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JMP and Oracle: Tips and Tricks for a Happy Marriage (2022-US-30MP-1093)

Peter Mroz, Statistical Programmer, Janssen Pharmaceutical

 

One of JMP’s strengths is the ability to read and write to a variety of data sources.  At Janssen we store much of our data in Oracle databases. This talk compiles some tips and tricks for getting the two applications to talk to each other. These tips and tricks were compiled over a 15-year period, developed using JMP versions 7 through 16 and Oracle versions 10 through 19. Topics include:

  • Finding that connection string to Oracle
  • Oracle ODBC connections without a Data Source Name
  • Pulling data from Oracle
  • Inserting data into Oracle
  • Fast data loading into Oracle
  • Faster data loading into Oracle
  • Executing Oracle PL/SQL procedures
  • Error trapping and handling
  • Building Oracle IN lists
  • Miscellaneous SQL tips and tricks

 

 

Hello  everybody.

My  name  is  Peter  Mroz.

I'm  with  Janssen  Pharmaceutical,

and  today  I'm  going  to  talk  to  you

about  how  combining  JMP  and  Oracle can  lead  to  a  happy  marriage.

I  work  for  Janssen  R&D.

We're  a  wholly- owned subsidiary of  Johnson  and  Johnson,

and  our  charter  is to  discover  and  develop

innovative  medicines  and  solutions that  transform  individuals  lives

and  solve  the  most  important unmet medical  needs  of  our  time.

Within  that  world,

I'm  in the  Global  Medical  Safety  Department,

and  our  charter  is to  protect  patients  by  driving

robust  medical  safety  excellence and  benefit -risk  assessment.

And  then  within  that  department,

I'm  in  a  group called  Methods  and  Analysis,

and  our  aim  is to  develop  and  implement  analytic  tools

to  increase  efficiency and  analytical  capability

to  detect  and  evaluate  safety  signals.

Again,  my  name  is  Peter  Mroz and  I've  been  a  JMP  user  since  2007.

Standard  Disclaimer.

These  are  my  views

and  do  not  imply  any  endorsement of  any  product  by  Janssen  or  J &J.

Here's  our  agenda  for  today.

I'm  going  to  give  an  introduction

and  then  we'll  jump right  into  Oracle  things.

We'll  talk  about  ODBC,  configuring  the  Oracle  client,

the  ODBC  connection  string, bringing  data  from  Oracle  into  JMP,

and  then  writing  data back  to  Oracle  from  JMP,

then  fast  data  insertion, faster  data  loading,

then  executing an  Oracle  PL /SQL  procedures,

hiding  the  passwords, error  trapping,

building  IN lists,

and  sprinkled  throughout, I've  got  some  miscellaneous  tips.

So  my  department is  called  Global  Medical  Safety,

and  we  collect,  process, and  report  and  analyze  adverse  event  data

for  the  medicinal  products that  we  produce.

They  are  mostly  spontaneous  cases,

although  there  are  some clinical  trial  cases.

These  are  called  post -marketing.

They're  a  man  or  woman  in  the  street, walking  down  the  street,

and  you  experience some  sort  of  drug  side  effect,

and  you  call  it  into  our  call  center

and  we  run  it  through  our  process and  store  it  in  Oracle.

Our  volume  is  about  5,000  cases  a  day, and  a  case  consists  of  a  person...

They're  not  a  patient, they're  not  in  a  clinical  trial.

It's  a  person, the  drugs  they  took,

the  events  they  experienced, the  side  effects  they  experienced,

maybe  some  medical  history, and  we  store  something  called  a  narrative.

And  here's  an  example, patient  narrative.

S ubject  had  cancer,

which  was  diagnosed  in  June  1998, et  cetera,  et  cetera.

It's  a  lengthy  story  about the  patient  and  the  side  effects,

and  this  is  very  important for  our  surveillance  physicians

and  other  scientists  to  look  at.

This  is  stored  as  a   [inaudible 00:02:52]   in  Oracle,  by  the  way.

JMP,  as  we  all  know,

is  great  at  statistical  analysis and  visualization.

Oracle  is  great  at  data  storage and  transactional  processing.

