RockyCode

In addition to some sweet Inversion of Control injection action, Spring brings flowers and baby deer. And it brings some nice database connection help. Spring JdbcTemplate is a vanguard of strength and ease for connecting to your favorite RDBMS. And it so happens that the DBA I'm working with right now digs the stored procs. So, we'll meet in the middle with some more goodness born of Spring.

Using an Oracle database backend in conjunction with LINQ required use of a 3rd party tool called DevArt dotConnect for Oracle. However, when the database model is configured, it's hard coded to a specific database instance (Dev, Test, etc). I wanted to dynamically select which database instance to run against relative to the lane my tests were running against. It's actually easier than I thought.

I was running an SQL query today and it was sooooo slow. So slow, in fact, that it never returned. I asked the DBA, Reed, who built the table what might be up, and he informed me that it was not indexed. And proceeded to show me some cool stuff I could do to actually get my query to return. In the end, it was a comparison between the "not in" operator and a "left join".

There's no pre-defined method to count the number of occurrences of a certain character in a database table column using SQL. There's a quick and dirty way to get it done however. In my case, I wanted to figure out how many lines existed in a column that held address information, separated by line breaks. Here's a spot of code that helped from the friendly neighborhood DBA, Reed.

Sometimes you have a large database schema and a lot of tables that you're not sure what they contain. You do know, however, the nature of the data'ific needle that you're trying to find in your schema'ific schema. Oracle provides some cool dictionary tables that might help you in your quest.