Listagg - or in my case Listagg AAAAARGH!

Oracle 11gR2 introduces a new analytical and reporting function LISTAGG that orders data within each group based on the ORDER BY clause and then concatenates the values of the measure column. See Chapter 22 in the Oracle Data Warehousing Guide 11g Release 2. 


Why Listagg AAAAARGH!? If I had taken the time 2 weeks ago to familiarize myself with the new features in 11gR2, I wouldn't have written a function to do exactly what LISTAGG does! 

A blast from the (not so distant) past!

Some time last week I got an email from someone who'd googled "extensible attributes" and stumbled upon my presentation at Collaborate '08. It's nice to know that he found this useful. 
I haven't dealt with TCA Extensible attributes since late 2007. 


Here's the link to the presentation - http://cdmsig.oaug.org/file/Collab08SIGTCAEXT1209951946.pdf

Ubuntu - I am because we are

I just installed Ubuntu 10.04 on my 7 year old Dell Inspiron 6000 that was running Windows XP and had become virtually unusable. I am kicking myself for not having gone the Ubuntu route earlier because I am extremely impressed with the ease of installation, setup and running. I feel like a kid with a new toy - one that I "built" myself and the best thing is that it's free!

I now have a LAMP environment - Linux Apache MySQL PHP - that I can play with.

Next - loading some Oracle software !