RE: Tool recommendation

  • From: "Dunbar, Norman (Capgemini)" <norman.dunbar.capgemini@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: <cary.millsap@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Wed, 18 Aug 2010 08:42:09 +0100

Morning Cary,

>> Sounds like the opening chapter of an interesting story. :-)

I have lived that story on far too many occasions, and each time, Access
was the problem. Well, the ability of Access to think it could fool
Oracle into doing something  like "select stuff from table where
LONG_COLUMN like '%something%'.

Oracle won't allow a LONG to be LIKEd so Access simply decides to pull
ALL the data back up and filter at the local end. Unfortunately, in
doing so, it drops all the WHERE clauses as well, resulting in a multi
table cartesian join - in one case, of the 4 biggest tables in the
database.

The explain plan had some very interesting cardinalities!

Of course, the user had become fed up waiting (for a 270 trillion (UK
trillion = 1e6 * 1e6 * 1e6) rows to be sorted and returned to Access and
killed the Access session. That died nicely, but left the query running
in the database!


To the OP: All Round Automations have a free tool called Query Reporter
that allows users to visually build queries by dragging and dropping
tables around. Parameters can be used at run time, or can be hard coded.
I try to get my users to use it when Access is mentioned for two
reasons:

1. It speaks Oracle - unlike Access - so if Oracle doesn't allow it,
then the users can't do it!

2. It's query only, no updates or inserts.

3. Output can be text, html, xml, and Excel format.

4. Command line option can run predefined and saved queries under the
Windows sceduler, on demand, etc.

5. Once written and tested, queries can be locked to prevent further
editing.

6. Ok, I lied about two reasons! ;-)

The URL is http://www.allroundautomations.com/qr.html


Cheers,
Norman.


Norman Dunbar
Contract Senior Oracle DBA
Capgemini Database Team (EA)
Internal : 7 28 2051
External : 0113 231 2051




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