Our  users  want  to  analyze  and  visualize data  from  Oracle  using  JMP.

Primarily,  we  look at  tabular  reports  of  safety  data,

summary  information, patient  narrative  drill downs,

and  we  do  some  visualization of  safety  data

via  trending  or  forest  plots.

With  all  that,

JMP  and  Oracle  together  make a  happy  marriage.

We'll  start  by  talking  about  ODBC,

which  stands for  Open  Database  Connectivity.

ODBC  drivers  access the  database  using  SQL.

SQL  stands  for  Structured  Query  language.

So  the  ODBC  driver  allows a  JMP  client  software

to  communicate with  the  Oracle  database.

The  first  thing  you  have  to  do is  install  the  Oracle  client  on  the  PC.

This  is  an  exercise  left  to  the  reader.

It's  not  a  tutorial  on  installing  this, so  you  can  Google  it.

However,  once  you've  installed  it,

there  are  a  couple  of  things  you  need to  supply  for  the  Oracle  client.

You  need  to  define two  environment  variables.

One  is  ORACLE_ HOME, the  other  is  TNS _ADMIN.

So   ORACLE_HOME  points  to  a  folder where  the  client  is  actually  installed.

Here,  it's  in   C, Oracle , 19 , client _1.

And  then  you  want to  include  the  bin  directory

in  the  path  environment  variable.

So  in  this  case, it's  the   ORACLE_HOME   with the  slash bin.

The   TNS_ADMIN  points to  the  location  of  TNSNAMES. ORA,

—I'll  explain  what  that  is  in  a  second—

and  that's  typically  located

in  the  network  admin  path underneath  the   ORACLE_HOME .

Here's  a  hint;

you  can  point  this   TNS_ADMIN  variable to  a  file  share  location

so  multiple  users  can all  point  to  this  file

and  it's  easier  to  maintain one  version  of  TNSNAMES.ORA.

What  exactly  is   TNSNAMES.ORA?

It's  a  configuration  file.

It's  like  a  secret  decoder  ring,

it  translates  between  a  database  alias and  information  needed

by  the  Oracle  client to  talk  to  your  database.

Here's  my  example; my  alias  is   MYDEVDB,

and  then  here's  my  description

for  how  to  connect   MYDEVDB to  my  Oracle  database.

With  that  completed,

now  we  need  to  determine an  ODBC  connection  string,

and  the  easiest  way  to  do  this  is  to  click the  Windows  button  and  type  ODBC,

and  we  want  to  match  the  hatch.

For  64 -bit  JMP, we  want  the   64-bit  ODBC  data  sources.

For  32 -bit  JMP, we  want  the  32- bit   ODBC  data  sources.

I  have   64-bit  JMP,

so  I  clicked  that and  I  bring  up  this  screen  here,

and  I  click  on  the  drivers  tab,

and  here  are  the  drivers  for  ODBC that  are  installed  on  my  system.

I  have  three  Oracle  clients and  one  SQL  Server.

I  have  the  Oracle  client version  11, 12,  and  19,

so  I'll click on  this  Oracle  version  19  driver,

and  you  want  to  make  note  of  this; Oracle  in  Ora Client19 Home 1.

That's  all  you  need  to  know.

Now  we  have  our  ODBC  connection  string.

We  combine  that  like  so with  driver  equals  that  string,

DBQ  equals  our  database  alias.

UID  equals  your  username, PWD  equals  your  password.

So  here's  a  fully -formed ODBC  connection  string.

Driver  equals  my  Oracle  19  driver. DBQ  is   MYDEVDB,

username  is  MYUSERNAME, password  is   MYPASSWORD.

Okay,  now  that  we're  all  configured, we  can  bring  data  into  JMP.

There  are  several  ways to  get  Oracle  data  into  JMP.

Ther e's   Open  Database,  Execute  SQL , New  SQL  Query,  and  Query  Builder,

which  is  under  the  File  Database  menu.

This  talk  will  focus  exclusively on  Execute  SQL

because  you  can  create a  database  connection

and  then  you  can  execute

several  SQL  commands  with  Execute  SQL and  then  close  the  database  connection.

