Update on blog

As qualified 8 months ago, I moved the blog here. If you’ve comments on the posts here, please feel free to move them there.

Migrating to a new blog site …

A number of friends wanted me to do things that weren’t possible while keeping my blog on WordPress.com’s web site. Things like code formatting, downloads for software, et cetera …

You can find the new blog at: http://blog.mclaughlinsoftware.com

So, I’ve migrated it to my own domain. I’m in the process of configuring the rest of the domain. I’ll update you through the blog as I complete the process.

I’ve got grand plans (lets hope there’s time). For example, I’m planning to migrate and update the TechTinker.com domain too. I’ll plan tutorials on Java, PL/SQL, and PHP initially as well as administration tips, techniques and walk through steps for my favorite platforms. As time allows, I’ve got some stuff comparing SQL across platforms – much beyond the trivial Oracle’s SPOOL is MySQL’s tee (not herbal tea).

While my perspective may change over time, I’m quite fond of Mac OS X, Ubuntu, and Red Hat. I won’t exclude Microsoft because we must live with it, but isn’t CrossOver sweet! I’d actually tried to get Oracle to run through it. I may yet, I’m still playing with it.

I’m trilled that Chris Jones and Justin Kestelyn got me blogg’n. I’ve always wanted to contribute more but the forums have mavens with much more time than I have to answer questions. The blog lets me share ideas and concepts as they travel with me on a daily basis.

Stats on the blog pages may not migrate but if time allows maybe I’ll write a plugin if I can’t find one. Generally, I don’t think anybody cares about the stats. It’s the information to solve problems, and I hope that’s what you find useful in my blog.

By the way, it wasn’t just the ability to have my blog pages look cool on my iPhone that drove the change, but it does look nice!!!

That old $TNS_ADMIN environment variable

Somebody reminded me that I should include the $TNS_ADMIN variable to avoid unnecessary file searches (minor expense) in the Mac configuration instructions. This eliminates additional searches when running sqlplus and tnsping executables. I’ve updated that blog page with those instructions. It’s not necessary to make it work but it does avoid a read to the local and /etc directories on your Mac OS X for a tns_names.ora file before reading it from the $ORACLE_HOME/network/admin directory.

Adapter or not adapter that’s the question

The Adapter pattern in Object-Oriented OO programming is missing when it comes to how you can read, pass, and manage a PL/SQL system reference cursor. At least, it’s missing for PL/SQL native development. It is available through the OCI but only as a multiple dimensional array of strings.

Here’s an illustration of the Adapter Pattern (courtesy of the Design Patterns book by Gamma, Helm, Johnson, and Vlissides):

There are a few ways to handle reference cursor in PL/SQL. I’ve updated the earlier blog to more completely cover the options. In all cases within a PL/SQL environment, you must know the target type of the PL/SQL record structure. The target for converting a PL/SQL reference cursor is a a PL/SQL record structure.

You can assign a PL/SQL record structure through a PIPELINED table function to an aggregate table, which can be read by SQL. The following query lets you read an aggregate table back into a PL/SQL structure but begs the question of why you’d want to do that. The actual query by itself is in the updated blog entry linked above.

The OCI8 driver lets you take the system reference cursor from a PL/SQL block and translate it to a multidimensional array of strings. The following (borrowed from my book on PHP programming with Oracle) demonstrates how to open a statement and a reference cursor, which lets you manage the OUT mode parameter (covered in this earlier post) variable of a PL/SQL reference cursor. Our thanks should go to the OCI team because they see the world of interactivity.

You can query the results of the reference cursor ($rc), like this:

Moreover, it would be wonderful if Oracle let you implement a full Adapter pattern but there are constructive ways to work with what we’ve got now. You actually get a bit more through the JDBC implementation but that’s for another blog I guess. As to adapter or not adapter, it’s clearly not.

VMWare Fusion tip on upgrading VMWare Tools

You’ll need to right click on the VMWareTools icon and manually extract the file. If you don’t and double click the icon instead, it’ll raise an exception that one already exists. After you manually extract it to your desktop, run the command as follows (replacing your user name of course):

# sudo /home/username/Desktop/vmware-tools-distrib/vmware-install.pl

VMWare Fusion 2.x causes Ubuntu printing failure

I’d already upgraded my Windows x86 instances to 2.x on my Mac Book Pro but hadn’t got around to Ubuntu until today. The upgrade went fine, and VMWare Tools compilation succeeded and kernel reports were normal. Unfortunately, CUPS (Common Unix Printing Service) fails to start correctly and there doesn’t appear to be any way to fix it without changing the VMWare Fusion libraries. It appears to be a bug introduced by VMWare Tools. I’ve updated my Ubuntu VMWare printer set up steps to note it. If you’ve got a fix for the problem, let me know.

