miscellaneous articles
You'll find a selection of articles below that didn't quite fit into the "new feature" category. These are not generally restricted to a specific version of Oracle (although where appropriate a minimum version is recommended). This section is intended to cover a broad range of articles including tips, tutorials and blog material (such as oddities, bugs and workarounds).
- Working with long columns
Various techniques for querying and manipulating long columns. July 2010 (updated March 2012) - Improving performance with pipelined table functions
Using pipelined functions as a performance tuning tool. January 2010 - Sorting collections
Various techniques for sorting collections. November 2009 - Setting cardinality for pipelined and table functions
Various methods for setting accurate cardinality statistics for table/pipelined functions. June 2009 - Pl/sql functions and cbo costing
Associating statistics with PL/SQL functions for greater CBO accuracy. June 2009 - Avoiding pls-00436 with forall
Workarounds to the FORALL PLS-00436 implementation restriction. July 2005 (updated June 2009) - Returning with insert..select
A workaround to the unsupported INSERT..SELECT..RETURNING construct. August 2005 (updated May 2009) - Dynamic logging with global application context
Controlling logging output across sessions using global application context. September 2007 (updated April 2009) - Pipelined function issues
A few "gotchas" to be aware of when using pipelined functions. September 2007 (updated May 2008) - Tuning pl/sql file i/o
Various techniques for unloading data to flat-file faster. February 2008 - Method 4 dynamic sql in pl/sql
Using ANYDATASET and pipelined functions to achieve native Method 4 Dynamic SQL. August 2007 - Flexible pipelined functions
Combining pipelined functions, polymorphism and multi-table inserts. August 2007 - Emulating string-to-table functionality using sql
Turning delimited strings into multiple records without PL/SQL. July 2005 (updated August 2007) - Encapsulating bulk pl/sql exceptions
Using object features to encapsulate FORALL .. SAVE EXCEPTIONS error-handling. July 2007 - Overcoming the limitations of set row
Techniques to avoid superfluous updates with SET ROW. June 2007 - Loading xml files with xml db
A tutorial on loading XML files into relational tables. March 2006 - Introduction to advanced queuing
A high-level tutorial on Oracle's Advanced Queuing. July 2005 - Row-generation without i/o
Methods for generating dummy data without incurring I/O costs. November 2004