If  you  compare   that  to  Open  Database, Open  Database  in   one  call,

opens  the  connection,

runs  a  SQL  command, closes  the  connection.

So  if  you  have  20  SQL  statements,

you're  opening  and  closing the  connection  20  times,

whereas  with  Execute  SQL, you  only  open  it  once,

execute  your  20  commands with  20  execute SQL  commands,

and  then  close  the  database  connection, so  it  speeds  things  up.

In  the  scripting  index, this  is  what  Execute  SQL  looks  like.

It  takes  the  following  arguments;

there's  a  database  connection  handle which   is here,

defined  by  your  connection  string.

There's  either  a  SELECT  statement or a  SQLFILE equals  statement,

or  a SQL FILE  equals  a  pointer  to  a  file containing  your  SQL  commands.

An  invisible  keyword, if  you  supply  a  table Name,

that's  equivalent  to  saying SELECT  star  from  table Name,

and  then  an  output Table Name  provides the  name  for  the  JMP  data  set

and  Execute  SQL  returns, pointer  to  a  table

if  you're  issuing  a  SELECT  statement , which  returns  a  data  set.

Here's  an  example;

I  have  my  connection  string, driver  equals  Oracle  in  Ora Client19 Home1,

MYDEVDB,  my  username, my  password.

I'm  calling it  create  database  connection with  this  string.

I've  got  my  SQL  statement  here,

I'm  selecting  some  columns from  a  table  called   eba_sales _salesreps,

and  I'm  passing  my  connection, my  SQL  statement,

and  then  a  title for  the  table  to  execute  SQL,

then  I'm  closing  the  database  connection.

Here's  my  table  I  rendered  from  Oracle.

That's seven  columns,  20  rows.

Here's  the  first  tip,

and  that  is  if  you  have  a  string with  a  single  quote  inside  it,

in  order  to  use  it  with  Oracle,

you  have  to  replace  that  single  quote with  two  single  quotes  like  this.

Here,  my  SQL  statement  is  SELECT  star from  my _table  m,

where  m  name  equals  O'Malley,

and  since  this  is  inside  the  string, I  have  to  replace  it  with  two  quotes.

Here's  the  second  tip;

use  column  aliases  for  readability.

These  are  my  column  aliases, so  here's  my  column,

and  then  in  double  quotes, I've  got  an  alias.

You  notice  it's  mixed  case,

there  are  spaces  in  there, it  makes  it  more  readable.

Here's  my  table with  the  more  readable  column  headers.

The  other  thing  about  this  is,

I'm  using  backslash  open  square  bracket, close  square  bracket  backslash

to  avoid  the  need to  escape  my  double  quotes.

You  notice  I've  got  double  quote  here,

then  I've  got my  backslash open  square  bracket,

and  then  I've  got  double  quotes,

and  then  I  close  it  out  here so  it  looks  a  lot  cleaner.

What  if  you  want to  write  data  back  to  Oracle?

You  can  issue  an  UPDATE  statement or  an  INSERT  statement.

Here  is  my  UPDATE  statement, and  I'm  simply  defining  that,

passing  to  a  variable, and  then  passing  to  Execute  SQL.

I'm updating  the  table,

setting  the  last  name  to  Smith where  the  first  name  is  Sweed.

Or  here  I'm  inserting a  new  record  into  this  table

and  I'm  setting  the  value  of  these  fields to  the  values  shown  here.

One  thing  to  note about  UPDATE  and  INSERT

is  Execute  SQL  does an  implicit  COMMIT  for  these  commands,

so  you  don't  need  to  do a  COMMIT  yourself.

One  thing  about  INSERT,

if  you  have  multiple  INSERT  statements to  execute,

they  can  be  slow,

so  I  found  an  alternative which  is   INSERT ALL.

Here's  an  example where  I'm  inserting  into  this  table.

The  column  is  called  sample _number

and  I'm  inserting  ten  values  all at  once  with  one  statement.

The  only  weird  thing  is,

you  have  to  put  something like  SELECT  1  FROM  DUAL

at  the  end  of  it and  then  it  works.

Let's  see  that  in  action.

