SQLFiddle (for Oracle) is broken. Try Oracle Live SQL

 

BI Publisher reporting work involves a lot of SQL. And often (in the Oracle world) one needs a quick way to try an Oracle function in a quick sandbox like system. For  long time, I have been using SQLFiddle, which provides a simple browser UI to create schema and run SQLs on them. But for many months now, the Oracle support on SQLFiddle has been broken. And I was looking for alternatives.

Turns out, Oracle themselves provides an excellent replacement tool to create schemas and run SQLs. Free for anyone who has an oracle.com login. That includes all customers and vendors working on their products. cleartext.blogspot.com

Go to Oracle Live SQL. The SQL worksheet page there can be used to run any SQLs, and its on a 12c DB server. cleartext.blogspot.com

 

There is a simple schema designer to create schema. Or you can also use standard DDL functions. Turns out , this is actually a simple Apex application. cleartext.blogspot.com

 

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BIP: Distinct

 

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BIP has a distinct function

xdoxslt:distinct_values

If you use it on a node of elements, it returns a space separated sequence of its distinct elements.

Eg: for this xml:

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<ROWSET>
    <ROW>
        <CwaProductCode>001</CwaProductCode>
    </ROW>
    <ROW>
        <CwaProductCode>002</CwaProductCode>
    </ROW>
    <ROW>
        <CwaProductCode>001</CwaProductCode>
    </ROW>
    <ROW>
        <CwaProductCode>003</CwaProductCode>
    </ROW>
</ROWSET>

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Using <?xdoxslt:distinct_values(CwaProductCode)?> gives:

001 002 003

Using <?count(xdoxslt:distinct_values(CwaProductCode))?> gives:

3

But what if one needs to group by the distinct values, and then count the number of elements under it ? Then distinct can’t help.

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<?for-each-group:ROW;./CwaProductCode?>
<?CwaProductCode?><?'-'?><?count(current-group()/.)?>
<?end for-each-group?>

Gives the answer:

001-2
002-1
003-1

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