Making life hard for yourself.  Sometimes it seems like a
developer has gone out of their way to make life difficult for
themselves (and us poor long suffering DBAs). For example we
have an audit trail of user actions in the database that
contains xml. This almost makes sense except that the xml is
stored (more...)  Bind Variable mismatch, nulls and oci  A short
post on a frustrating issue that took a while to find the
solution to. The developers made a small change to a table
allowing nulls in 23 columns previously configured as not null.
This resulted in a large number of bind mismatches and child
cursors being generated, eventually giving rise to a serious
performance issue.  After much discussion of the issue test
cases, being told to tune the database flushing the shared pool
finally a developer opened the code and took a look at the
problem and found the reason for the bind mismatch was the oci
null (more...)  How expensive are literals?  As a follow-up to
my last post I finally got around to writing a