all it was mainly a bit of a sales rap, but I think developers (I am not a DBA) need to know about these tools (and be able to view the results) and there are probably more tools available than just the Quest ones, but if you don’t know what to look for, how can you find the right ones.

Code refactoring…

3 years ago
by Patrick Barel in ,

Steven Feuerstein wrote an entry on his Toadworld blog where he checks the refactoring capabilities of SQL-Developer.

I am trying the same things in PL/SQL Developer to see if this does do the trick.

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