Quick review of PL/SQL formal parameter modes

My students wanted a supplement on how variable modes work in PL/SQL, so I figured it would fit nicely in a quick blog entry. If you’re interested, read on …

PL/SQL supports three patterns of variable modes in functions and procedures. The easiest supports a pass-by-value function or procedure, and it is the IN mode of operation. The other two are related but different, and support a pass-by-reference function or procedure. The differences between a function and procedure are straightforward: (1) A function can return a value as an output, which is known as an expression; (2) A function can be used as a right operand; (3) A procedure can’t return a value because it more or less returns a void (borrowing from the lexicon of C, C++, C#, or Java and many other languages), (4) A procedure can be used as a statement by itself in a PL/SQL program while a function can’t. The variables you define in a function or procedure signature (or prototype) are the formal paramters, while the values or variables assigned when calling a function or procedure are the actual parameters.

IN mode:

An IN mode variable is really a copy of the variable, but you can ask to pass a reference. PL/SQL typically obliges when using the IN mode of operation. The following defines a pass-by-value PL/SQL function (other than the return type, you could do the same in a procedure too):

You can test the values of the actual parameter before and after the function call while also testing it inside the function. You can also assign a literal number or string as the actual parameter because the IN mode only requires a value because it discard the variable reference and value when it completes.

There is an exception data type for this IN mode operation, and it is the PL/SQL system reference data type (more on this type can be found in the following post). A PL/SQL reference cursor can only be passed when it is already opened, and it actually passes a reference to the cursor work area in the Private Global Area (PGA).

You can’t assign a value to a formal parameter inside a function when the variable has the default (or IN) mode of operation. Any attempt to do so raises a PLS-00363 with a warning that expression (formal parameter) can’t be used as an assignment target. A test of the function follows:

This seems to be the preferred way to implement functions for beginning programmers.

IN OUT mode:

An IN OUT mode variable is typically a reference to a copy of the actual variable for a couple reasons. If the function or procedure fails the original values are unchanged (this is a departure from the behavior of collections passed as actual parameters in Java). You can assign values to the formal parameter at runtime when using an IN OUT mode variable.

At the conclusion of the function or procedure the internal variable’s reference is passed to the calling program scope and replaces the original reference to the actual parameter. Here’s an example of an IN OUT mode variable in a function.

As you can see the external value is changed inside the function and at completion of the function the external variable passed as an actual parameter is changed:

This seems to be used more frequently in procedures than functions in PL/SQL. However, you can use the approach in either. I’d recommend it for functions that you call through the OCI or Java.

OUT mode:

An OUT mode variable is very much like an IN OUT mode variable with one exception. There is no initial value in it. You must assign a value to an OUT mode variable because it has no value otherwise. If the function or procedure fails, the external variable is unchanged. At the successful conclusion of the function or procedure, the reference for the internal variable replaces the reference to the external scoped variable.

The following shows you the test case:

The OUT mode also has an exception, which relates to CLOB and BLOB datatypes. You can find more about large objects in this presentation made at the Utah Oracle Users Group – Oracle LOBs.

This should be pretty straightforward but if you have suggestions to improve it let me know.

Oracle networking – some ugly duckings

I tried to answer a question in the forum a couple weeks ago about connections. It contained all the trite stuff about check this, then that, et cetera because I couldn’t remember why I’d seen an TNS-03505 error. It returns an illustrative message “Failed to resolve name” error. Along the way, I tripped into ORA-12560 and one I’d never seen before an ORA-12518. If you want the dirt on these read on …

TNS-03505
You’ll typically encounter this error when you’re working on a laptop. It gets triggered when you run the tnsping utility. When you’ve qualified the hostname and hostname.domain name in the hosts file and in the tnsnames.ora file, it’ll throw the TNS-03505 error because you’re on another network. You may also encounter it when there’s a change or discrepancy between the machine hostname and DNS server results. Lastly, you may encounter it when you’ve lost the lease on an IP address and now have a new lease with a different IP address.

These errors effectively block successful tnsping calls. You get around it by shutting down the listener, modifying the IP address in the tnsnames.ora file if you’re not using a hostname, setting the %TNS_ADMIN% environment variable in a command session when you have multiple Oracle homes, and restarting the listener.

