Monthly Archives: June 2016

#OUG_SCOT

23 Thursday Jun 2016

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I am at the Glasgow airport waiting to board my flight to London and then home.

I was attending and speaking at the OUG Scotland event in Glasgow. What a great event it was! I did not even realize how much I have missed the UKOUG events and Scotland! I had so much fun, met old friends and made new ones. Thank you everybody!

I arrived on Wednesday for the ACE dinner organized by Debra Lilley. The food was lovely but what was the best was that this restaurant is famous for its gin collection: they have 60 different gins! They did not know anything about Björn Rost’s speciality Gin Basil Smash but they offered us a Gin Smash which was pretty close to the one Björn makes but had mint in it. Not bad at all!

debra

The event was a one day event on Thursday. I was a very proud panelist on a optimising panel chaired by Jonathan Lewis:

panel

Based on what I heard from the attendees afterwards the panel was really good. I had fun and as usual I did have plenty of opinions 😉

I also gave a session about managing the changes in database structures using Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler. Thank you for all the questions during and after the session!

I attended several great session during the day and when we finished I was really tired and ready to sleep. But since a good friend of mine, Peter Robson, was there I really wanted to have a dinner and a proper chat with him. He will be visiting Finland very soon! We realized we both like the same band and will go and see their concert in Helsinki in September 🙂

We had a great dinner in an Italian restaurant:

dinner

Kai Yu, thank you for the photos!

What a great event and what a great couple of days in Scotland! Please, UK, vote for “remain”… My travelling would get more difficult if you vote otherwice…

 

cider

Cheers,

Heli

P.S. They voted “leave” 😦 My flight was delayed almost 2h and I missed my connecting flight. Thanks to Finnair’s superkind customer service (my ticket was a BA ticket!) I made it to the next flight and was home only about 1 h later than originally planned. Still waiting for my bag though…

P.P.S The bag arrived!

 

 

How to change the target and the source in comparing with a DDL?

22 Wednesday Jun 2016

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I want to compare a DDL and a design using File|Import|DDL File. I know my design is correct but the comparison always shows the DDL to be correct and suggests me to change the design. How to I tell the tool that my design is correct and I want to alter the database accordingly?

It is very simple. While importing the DDL select “Swap target model”

swapthetarget

Now the comparison will show the design as the source (truth) and the DDL as the target (false). AND it will give you the ALTER DDLs to change the database. Simply press DDL Preview to get those ALTER scripts.

 

 

How to sort attributes?

19 Sunday Jun 2016

Posted by in Data Modeler

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I would like to have my attributes in alphabetical order. Do I need to do it manually or is there a way to do it automatically?

There is a way to do it automatically. Right-click on the Logical Model canvas and select Sort Attributes. You can sort them either ascending or descending.

 

Sort

 

But are you sure you want them to be in alphabetic order? Usually it is easier to understand the model if the primary key attributes are first and usually we define the mandatory attributes in the beginning of the list.

 

 

Why can’t I see the domains in the list?

10 Friday Jun 2016

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I have defined several domains but when I try to use them I cannot see any of them in the list. What is wrong?

Most likely the reason is that you have the Preferred property enabled for logical datatypes and when you change to domains it stays enabled. You have not defined any domains and preferred domains and that is why the list is empty.

domain

domain2

Either disable Preferred or define the domains as preferred in Preferences.

domain3

 

 

Heli’s Tour

10 Friday Jun 2016

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I am on my way home after travelling for 10 days. I visited 3 countries and attended 5 events. At the moment I am in Germany waiting to be boarded to my last flight of this tour.

I started my tour with the OTN Cloud Developer Challenge in Leiden, Netherlands. Then I attended the AMIS25 celebrations with two talks: My fav SQL Developer features and Managing changes in database structures. After that I flew to Sofia, Bulgaria where I drove to Borovets for the BGOUG event. At the BGOUG I gave two talks: one about Big Data and the second one about my fav SQL Developer features. After BGOUG I had one day to rest in Sofia (=to do my real work) and then Milena and I drove to Bucharest, Romania. In Romania I attended the EOUC Presidents’ meeting and I gave two talks at the local user group (RoOUG). The first talk was about Big Data and the second one about database security.