I  want  to  insert  100  rows  one  by  one and  compare it  to  100  rows  all  at  once.

I  have  a  little  example  here, let's  go  ahead  and  run  it.

So  it  took  8  seconds  to  do  one  at  a  time versus  0.15  for   INSERT ALL,

and  so  it  was  52  times  faster.

Let's  look  at  the  code  a  little  bit.

We  have  making  a  connection, truncating  a  table.

Here's  my  one  at  a  time.

I  have my Execute SQL  inside  my  loop,

and  by  the  way, I'm  looping  a  hundred  times.

Here,  Execute  SQL  is  inside  the  loop, and  down  here  for   INSERT ALL,

I'm  starting  with   INSERT ALL

and  I  keep  adding into  the  table,  fields,  values.

Keep  adding  that,

and  then  I  only  run one  SQL  command.

And  if  I  look  at  this  command, you can see it's  pretty  hefty.

Here's  my  SQL  statement.

It's  very  long, but  it  took  0 .15  seconds  to  run.

INSERT ALL into  TEST  IMPORT,

field  names,  values, into, into, into.

Okay.

Let's  go  back  to  slide  mode.

What  if  you  have

more  than  a thousand  rows to  insert  into  your  database?

What  if  you  have  10,000  rows or  50,000  rows?

You  can  use  a  tool  from  Oracle  called SQL Loader  for  faster  data  loading.

SQL Loader  requires  a  data  file which  can  be  comma  separated,

tab -delimited,  fixed  format, and  a  control  file.

The  control  file  describes

the  structure  of  the  data  file and  the  target  table,

and  we're  going  to  add another  layer  on  this

because  we're  going to  do  all  this  from  within  JSL.

I'm  going  to  create  a  command  file

which  runs   SQL Loader in  a  command  window.

It  also  generates the  control  and  command  files  using  JSL,

and  I'll  use  run program to  execute  the  file.

Here's  my  file.

It's  very  exciting,

it's  six  columns,  four  rows and  it's  tab  delimited.

Here  I'm  showing  the  reveal  code, so  this  is  my  tab  character,

and  here's  my  example.

I've  got  setting  some  variables,

and  here  I'm  creating  my  control  file

and  I'm  using  eval insert to  make  these  variables,

—surrounded  by  the  little  carets— convert  to  their  values  up  here.

Import _file name  will  be  test_import.txt, dest_table  will  be  TEST_IMPORT.

Fields  are  terminated  by  tab, actually  enclosed  by  double  quotes.

Here's  my  six  fields,

and  I'm  adding  a  couple  of  other  fields, date _loaded  and  username _loaded.

Date _loaded  will  be  the  system  date.

The  username _loaded  will  be the  account  name

of  the  person  running  it.

I'm  saving  this  file  out to  the  directory

and  I'm  creating  a  command  file to  run   SQL Loader.

Setting  my  drive  to  the  C  drive, seeding  into  this  directory,

and then  here's  my  command;

SQL Loader  user  ID  equals  my  credentials at  my  database  name,

and  here's  my  control  file, my  log  file.

And  if  you  notice,

I  had  to  add  these  backslash exclamation mark  capital  N.

These  are  hard  returns.

For  some  reason, it  didn't  work  without  these  in  there,

so  I  had  to  add  those  in for  the  command  file  to  work.

I'm saving  it,

and  then  I'm  running  it  here with  run program.

Then  I'm  checking  the  results.

If  it  does  not  contain row  successfully  loaded  in  the  output,

then  I  display  an  error  message and  display  the  output  from  run SQL  load.

If  it  was  successful,

then  I  load  the  log  file  in and  display  that.

Here's  my  log  file.

I've got about four  rows successfully  loaded  in  1.5  seconds.

I  want  to  do  a  demo  of  six  columns with  30,000  records,

and  let's  run  that  one.

I'm  loading  into  the  same  table, I'm truncating  the  table,

and  I'm  running  SQL Loader,   load  the  data  file.

It's  the  same  control  file.

When  it's  all  done,

it's  going  to  display the  output  from  the  log  file.

Here's  the  output.

