Metalink headlines

When I was thinking about whether to go on Tanel Poder’s course, I read the testimonials and there’s a great piece of advice from Tanel via Coskan Gundogar:

I asked him how do you learn all these interesting stuff. He gave me a perfect clue. Sign up for metalink headlines mailing list. Bugs docs they are all there after they are created. Perfect resource.

I just want to emphasise what a great resource these Metalink updates are.

I’ve only been signed up for a couple of weeks but some of the nuggets that come into your mailbox are pure gold.

I’ve learnt some stuff that I would never come across, plus I’m building up links for some great articles and explanations, some of which are invaluable as a reference for yourself or to give others (I’m rubbish at explaining stuff in my own words).

For example, just from the last couple of days, I’ve been notified of these new or updated articles:
(Note: Login to Metalink first before clicking the links)

Character set and character set conversion (comes up all the time on the forums and from other teams at work):

• 260893.1: Unicode Character Sets In The Oracle Database
• 158577.1: NLS_LANG explained

Metalink Scripts:

• 131704.1: Database Scripts Library Index

General:

• 783357.1: Troubleshooting DBMS_SCHEDULER and DBMS_JOB

Interesting behaviour:

• 887553.1: Join elimination does not happen for Composite Foregin key

To name but a few…

It’s just invaluable stuff.

Sign up if you don’t already.