Kirtan Desai

Oracle just announced the release of Oracle Virtualization software, Oracle VM. It sounds all great and fun but it needs two machines, one for installing the server and another for managing it. I don’t have two machines for this. I have two machines but this approach seems like a little too much effort for “virtualization”. [...]

To extract values from an oracle table column of timestamp datatype, you need to convert it to a character datatype since the Oracle Timestamp datatype is not currently supported by PowerCenter. To extract the value do the following.
Use SQL override and function to_char, provided by oracle, to convert the values of a field to character [...]

So how to pivot data in a table?
I was asked about this by someone at work today. Let’s say you have a table that looks like following. I have included create and insert statements so that you can see it and understand it yourself.
Create table t1 (a number, b number);
insert into t1 values (1,1);
insert into [...]

Analytic functions:
All my findings regarding analytic functions will go in this post. In other words I will keep on adding my finding to this post instead of creating new one all the time. I will also make sure that everytime when I update this post I bring up to the top of the list so [...]

COALESCE is one of many convenient ways provided by oracle to handle NULL values in the database. The Oracle COALESCE function accepts a varying length list of arguments and returns the first non-NULL value/expr in the list. If all arguments in the list evaluate to a NULL value, then the COALESCE function will return a [...]

There was a question asked on InformaticaDevelopement yahoo group about parsing names. I had a piece of code saved from asktom. I don’t know when I got it from asktom, but I know I got it from asktom. I just wanted to put it out here for reference. To parse names you would have to [...]

Flashback features were there in 9i. 10g is providing something new/extra.
### From new features guide  ###
What if you ever need to do a resetlogs operation for recovery purposes, you can take the
database back to a point in time before the resetlogs if you find that you made a
mistake. This provides administrators more flexibility to detect [...]

I just wrote this procedure below that does duplicate file (dataset, i should say) check.
Let’s say, you have a system where your clients/users have rights to write straight to your “staging” or “landing” tables. You have a system where multiple users are feeding multiple files everyday. You have a requirement to check whether users are [...]

Below are some useful scripts that i found in one of my old hard drives. If you want to gather stat reports for the oracle ser sessions you could use the following scripts. Right before posting this i tried them on 8i, 9i, and 10g.
To find total cpu usage by each/all sessions, you could use [...]

Using Oracle function TRANSLATE and REPLACE to remove special characters from a string.
This is the definition of the function.
TRANSLATE(expr, from_string, to_string)
Descrption: [FROM ORACLE DOCUMENTATION]
TRANSLATE returns expr with all occurrences of each character in from_string replaced by its corresponding character in to_string. Characters in expr that are not in from_string are not replaced. If expr is [...]