This video and set of resources is a follow up to the webinar broadcast by Red Gate on 13th September 2012. Please see further down the page for a follow up to the Q+A.

The video above is accompanied by the following downloadable scripts:

I will make the test data available on our FTP server as soon as possible.

Summary

In this session we will take a look at some of the lesser known PL/SQL packages that come with the Oracle database. Packages like DBMS_ASSERT, DBMS_CRYPTO and DBMS_PARALLEL_EXECUTE. We will take a look at some of the utility packages that could come in handy such as UTL_NLA and UTL_MATCH, look briefly at some of the helper functions from UTL_INADDR and UTL_URL. At the end, I will take a look at some of the good packages from the Oracle community that will help you get your work done faster and smarter.

A live Q&A session with Morten Egan follows the presentation.

Follow up from the QA

Question: Could the compressed data be presented as a virtual column instead of a pipelined function?

I did a quick test, and yes it can. The code to do it, is here:

create or replace function get_compressed_content(compressed_in blob)
return varchar2
deterministic

as

l_blob blob := empty_blob;
ret_text varchar2(4000);

begin

dbms_lob.createtemporary(l_blob, true);
l_blob := utl_compress.lz_uncompress(compressed_in);
ret_text := utl_raw.cast_to_varchar2(l_blob);
dbms_lob.freetemporary(l_blob);

return ret_text;

end get_compressed_content;
/

create table do_compress2 (
nyhed_id number,
nyhed_titel varchar2(4000),
nyhed_content_compress blob,
nyhed_contet_uncompress varchar2(4000) generated always as (get_compressed_content(nyhed_content_compress)) virtual
);

insert into do_compress2 (nyhed_id, nyhed_titel, nyhed_content_compress)
select nyhed_id, nyhed_titel, do_compress_content(nyhed_content)
from no_compress;

select nyhed_contet_uncompress from do_compress2;

Question: Are any of the packages specific to a special edition of Oracle?

All the packages are available on both Standard Edition and Enterprise Edition.

Question: What is the URL to the site, where the compare tool ran?

The url is www.dbping.com/stats/compare_ui.welcome

Please note that I have noticed a couple of people just went to the main site www.dbping.com, and registered there instead. That site is a different product, but you are more than welcome to use that as well :) It is a tool to do a simple monitoring of your database uptime. Think of it as a database version of pingdom.com.