ORA-12560
This is the sqlplus utility cousin of the TNS-03505. All the rules that apply to it apply to this.

ORA-12518
This one is cute. I only hit it because my touchpad is too sensitive on the Dell laptop. It occurs if you pause the Windows listener service. You fix it by restarting the service. It is an enigma within a conundrum (Churchill on the old Soviet Union) why anybody would create a service like this with a pause option. Wouldn’t it be cool if somebody at Oracle were listening now (that is reading this blog) and they got the service fixed.

AJAX gone wrong, or the dynamic duo Blackboard & IE

We’ve got an implementation of Blackboard running on Oracle 10g. The new version has a grade book redesign that uses AJAX to eliminate the cumbersome nature of its predecessor. It was interesting figuring out why grades entered wouldn’t show without restarting Internet Explorer, while Firefox and Safari worked fine. Another heart found thank you to Microsoft for failing to optimize JavaScript execution in their browser (all the way through to 8). Read on if you must use IE.

The issue is that Internet Explorer reads JavaScript including all whitespace at initial page load. There’s no attempt to compress it, arghhh. Naturally, that makes performance crawl a bit on initial page load. That wouldn’t be bad but Blackboard’s JavaScript changes DOM values during product use. Those changes go unseen if you navigate from the Grade Book and return to it. At least, they do when you’re using default IE settings. Unlike Microsoft’s solution to the problem of suppressing Mac purchases (an advertising gem from Apple), Microsoft didn’t spend more on marketing (after all the Windows platform is more or less captured by IE). They simply set the default value for page refreshes to automatic, which means once per active IE load into memory for JavaScript files. Then, it is Blackboard’s fault for how it implemented AJAX, right?

You can fix this default by taking one step. Open IE, navigate to Tools, Internet Options, and then click the Settings button in the Browsing history section. The form looks like:

When you click on the Settings button, you’ll come to the following screen. Click the radio button for “Every time I visit the webpage,” which will ensure you get a working grade book in Blackboard.

Click the OK button. You’re not done yet. You must shut down all IE sessions and re-launch the product for the changes to occur. If you think that was tedious, here we need to do it every time our corporate governance folks push an update to Windows because they reset IE to an incompatible set of values for Blackboard’s AJAX implementation.

Inline views, table fabrication, and the WITH clause

Sometimes working with a product like Oracle brings a surprise, like a new feature you failed to catch when it was released. I’ve seen a lot of entries using inline views through the WITH clause in the Oracle forums. It caught my eye because it is such a radical departure from portable SQL syntax of an inline view. I finally went searching to find the rationale for this approach.

The answer doesn’t lie with the Charlotte like National Treasure, but with simplifying the join syntax, as qualified in the Oracle Database 2 Day + Data Warehousing Guide 11g, Release 1. The following looks at this approach, and compares using the WITH clause instead of the inline view to perform table fabrication.

Oracle tells us to use the WITH clause when a query has multiple references to the same query block and there are joins and aggregations. Basically, the WITH clause lets you name inline views and then reuse them inside other inline views. Like PL/SQL, they must be defined before they can be referenced. Unlike PL/SQL, they have no equivalent for forward referencing a query block. The basic syntax is:

The first code block is assigned the inline name. You can then reuse the inline code block inside any subsequent code block or the master query. The idea is that this syntax is simpler than the generic syntax.

The standard way of writing this is consistent across other SQL databases, and I don’t really see it as any more complex than the WITH syntax Oracle provides.

The WITH clause is also capable of letting you create tables from literal values, which is known as table fabrication. The following syntax uses the with clause to fabricate a table of two columns (x and y) and two rows.

The next shows the traditional way of fabricating a table using an inline view:

You can also use this type of syntax in MySQL to fabricate a table. You can’t use the WITH clause in MySQL because it’s not supported. You’ll notice in the example that the FROM dual portion is omitted in MySQL. Wouldn’t it be nice if Oracle let that happen too?

A neat function that I picked up on the Oracle Technical Network is the NUMTODSINTERVAL (number to date-stamp interval) function, which can create intervals for qualifying sales by hour or quarter hour. More or less it is a way to fabricate timing intervals. Here’s a quick example:

This has been the syntax, now I’ll have to check whether there are any performance differences. I suspect that since the execution plan is the same that there aren’t any performance differences but you never know until you test it.