I've  got  30,000  rows  successfully  loaded.

No  rows  were  not  loaded  due  to  data  errors and  it  took  16  seconds.

That  was  30,000  rows, and  we  can  look  at  that  data.

Here  I  am  in  a  tool called  PL/SQL  Developer.

SELECT  star  from  the  table and  here's  my  values,

here's  my  date  loaded, which  is  today,

my  username,

and  it's  going  to  select  all  the  rows.

I'll let  that  run.

Okay,  so  here's  a  look  at  the  data  file, and  here's  the  log  or  previous  run.

It  took  25  seconds.

All  right,  moving  on.

Now,  what  if  you  want  to  execute an  Oracle  PL /SQL  procedure?

PL /SQL  stands  for Procedural  Language  Extensions  to  SQL,

and  it's  a  sort  of  a   3GL, 4GL  language  Oracle  uses

to  do  functions, procedures  and  the  like.

If  you  have  a  procedure,

you  simply  surround  it  with  begin  and  end and  then  pass  it  to  Execute  SQL.

Here is  BEGIN, that's my  schema  name.

This  is  a  package  called  package  util, and  then  inside  there,

there's  a  procedure  called  send  email with  an  argument   success ,

and  then  I  add  the  END  at  the  end.

So  when  you  do  this,

it  runs  it  and  control  will  return to  JMP  when  the  procedure  is  done,

so   we'll  wait.

Okay,  let's  talk  about some  security  things.

When  you  pull  data  from  Oracle,

by  default,  there's  a  source  property in  the  data  set,

and  that  will  show  you

the  username  and  password and  connection  string,

and  you  might  not  want to  show  that  to  all  your  users.

If  you  run  this  command,

it  will  hide  the  connection  string in  the  data  set  that's  returned.

I  go  a  couple  of  steps  beyond  that.

I  create  a  connection in  an  encrypted  JSL  function.

This  function  contains  a  database  name, the  username,  and  the  password,

and  it  returns  a  database  connection

and  default  local  ensures that  function  variables  are  not  visible.

Let's  have  a  look  at  that.

Here's  a  little  function  called  my _dbc,

and  this  is  the  unencrypted  version.

Here's  my  default  local.

I  check  environment  variables.

Here's  my  connection  string.

This  is  the  one that  you  don't  want  people  to  see.

Here's  my  driver,  my  database, my  username , my  password.

I  create  a  database  connection with  that  string

and  then  just  return my  database  connection.

Go  to  encrypt  the  script,

you  click  on  edit,  encrypt  script, enter  a  decrypt  password.

—I  don't  use  run  passwords—

and  then  click  yes here.

Here's  my  encrypted  script,

and  then  I'm  going  to  save  it as  my_dbc .jsl.

To  use  it, I  include  that  script,

that  encrypted  script  in  my  JSL  code, and  that  defines  that  function  for  me.

Then  I  call  my _dbc to  get  a  database  connection,

SELECT  star  from  this  table

execute  SQL, close  database  connection,

so  here's  my  table.

And  if  you  look  at  DBC  in  the  log,

all  it  shows  is  database and  then  your  Oracle  client  driver.

Many  times  when  you  run SQL  commands  in  JMP,

you  run  into  errors, and  it's  not  very  easy  to  debug  this,

so  I  wrote  a  function called   log_execute_ sql,

which  executes  SQL  commands  and  traps any  ODBC  errors  found  in  the  log.

If it  finds  errors, it  displays  a  warning  message  to  the  user

along  with  the  SQL, and along  with  the  error.

If  you  set  a  global  variable  to  one, it  displays  a  SQL  before  executing  it.

This  has  become  very  handy for  developing  and  debugging  SQL.

The  function  uses  log  capture to  inspect  the  log  for  errors.

This  is  the  syntax  for  log  capture, string  equals  log  capture  expression,

and  this  is  whatever  commands you  want  executed  and  captured,

and  anything  that  normally  go  to  log will  go  into  string,

and  then  you  can  inspect  the string.

Log _execute _sql  takes  five  arguments: the  name  of  the  calling  program,

a  database  connection, a  SQL  statement,

an  invisible  flag, and  a  table  name  to  return,

and  here  are  two  examples.

