Iowa Pork Producers Association

Understanding the history and theory behind relational databases helps us achieve a deeper understanding of Oracle SQL. This information helps us avoid repeating old mistakes, and it gives us the confidence needed to occasionally ignore the theory and build practical solutions. This book assumes you are already familiar with relational databases and SQL, so the information provided here is not merely introductory; it is foundational.

Solving Oracle SQL performance issues is the pinnacle of SQL development. Performance tuning requires a combination of all the skills previously discussed in this book. We need to understand the development process (to know why problems happened and weren’t caught sooner), advanced features (to find alternative ways to implement code), and programming styles (in order to understand the code and rewrite it into something better).

You don’t need a computer science degree to apply the practical advice in this book and become a better SQL developer. For database developers it can be useful to branch out in different directions and learn about other languages, system architecture, project management, etc. But a deeper understanding of database processing can also help your career and create interesting opportunities. Use the following list to explore the theoretical foundations of many of the topics in this book:

Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) was declared a global pandemic on March 11, 2020 by the World Health Organization and its impact on animal agriculture in the United States was undeniable. By April, COVID-19 resulted in the simultaneous closure or reduced operations of many meat processing plants in the upper Midwest, leading to supply chain disruptions. In Iowa, the leading pork production and processing state, these disruptions caused producer uncertainty, confusion, and stress, including time-sensitive challenges for maintaining animal care. The Iowa Resource Coordination Center (IRCC) was quickly created and launched by the Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship (IDALS). The IRCC included public representation from the Iowa Pork Producers Association (IPPA), Iowa Pork Industry Center (IPIC), and Iowa State University Extension and Outreach, and private partners including producers, veterinarians, and technical specialists. Supporting swine welfare, the IRCC provided information on management strategies, dietary alterations to slow pig growth, alternative markets, on-farm euthanasia, and mass depopulation under veterinary oversight. In a crisis, Iowa created a model that reacted to producers’ pragmatic, mental and emotional needs. This model could be quickly replicated with an introduction of foreign animal disease.

Pulmonary embolism (PE) represents the third leading cause of cardiovascular mortality. The technological landscape for management of acute intermediate- and high-risk PE is rapidly evolving. Two interventional devices using pharmacomechanical means to recanalize the pulmonary arteries have recently been cleared by the US Food and Drug Administration for marketing, and several others are in various stages of development. The purpose of this document is to clarify the current state of endovascular interventional therapy for acute PE and to provide considerations for evidence development for new devices that will define which patients with PE would derive the greatest net benefit from their use in various clinical settings. First, definitions and limitations of commonly used risk stratification tools for PE are reviewed. An adjudication of risks and benefits of available interventional therapies for PE follows. Next, considerations for optimal future evidence development in this field are presented in the context of the current US regulatory framework. Finally, the document concludes with a discussion of the pros and cons of the rapidly expanding PE response team model of care delivery.

Understanding the history and theory behind relational databases helps us make sense of things and avoid common traps. But there are also many times when we need to ignore the theory and build practical solutions. This book assumes you are already familiar with relational databases and SQL; the information provided here is not merely introductory, it is foundational.

SQL is Oracle's greatest strength. Dynamic SQL is important because it gives us more opportunities to use SQL. Chapter 14 introduced the basic features: using dynamic SQL for DDL, unknown objects, and simplifying privileges; EXECUTE IMMEDIATE and bind variable syntax; simplifying dynamic code with multiline strings, alternative quoting syntax, and templating; and the benefit of generating code instead of creating generic code.

Now that we learned how to write advanced SQL statements to retrieve data, it is time to learn how to write advanced SQL statements to change data. Oracle Data Manipulation Language (DML) lets us insert, update, and delete data.

Most Oracle database development environments are set up like fragile china shops. There’s an intricate structure that must be maintained at all costs, and the smallest change can break things and stop everyone from working. Nobody knows exactly how the database got to be the way it is, and everybody is worried they won’t know how to fix it when it breaks. Typical Oracle database development processes are woefully behind industry norms.

We must write large SQL statements to take full advantage of the power of Oracle SQL. Large procedures are an anti-pattern in procedural programming languages; we need to understand why SQL is different. Large SQL statements create several risks and opportunities; we must be aware of the consequences of parsing, optimizer transformations, resource consumption, context switches, and parallelism. Finally, we need to learn how to read and debug large SQL statements.