A common SQL habit is to use SELECT * on a query, because it’s tedious to list all the columns you need. Plus, sometimes those columns may change over time, so why not just do things the easy way? But ...

Oracle9i offers some great tools to make it easy to view the execution plan and trace information for a SQL statement. Prior to Oracle8i, you had to create a plan table and execute special syntax to ...

SQL is the lingua franca for modifying and reading database data and any DBA worth his (or her) paycheck should be proficient in writing SQL queries. But SQL is a flexible and feature-rich language, ...

In my last column, I introduced SQLite, an amazing little database engine written and provided entirely in C source code. I showed you how to begin wrapping it up in modern C++, producing a correct ...

Before we even begin this month's column I had better define what I mean by a "black box." Simply put, a black box is a database access program that sits in-between your application programs and the ...