One  works  and  one  doesn't  work.

This  has  SELECT   SYSDATE  FROM  DUAL,

which  is  a  standard  Oracle  command to  get  the   current  system  date,

and  this  has  an  intentional  error  in  it, dual  X,

which  I  know  doesn't  exist.

When  we  run  the  first  SQL  statement, we  get  the  system date.

Very  good.

When  we  run  the  second  statement, we  get  an  error  message.

Calling  program is  listed  here, the  error  message is  here.

This  is  very  important,

along  with  this  code, ORA-00942,

and  then  here's  your  SQL  statement,

and  this  whole  message is  inside  of  a  text  edit  box,

so  you  can  copy  and  paste  it.

Here's  an  example  for  debug  output.

I  turn  on  my  debug  flag and  when  I  run  my  statement,

I  get  an  informational  message

—It's  not  an  error, it's  just  informational—

showing  the  calling  program, database  connection,

whether  it's   invisible  or  not, the  table  name,  and  the  SQL  state,

and  then  I  can  click  this  checkbox

if  I  want  to  turn  off subsequent  debug  output.

So  here's  log _execute _sql, there's  a  description,

a description  of  the  arguments,

a  couple  of  example  calls, and  then  here's  the  function  itself.

Here's  my  arguments, I  check  the  database  connection,

I  check  the  SQL  statement, I check  the  debug  flag.

If  the  debug  flag  is  on, I  make  a  little  window

and  I  display  the  current  SQL in  a  text  edit  box,

and  then  I  give  the  user  the  option to  turn  off  subsequent  debug  output.

If  they  click  that, I  reset  the  flag  to  zero.

Then  here's  the  meat  of  this  function

I  force  all  errors  to  go  to  the  log with  batch  interactive  one,

then  I  call  log  capture

with  either  an  invisible  flag  on or  non- invisible  flag on

for  execute  SQL,

and  then  I  turn  batch  interactive, set  it  back  to  zero,

then  I  check  the  log  window for  ODBC  errors,

I  look  for  Oracle  ODBC or  the  word  error  and  I  set  a  flag,

and  then  I  use  words and  the   [inaudible 00:25:02]

to remind me  to  parse the  output  of  the  log  into  separate  lines.

Then  the  error  message  is  always on  line  one  of  this  message.

If  we  found  an  error, then  it  displays  the  error.

I  have  an  example  here  yet.

So  here's  an  example  where  it  says FROM  keyword  not  found  where  expected.

If  we  look  at  the  SQL,

I  happen  to  know there's  a  comma  missing  here.

Let's  talk  about  building  IN  lists.

The  Oracle  IN  operator  determines  whether a  value  matches  any  values  in  a  list.

Here's  an  example.

SELECT  star, FROM  EBA _SALES_ SALES REPS,

where  the  last  name is  in  one  of  these  values,

and  it's  similar to  the  JSL  contains  function

where  here  I'm  saying does  this  list  contain  the  word  Raj?

In  this  case  it  was  down  at  position  two.

There's  a  caveat  with  the  IN  operator.

There's  a  limit  of  a thousand  values.

Of  course,  I  wrote  my  own  function, get_sql _in _list,

which  gets  around  that  limitation.

And  what  it  does,

it  builds  an  inlist from  the  list  provided.

If  there  are more  than  1000  items  on  the  list,

it  separates  them into  1,000  element  chunks

connected  via  union to  avoid  the  limit  of  a thousand  items.

And  if  the  elements  are  of  type  string,

any  single  quotes  inside  the  strings will  be  replaced  with  two  single  quotes,

and  single  quotes  will  be  put around  each  item.

So  there's  two  arguments.

First  one  is  item  list.

It's  the  list  of  items  to  create an  endless  FROM,

and  then  a  preamble,

which  is  a  SQL  string to  preface  the  IN list  with,

so  we'll  see  what  these  mean in  this  example.

Here's  an  example  where  I  have a  numeric  list,

and  my  preamble  is  select  this  ID from  schema  info,

where  the  ID's  in  open  parentheses.

