At a customer site, I recently refactored a "slow-by-slow" PL/SQL loop and turned that into an efficient set based UPDATE statement saving many lines of code and running much faster. In this blog post, I will show how that can be done. The blog post will focus on Oracle and UPDATE, but rest assured, this … Continue reading How to Use SQL UPDATE .. RETURNING to Run DML More Efficiently
Month: September 2018
How to Write a Multiplication Aggregate Function in SQL
Everyone knows the SQL SUM() aggregate function (and many people also know its window function variant). When querying the Sakila database, we can get the daily revenue (using PostgreSQL syntax): WITH p AS ( SELECT CAST (payment_date AS DATE) AS date, amount FROM payment ) SELECT date, SUM (amount) AS daily_revenue, SUM (SUM (amount)) OVER … Continue reading How to Write a Multiplication Aggregate Function in SQL
How to Reduce Syntactic Overhead Using the SQL WINDOW Clause
SQL is a verbose language, and one of the most verbose features are window functions. In a stack overflow question that I've encountered recently, someone asked to calculate the difference between the first and the last value in a time series for any given day: Input volume tstamp --------------------------- 29011 2012-12-28 09:00:00 28701 2012-12-28 10:00:00 … Continue reading How to Reduce Syntactic Overhead Using the SQL WINDOW Clause
Beware of Hidden PL/SQL to SQL Context Switches
I recently stumbled upon a curious query on a customer's productive Oracle database: SELECT USER FROM SYS.DUAL Two things caught my attention: The query was executed many billions of times per month, accounting for about 0.3% of that system's load. That's 0.3% for something extremely silly! I don't think that customer would ever qualify the … Continue reading Beware of Hidden PL/SQL to SQL Context Switches
Find the Next Non-NULL Row in a Series With SQL
I've stumbled across this fun SQL question on reddit, recently. The question was looking at a time series of data points where some events happened. For each event, we have the start time and the end time timestamp start end ----------------------------------- 2018-09-03 07:00:00 1 null 2018-09-03 08:00:00 null null 2018-09-03 09:00:00 null null 2018-09-03 10:00:00 … Continue reading Find the Next Non-NULL Row in a Series With SQL