Tag Archives: database

Oracle + Government = Fail

As some of you know, I pretend to be an Oracle DBA as part of my day job. Oracle is the Microsoft of the database industry. It’s bloated, hard to use, and entrenched in businesses around the world. One of its biggest customers is the US Government.

The main component of the software that resides in memory is the System Global Area (SGA). It contains all kinds of caches and sort areas where Oracle does all the work on behalf of database users. If you’re running a critical production server with nothing else but Oracle on it, the System Global Area should be as large as possible while still leaving some RAM for the operating system.

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I Joined With Your Mom Last Night

Welcome to Part 3 of my series on SQL. If you need to catch up, try Part 1 or Part 2. I’ll make this installment short because of one or more of the following possible reasons:

  1. You don’t care about SQL.
  2. You don’t like baseball, which I use in my examples.
  3. You think I suck at writing and/or life.
  4. You’re a Grumpy Gus and you hate your job and your girlfriend and your life.

Onward, shall we?

Joins

There are a few types of joins in SQL: inner, left, and right. They each have their specific uses, so it’s important to know which one to use for a situation.

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A SQL Sequel

Duh?

Now, let’s recover from that terrible start to a blog post. And by recover I mean put up this lame educational post a day after Charlie’s awesomely nerdy post from South Dakota.

For the second part of this pointless series on SQL, I’ll continue my discussion on select statements. This time around I’ll cover the ORDER BY clause, the GROUP BY clause, and the SUM function. If you need to get caught up, here’s Part 1.

ORDER BY

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And now for something completely unnecessary: An intro to SQL

As a kind of, sort of “junior DBA,” I have learned several things about databases. I know Charlie’s looking to learn about SQL, so I’ll post a series about some of the basic stuff about the language that I picked up.

SQL (some people pronounce it “sequel”) is a fairly simple language, with a pseudo natural language flow. In this post, I’ll start with select statements, and in later posts I will cover insert, update, and delete statements. These four statements are the core of the language. They are practically standardized across all database systems. I’ll use MySQL in my examples, but it shouldn’t matter what system you’re using.

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