In MySQL and Oracle, you set a session variable quite differently. That means you should expect there differences between setting a session variable in Postgres. This blog post lets you see how to set them in all three databases. I’m always curious what people think but I’m willing to bet that MySQL is the simplest approach. Postgres is a bit more complex because you must use a function call, but Oracle is the most complex.

The difference between MySQL and Postgres is an “@” symbol versus a current_setting() function call. Oracle is more complex because it involves the mechanics in Oracle’s sqlplus shell, SQL dialect, and PL/SQL language (required to assign a value to a variable).

MySQL

MySQL lets you declare a session variable in one step and use it one way in a SQL statement or stored procedure.

1. You set a session variable on a single line with the following …

This post shows you how to add the menu option and GUI to set users and groups. It’s quite a bit easier than mastering all the command-line syntax. It makes setting up the required user and group accounts for an Oracle Enterprise or MySQL database solution much easier.

You add the utility by calling the yum (Yellowdog Updater, Modified) utility like this:

yum installed -y system-config_users

You should see the following:

Loaded plugins: langpacks
adobe-linux-x86_64                                       |  951 B     00:00     
ol7_UEKR3                                                | 1.2 kB     00:00     
ol7_latest                                               | 1.4 kB     00:00     
Resolving Dependencies
--> Running transaction check
---> Package system-config-users.noarch 0:1.3.5-2.el7 will be installed
--> Processing …

Sometimes I give parts of a solution to increase the play time to solve a problem. I didn’t anticipate a problem when showing how to perform a sort operation with a CASE statement. It’s a sweet solution when you need to sort something differently than a traditional ascending or descending sort.

I gave my students this ORDER BY clause as an example:

  CASE
    WHEN filter = 'Debit' THEN 1
    WHEN filter = 'Credit' THEN 2
    WHEN filter = 'Total' THEN 3
  END;

It raises the following error in MySQL for students:

      ERROR 1064 (42000): You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near 'ORDER BY
  CASE
    WHEN filter = 'Debit' THEN 1
    WHEN filter = 'Credit' THEN' at line 6

It raises the …

Last week, I wrote about how to use bash arrays and the MySQL database to create unit and integration test scripts. While the MySQL example was nice for some users, there were some others who wanted me to show how to write bash shell scripts for Oracle unit and integration testing. That’s what this blog post does.

If you don’t know much about bash shell, you should start with the prior post to learn about bash arrays, if-statements, and for-loops. In this blog post I only cover how to implement a bash shell script that runs SQL scripts in silent mode and then queries the database in silent mode and writes the output to an external file.

I’ve copied the basic ERD for the example because of a request from a reader. In their opinion it makes cross referencing the …

This is the continuation of my efforts to stage an awesome Fedora developer’s instance. It shows you how to install Java 1.8 software development kit, which is nice to have. Though you can’t use Java 1.8 officially with Oracle SQL Developer 4.0.3 it is required for Oracle SQL Developer 4.1. Fortunately, the Oracle Product Manager, Jeff Smith has advised us that you can use Java 1.8 JDK with Oracle SQL Developer 4.0.3, and he’s written a comment to the blog post that it runs better with the Java 1.8 SDK.

After you install Oracle SQL Developer 4.0.3 or Oracle SQL Developer 4.1, you can watch Jeff Smith’s YouTube Video on SQL Developer 3.1 to learn how to use the basics of SQL Developer. I couldn’t find an updated version of the video for SQL Developer 4 but I didn’t try too hard.

You …

After installing the LAMP stack on Fedora, you need to open port 80 in the Firewall to access the PHP programs on the Fedora instance from external servers. You can open a firewall port by launching the firewall-config application as the root user with the following syntax:

firewall-config

The firewall-config utility opens the following dialog:

Click on the Ports tab, and you’ll see the following:

…

Somebody asked me if there was a cheaper alternative to using the Embarcadero Data Architect (a data modeling tool). I said sure, you can use the MySQL Workbench. My friend laughed and said, it’s to model Oracle databases and they use different data types. I broke the news to him that he can create his own user defined types and use MySQL Workbench to model problems for the Oracle Database 11g.

For example, you can launch the MySQL Workbench, and click on the Model menu option, and in the menu window click on the User Defined Types choice, as shown in the following:

Choosing the User Defined Type option, launches the following form. You can enter customized user defined types in the User Defined Types module:

…

In teaching, I had a problem because my students have different base operating systems, like Windows 7, Windows 8, Linux, and Mac OS X. I needed a teaching and lecture platform that would let me teach it all (not to mention support their environments). That meant it had to virtualize any of the following with a portable device:

• Windows 7 or 8 hosting natively an Oracle Database 11g XE, 11g, or 12c and MySQL Database 5.6
• Windows 7 or 8 hosting a Fedora or Oracle Unbreakable Linux VM (3 or 4 GB) with Oracle Database 11g XE, 11g, or 12c and MySQL Database 5.6
• Mac OS X hosting a Fedora or Oracle Unbreakable Linux VM (3 or 4 GB) with Oracle Database 11g XE, 11g, or 12c and MySQL Database 5.6
• Ubuntu hosting a Fedora or Oracle Unbreakable Linux VM (3 or 4 GB) with Oracle Database 11g XE, 11g, or …

I’ve worked with every release of Microsoft Excel, and I know it takes effort to keep up to date with certain releases. Clearly, the Data Analysis eXpression (DAX) Language introduced in Excel 2010 went unnoticed by many, which was sad. DAX is truly a powerful extension to the analytical and modeling approaches in Microsoft Excel.

I’d like to recommend Microsoft Excel 2013 Building Data Models with PowerPivot to those who haven’t learned how to use DAX in Excel 2010, 2011, or 2013. DAX works with tables but if you don’t use tables, I guess you can skip DAX …

Just went through all my PHP testing against a fresh instance of Oracle with Zend Server Community Edition 6, and found these warnings, guess that’s pretty clean for the Oracle part of the installation. I didn’t notice it before because generally I do most of my PHP development against a MySQL database. I should have been configuring the php.ini file routinely, as qualified in this PHP forum discussion.

      Warning: oci_set_client_info(): It is not safe to rely on the system's timezone settings. You are *required* to use the date.timezone setting or the date_default_timezone_set() function. In case you used any of those methods and you are still getting this warning, you most likely misspelled the timezone identifier. We selected the timezone 'UTC' for now, but please set date.timezone to select your timezone. in C:\Program Files …