Category Archives: Software

Lazy Duplication of Records in Oracle

Posted on 8th March, 2012 by Xophmeister

Occasionally, one needs to duplicate a table record; either in the same table, or into another table (e.g., a history or audit table). Of course, when copying data into the same table, you will need to modify a few fields … Continue reading →

Posted in Oracle, PL/SQL | Leave a comment

Sanitising with Insanity

Posted on 15th December, 2011 by Xophmeister

I do a lot of hacking around in an Oracle database and my chosen tool to interrogate the data is Oracle SQL Developer. Sometimes, I have to transfer the contents of one table into another schema and, because I don’t … Continue reading →

Posted in Day Job, Oracle, SQL Developer, VIM | 1 Comment

Counting with Subquery Factoring

Posted on 25th October, 2011 by Xophmeister

This is fairly trivial, but I thought I’d post it anyway! It’s a PL/SQL script I wrote using subquery factoring to count in natural language: from 1 to 10,000. (It will go higher, but there are gaps after 10,000.)

Posted in Oracle, PL/SQL, Random | Leave a comment

Everything You Wanted to Know About TeX, but Were Too Afraid to Ask

Posted on 24th October, 2011 by Xophmeister

My previous website was well-known for perhaps one thing: a LaTeX tutorial which I wrote when I was young and foolish. Despite being fairly rudimentary and not especially well-written, it gained a lot of credence — there was a time … Continue reading →

Posted in LaTeX | 3 Comments

If Everyone Jumped Off A Cliff, Would You Too?…

Posted on 13th October, 2011 by Xophmeister

Damn right, I would! My First SQL Sudoku Solver Writing a sudoku solver in SQL (or, at least, using the RDBMS as a platform) seems to have become a rite de passage; so who am I to argue? While my … Continue reading →

Posted in Distractions, Oracle, PL/SQL, Random, SQL | Tagged | Leave a comment

Building a Better Search Engine

Posted on 7th October, 2011 by Xophmeister

I should qualify this post’s somewhat shameless title with the fact that I am considering domain-specific applications; inspired by a question I posted on Stack Overflow. I make no pretence in ousting the Googles of this world!

Posted in Database Design, Day Job, Linguistics, NLP, Oracle, Phonetics and Phonology, PL/SQL, Software Engineering, SQL, User Experience | Tagged | 3 Comments