You may of course know these two famous posts called To sample or not to sample… (part-2) about data sampling by Mark Hornick. Although very limited in scope, the two posts (imho) very well sketch why we may employ data sampling and how we may lift off table sampling in oracle.
In general, sampling is used to make a representative statement about a collection of data while only regarding a limited random selection, the sample. As long as you are ok to analyze just a sufficient subset of your 1o million rows table for an analysis, you will save your environment a lot of resources and time. On some other scenario, a limited random data selection may also serve verification or testing purposes where, however, not the representativeness but the randomness at a more or less constant sample size, determines the quality of the sample output. Again, as long as you are ok to not exceed this 15 minutes time window overnight, you will be allowed to run that live unit test on any table in question, on 1, 10 or 100 million rows.
In sql, selecting in regard to gain a representative statement will feed the sample function with a requested percentage of rows to sample from. This is what the oracle sample function already offers. Yet another sql to accept a requested actual number of rows to return, independent of the table size, is not available so far (although most people do expect exactly this behaviour when they spot the sql sample function for the first time, weird). The following text will outline a snippet of pl/sql to provide for a sample function to accept the expected number of rows as a parameter.
Month: September 2017
Deprecation announcement of oracle restart along 12c withdrawn
As being spotted on Bjoern Rost’s blog, commented by Trap, today, Oracle obviously has been backing down on the deprecation announcement of oracle restart along 12c. On metalink, see:
Withdrawn: Deprecation Announcement of Oracle Restart with Oracle Database 12c (Doc ID 1584742.1)
This is good news, accepted with delight, since we do no longer need to turn back the hands of time into the nifty-oracle-bounce-handycraft-scripts-era. In fact, I wonder how many dba’s are already comfortable with systemd service registration. I suppose, a lot of dba’s would have been resorting back to the dusty sysv configurations, using the systemd-sysv-compatibility engine, which is sort of retrofitting a car-key-starter with a car that already comes with wireless keying and just some starter button. Look around, the major share of on-premise oracle database installations is still single instance compared to rac and even 12c-containers.
Have fun, Peter
Bitbach's Blog 