I have read about the use of bind variables and how dramatically it can
inprove the performance on the Database servers.
Unafortunatelly I have several applications running against my Oracle
servers that doesn't make good use of this feature. In most of the

Morning, my first post on c.d.o.s,
As system user I use to select instance_name from v$instance to discover
which instance I'm running on. Is there a way to obtain this information
as an unprivileged user?

I have an application whose database was recently upgraded from 7 to 9i. In
a bit of code, columns are compared that may both be null. In Oracle 7,
will two columns compare equal if they are both NULL? In 9i it seems that
they do not and I have to change it to NVL(column1) = ...

Oracle 9.2.0.6 on WIN 2K SP4.
The following query runs for a very long time when I add an additional
WHERE clause into the subquery block (which should effectvely limit the
rows further....)

I have a table that has 5 partitions using an integer based range. I
would like to "un-partition" this table.  In this environment it is
very difficult to get any downtime.
What options or techniques can you recommend (please elaborate)?

The following command (which just executes the date command) says that
it completes successfully:
BEGIN
DBMS_SCHEDULER.CREATE_JOB(

I have tablespace that consist of two datafiles. One is almost full,
secondary is empty. I want to decrease size of the first file. Will
Oracle automatically move data to the empty file?
Thanks

I'm a Business Analyst, and I need to learn Oracle for my job.
Unfortunately, the company is stingy about paying for training, so I'm
left to my own devices.
Is it better to download Oracle 10g Express Edition, grab a manual, and

Hello Experts,
I need your comments on below topic.
Oracle generating 2 buckets for each column if I am executing this
command.

Need help to write a query to achive the following.
Have 3 tables - Main_Table , Include_Table & Exclude_Table
There is one ID column in the main_table.
Need to select the rows from the main table where

How can I verify that my autoextend is on or off?

Hey All,
Quick question here:
Say I have Schema S1, with Table T1.  I have a public synonym on T1, as
well as a trigger on T1.

Does anyone know if there are any plans for column level locking?
I feel different processes should be able to update different columns
w/o blocking each other, as long as what's updated is not the PK.
.......

Hi all, I am new to Oracle and apparently I am having problems trying
to recover the database.
I had installed Oracle 10 g R2 on Windows on my laptop computer as
developement machine. The database instance was set to run in