Learning A Little Oracle

Oracle
As part of my job, I've been tasked with doing some of my work in Oracle, so I'm learning Oracle. Allow me to share a little of my pain as I explore a space I've only ever dabbled in. Getting Started in Oracle Back in the day, in order to get started with Oracle, you begin at the Oracle web site. There, you download an installation, after getting a license (or while, whatever). In our modern era, this is the hard way to get stuff done. The first place I went was Azure. There is excellent Oracle support on the Azure platform and, best of all for me, it's really easy to fire up an Oracle VM. I had a server up and running in no time. Win! Another way…
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Azure Offerings Continue to Expand

Azure
We just received word of a bunch of new functionality over at Scott Guthrie's blog. Not a lot of stuff for data pro's... unless you work with Oracle. Yeah, you can now create Oracle VMs. See the image below:   I swear, I can't tell you why this gives me the giggles, but it does. See, Oracle really does have a cloud offering, and it's Microsoft. Ha! Well, anyway, check out the link on Scott's blog to see the other changes to billing, security, etc. Absolutely worth the read. <snicker>Oracle on Azure. Oh, and if you need to get going on Oracle and you have an MSDN account, you can link your MSDN account to an Azure account for zero cost. Check it out here and enter to win an…
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Never, Ever Use Clustered Indexes

SQL Server
This whole concept of the clustered index as a foundational structure within SQL Server is just plain nuts. Sure, I get the concept that if a table has a clustered index, then that index actually becomes the table. When you create a clustered index on a table, the data is now stored at the leaf level of the Balanced Tree (b-tree) page distribution for that index, and I understand that retrieving the data using a seek on that index is going be extremely fast because no additional reads are necessary. Unlike what would happen with a non-clustered index on a heap table. Yes, I get that if I store my data in a heap, the only way to access the data is through the Index Allocation Mapping (IAM)  pages that…
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