Wednesday, March 4, 2015

Search and history in SQL Developer

Should be obvious, but I just discovered that it is much easier to change preferences if you search for it in the search field instead of wandering around in the Preferences GUI looking for the place where you can set it:


And it is pretty fast, try to look for the place where you choose the OCI client, just write OCI in the field. And similarly, if you think you wrote some smart code a few days ago, just search for it in the SQL history:


If you can't find it, it is because you have forgotten to increase Days to keep history from 7 which seems to be default. Go back to preferences and crank it up. 30 days, why not? 

Monday, March 2, 2015

DBMS_INDEX_UTL

Here the other day I came across this package in a PL/SQL procedure written by someone else. From the name I reckoned it was a standard package from Oracle, but I had never seen it before. It is not mentioned in the manual Database PL/SQL Packages and Types Reference, and I could not find much about it at My Oracle Support either. Anyway, with SQL Developer you'll get what you need by hitting Shift-F4 (with the cursor at the name of the package). The API is pretty good documented in the comments. The package is used to rebuild indexes, either for a named table, a named schema, or a list of indexes plus some stuff I didn't bother to look into.

Now, there may be a reason why this is not well documented and better known.