So  here's  my  call  to  get _sql_in _list, my   id_list,  preamble

and  the  output  looks  like  this;

SELECT  star  from  my  table  m.

The  ID  is  in  here.

Select  ID  from  schema  info where  ID  is  in  one  of  these  numbers.

If  you  look  at  a  string  example, here's  four  elements  in  this  list.

The  first  one  and  the  third  one has  a  single  quote  inside  them,

and  here's  my  preamble.

When  I  call  get _sql_in_list and  combine  it  in  my  SQL  statement,

this  is  my  result.

SELECT  star  from  my table  m,

where  the  product  name  is  IN and  here  it's  my  preamble,

where  alert  name  is  IN, A, B, C,  or  D.

And  you'll  notice  for  A  and  C

it  replaced  the  single  quotes with  two  quotes,

and  it  also  converted  these  double  quotes to  single  quotes  here.

Here's  an  extract  of  a  long  example where  I  had  a thousand  of  these  ID  values,

and  so  here's  the  first  thousand, and  then  a  union  statement,

and  then  the  next  thousand and  so  on  and  so  forth.

All  right, here's  tip  number  three.

That  is  to  use an  integrated  development  environment

for  developing  your  SQL  statements.

These  have  a  GUI  front  end

and  they  let  you  develop and  debug  SQL  and   PL/SQL.

These  are  some  popular  tools that  I'm  aware  of.

I  use   PL/SQL  Developer.

It's from  All round  Automations.

There's  a  tool  called  SQL  Developer from  Oracle  that's  a  freebie,

and  TOAD  comes  from  Quest.

Many  people  are  familiar  with  TOAD.

Let's  have  a  look  at  PL/SQL  Developer.

We  saw  it  earlier  when  I  selected from  this  table.

I  can  do  things  like  highlight  these,

copy  with  header, back  to  JMP,

create  an  empty  data  set and  click  on  Edit,

paste  with  column  names.

Boom,  there's  my  data.

Okay.

And  I  can  browse  functions,  procedures, packages,  tables,  et  cetera,  et  cetera.

Here's  a  little  more

on  that  debugging  example that  we  saw  earlier,

and  again, a  comma  missing  here.

It's just  another  more  explicit  showing of  that  error  message.

So  you  take  this,  copy  it, look  at  it,  and  rework  it.

Another  tip, this  is   a  soft  tip,

and  that  is  to  avoid  inline  comments  using  dash- dash

as  it  can  confuse  the  parser.

These  are  comments where  the  dash -dash  says

everything  after  this  on  this  line is  a  comment.

Sometimes, some  situations,

the  parser  gets  confused

and  doesn't  treat these  properties  as  comments,

so  it's  better  to  use slash-star-star-slash.

I've  just  seen  a  couple  of  times where  it  didn't  work

and  I  traced  it  down to  these  comments.

One  more  tip, and  that  is  to  use

this  Oracle  SYS _CONTEXT  function to  get  useful  information.

There's  a  namespace  called U SERENV  in  Oracle

and  you  can  get  the  IP  address, the  client  computer,

the  program  making  the  ODBC  call,

the  operating  system  identifier for  the  client,

the  current  session,

operating  system  username, and  the  database  name.

There's  many  more.

If  you  Google  it, there 's  many  more  parameters,

but  these  are  the  ones  that  I  use.

Here  I'm  saying  select  IP  address, module,  terminal,

operating  system  user and  service  name.

Here's  my  call  to   SYS_CONTEXT,

and  I'm  just  selecting  it  from  DUAL, unioning  these  together,

and  the  results  look  like  this  down  here.

Here's  my  IP  address.

I'm  calling  from  JMP .exe, no  surprise  there.

My  username,  my  database, and  then  my  computer  name.

That's  all  I  have  today.

The  conclusions  I'll  draw,

or  if  you  configure the  Oracle  client  properly,

get  the  ODBC  connection  string

and  use  Execute  SQL  JMP  in  Oracle can  do  great  things.

So  once  again, JMP and  Oracle  equals  a  happy  marriage.

Thank  you, are there  any  questions?

Comments
FN

Great contribution. Thanks for sharing.