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.