Write Less (Code) With More (Features)

This session covers many features that were added to the Oracle database in the recent releases, and allow us developers to become more efficient and productive.

Some features enhance the SQL language, so SQL statements can become much shorter and more readable than before. Other features offer built-in functionality that previously had to be implemented by the application.

Attend this session to learn about the new features, and see many useful examples.

Oracle SQL Pattern Matching Made Easy

Has your country ever won the Eurovision Song Contest two or more years in a row? As we'll see, this can be answered easily using SQL Pattern Matching.

A new clause – MATCH_RECOGNIZE – was added to the SELECT statement in Oracle 12c, to allow recognizing patterns in sequences of rows.

This new capability is very powerful, and introduces a completely new (yet somewhat intimidating) syntax. It allows solving a variety of problems in a simpler way than before, and with better performance.

The purpose of this entertaining and educating session is to explain the MATCH_RECOGNIZE feature from the basics, step-by-step, with many examples, and by that demonstrating how powerful and useful it is, and at the same time eliminating the fear from what may seem at first as complex syntax.

I won the Top Speaker Award for the Core & Database track at Kscope22 for this presentation.

Constraint Optimization: The Difference a Comma Can Make

A task can be done in a very short way and in a very long way. Which one will you choose?

Knowledge is Power!

This session gives lots of interesting knowledge about an allegedly boring topic - Constraints. And this knowledge will give you the power to optimize and make better decisions.

The behavior of adding columns and constraints to big tables in Oracle may vary significantly, in two aspects - duration and availability - based on the way we perform these operations. In addition, different constraints may have different impact, based on their syntax, types, states, locking, etc.

Attend this session to understand what happens exactly under the hood when we issue a simple ALTER TABLE statement, and how to utilize this knowledge for achieving better performance or higher availability.

This session is based on a series of blog posts I've published about constraint creation optimization, after investigating and analyzing various optimizations that Oracle applies in some cases, and neglects to apply in other cases.

How I Stopped Upgrading at Nights and Weekends, and Became More Relaxed and Productive

Do you shut your Oracle-based system down for application upgrades?

Do you upgrade only at nights and weekends (when you are tired and angry) for minimizing downtime?

I don’t, for more than 10 years now, because I use Edition-Based Redefinition (EBR). Join this session and learn from my experience.

EBR is a powerful feature of Oracle (added in version 11.2), that enables application upgrades with zero downtime, while the application is actively used and operational. I have been using it on a daily basis for many years now, in a production site that requires frequent application upgrades with very limited downtime, and find it very useful and fascinating.

Join this session to learn how to use EBR, see many live examples, and get tips from real-life experience in a production site using EBR extensively.

EBR is a hidden gem!

It can improve both the life of developers and DBAs and the experience of clients and users.
It is included in all Oracle Editions and requires no extra license, option or pack. And yet, not many know about this feature, let alone use it.

I think it's important to expose more Oracle professionals to EBR, and events such as your conference are perfect for this.

Design Patterns in PL/SQL and SQL

A software design pattern is defined in Wikipedia as "a general, reusable solution to a commonly occurring problem within a given context".

In this session we'll see design patterns for various common problems in SQL and PL/SQL, like how to implement some data model requirements, how to write SQL queries for specific types of questions, and how to use PL/SQL for solving some challenging tasks.

Design patterns are popular in C++ and Java, but the concept of general reusable solutions to commonly occurring problems can (and should) be applied in SQL and PL/SQL as well.

The concept of this session is based on a demo application that is built from scratch during the presentation, where every development requirement is a concrete example of a general common task, that is solved using some design pattern.