Coming up: My 10th Kscope!

In June 2010 I attended ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2010 in Washington D.C. I got this T-shirt:

But I didn't get just a T-shirt, I got an awesome experience. And most importantly I got to be part of a fabulous community of friends all over the globe without whom I wouldn't be where I am today.

Being hooked from day one, I've been to each and every Kscope since - attending, speaking, ambassadoring, volunteering at all community service days, having fun, helping others, getting help, and so on. In short: getting my yearly inoculation against LowTech Syndrome.

It's also taken me around the US:

Kscope10	Washington D.C
Kscope11	Long Beach, California
Kscope12	San Antonio, Texas
Kscope13	New Orleans, Louisiana
Kscope14	Seattle, Washington
Kscope15	Hollywood, Florida
Kscope16	Chicago, Illinois
Kscope17	San Antonio, Texas
Kscope18	Orlando, Florida
Kscope19	Seattle, Washington

And now I am just *so* ready to go to Seattle for Kscope19 (my 10th anniversary Kscope), where I've got a packed schedule:

• Saturday: Bag stuffing - see if we can optimize the workload this year.
• Saturday: Community Service Day - this year packing lunches at Pike Market Food Bank.
• Sunday: Oracle Symposiums in the Database track.
• Sunday: Welcome Reception and Geek Game Night.
• Monday: Seeing scientific magic at the Keynote.
• Monday: Co-presenting on Helen Sanders' presentation "SQL on Steroids: BULK Processing."
• Monday: Interviewing the one and only Maria Colgan in the ODTUG Social Media Lounge.
• Monday: The OrclDB Community Night: "Database Everything But the Beanstalk."
• Tuesday: Moderating the Oracle Groundbreakers Lunch and Learn: Database Panel.
• Tuesday: Presenting my own session "Data Twisting."
• Tuesday: Eating and drinking with fellow members of the Oracle ACE Program.
• Wednesday: Being interviewed and taping a 2 Minute Tech Tip.
• Wednesday: Presenting my own session "Uses of Row Pattern Matching."
• Wednesday: The Big Party at the MoPOP.
• Thursday: The Deep Dive in the APEX track.

Add to that:

• Attending 8(ish) other presentations and learn something (still trying to decide which.)
• Mingle and chat at Breakfast, Lunch, Coffee/Tea Breaks, Happy Hours, etc.
• Visiting Exhibit Hall and see what's new.
• Meet as many old and new friends as possible.

When flying back home, I'll be bushed, but believe you me - it's worth it!

I'm not alone in thinking Kscope is a great conference. I do have a couple of colleagues from Trivadis also speaking:

Philipp Salvisberg will be speaking about:

• MLE—Java, JavaScript, Python, or PL/SQL in the Database?
• Testing with utPLSQL—Made Easy with SQL Developer

Dani Schnider will be speaking about:

• Avoid "Horror Queries": Keep Your SQL Simple and Fast
• How Autonomous Is the Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse?

We're all looking forward to seeing you all in Seattle for ODTUG Kscope19.

Results of the Dev Gym SQL Championship for 2018

All the after-play checking of the results of Oracle SQL Annual Championship for 2018 is done. The awards have now been processed, and it is with great pleasure I can publish the results here to serve as an inspiration for you to trying out your own SQL knowledge at the Dev Gym.

ORA-22905 when calling ODCI Table functions from PL/SQL

Back in 2015 I experimented using ODCITable* functions to dynamically parse delimited text (see blog post here.)

Now blog reader Daniel Cabanillas points out, that it raises an error when used in PL/SQL. Silly me - I had only tried it out in SQL (my favorite language) and had completely missed that it failed in PL/SQL.

Lucky for me, the classic workaround of dynamic SQL works here too 😁

Participant list for Oracle Dev Gym SQL Championship 2018

2018 is over. Throughout the year people have participated in the "Select for SQL" Tournament on Oracle Dev Gym. It's time for the Top 50 to try their skills in the Annual SQL Championship!

Everybody who tried the quizzes have hopefully had fun as well as exercised SQL skills. Maybe even learned a little :-) I hope you'll all keep working your mental muscles in 2019 as well - get your friends and colleagues to try it too! I'll do my very best to try and pass on knowledge via the quizzes.

Whether you worked out with the quizzes for fun alone or you played in the tournament as well, thank you for being there in 2018. And congratulations to the Top 50 in the "Select for SQL" Tournament on Oracle Dev Gym in 2018 for the stamina and skill displayed to be ranked sufficiently high at the end of the year to participate in the Championship.

ODC Appreciation Day : The ever growing toolbox

It's ODC Appreciation Day 😃 !

The day initiated by Tim Hall where Oracle bloggers worldwide make a blog post to show appreciation of the Oracle Developer Community.

This year I won't dive into a specific technical thing in SQL or PL/SQL, but rather I'm appreciating how much my toolbox grows all the time with new bits coming in a steady flow.

Corrupting characters - How to get invalid byte values stored in strings

Having worked with Database Migration Assistant for Unicode (DMU) to convert some databases from single-byte charactersets to AL32UTF8, I had problems with DMU reporting a lot of characters with invalid byte values (in this case binary values that did not exist in WE8ISO8859P15.)

So how can that happen? Doesn't the database enforce character encoding to match the database characterset?

Wrong - not always.

Well ok, you can get invalid values with single-byte charactersets - but once the database is AL32UTF8 then it can store all the characters in the world, so then it cannot happen, right?

Wrong again - you can still get corrupt character data if you do it the wrong way.

Announcing the results of the Oracle Dev Gym SQL Championship for 2017

A huge round of applause to the top players in the championship:

1st Place: mentzel.iudith of Israel

2nd Place: Pavel Zeman of Czech Republic

3rd Place: Andrey Zaytsev of Russia

Especially noteworthy is the accomplishment of Iudith Mentzel, who also won the DB Design Championship and has been a very regular Dev Gym participant for years. Congratulations, Iudith!