I had a great 10 days and I would like to thank all the organizers, attendees and fellow speakers. I am very tired but it really was a great (and efficient J ) tour! Now I will rest a bit before OUG Scotland in Glasgow and KScope16 in Chicago…

How to define a default domain for automatically generated surrogate primary keys?

08 Wednesday Jun 2016

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I always use surrogates as primary key and I use the Data Modeler functionalities to generate them automatically. That is very good but I do not like that it only defines them as NUMERIC. I have defined a domain I would like to use when generating those primary keys but how can I tell Data Modeler to use that domain?

 

To define the default domain for surrogates go to Preferences, Data Modeler, Model, Relational and select that domain from the list of domains:

defaultdomainforsurrogates

 

Now when the tool generates a surrogate primary key it will use the domain definition for it.

 

What is a “Preferred Datatype”?

07 Tuesday Jun 2016

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My colleague is using something she calls Preferred Datatypes when working but I am not sure what she is talking about?

You can define some of the logical datatypes to be your preferred logical datatypes (or preferred domains). In the Preferences you define a list of logical datatypes as preferred logical datatypes like this:

Datatypes1

 

Then when designing the attributes you enable Preferred and will only see those logical datatypes, that were defined as preferred, in the list.

Datatype2

 

Now you do not need to go through the whole list of potential logical datatypes, only the ones that you find useful.

 

#BGOUG

05 Sunday Jun 2016

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What an amazing BGOUG once again! This time it was held on the mountains in one of the ski resorts. Beautiful place!

BGOUG

I missed the first day because I was travelling from the wonderful #AMIS25 event but I did make it to the dinner and… the dancing. There is no BGOUG without dancing!

BGOUG2

On the second day of BGOUG I gave two sessions. One about Big Data, the area I am doing my research on for the PhD. The room was packed! Not everybody found themselves a seat! Thank you so much for attending! I hope you enjoyed my talk.

The second session was a session APEX Connect asked me to give in April: My fav features of SQL Developer. I was thinking I have nothing special to tell, I am just a regular user not a guru. But already in APEX Connect it turned out that I did have some tips not everybody knew about. And also in BGOUG every attendee convinced me they learned something new in my session. I am so glad! And I am also extremely glad the session was so well attended!

BGOUG3

The weather in the mountains was quite surprising: rainy, windy, sunny,… But we were good because we knew how to forecast the weather, thanks to a local sign:

BGOUG4

Thank you Milena and the team! It was a great event, as always!

— Heli

 

How to update the Physical Model?

03 Friday Jun 2016

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You have probably already learned that when you change the Logical Model you need to press the double-arrow pointing to right (Engineer to Relational Model) to get those changes to the Relational Model. But with Physical Model it is a different case: you create a Physical Model once and after that the tool will automatically add new object there. You only need to go and define the physical properties for those elements.

If you want, you can define defaults for physical properties. These defaults depend on the RDBMS selected: for example for Oracle they are different than for SQL Server. For Oracle RDBMS you can for example define the default user and the default tablespace.

3bitmap1

 

For some of the elements you can also define templates: a set of properties that will be automatically set for a new element of that type. For Oracle RDBMS you can for instance define a template for tables and indexes. Here’s an example of an index template for an Oracle RDBMS:

index3

 

The defaults you define in Preferences will be used to automatically set properties for a new elements of that type. But of course you can manually change them to something different for an individual element.

This functionality is very useful if the element of one type (tables, indexes, …) have some properties always or most of the time the same.

Note: You can also use Propagate Properties to easily copy properties from one element to several elements of the same type.

Note: if you cannot see the Physical Model in the Browser, right-click and select Open.