On an Oracle database with a table storing long strings as BLOB/CLOB, you might get an ORA-01704 error trying to perform manual updates.

Four years ago, I was the technical lead in the development and support team for the Portuguese Public Contract Register. The platform won second place in the Award ‘Better Governance through Procurement Digitalisation’. That award aimed to highlight and reward the solutions in digital public procurement in Europe that help to improve the governance of the national procurement systems. There was a cash prize for the award winners. We invested ours in text-to-speech software.

Recently I chose to develop a quick batch solution, for working with SQL Server databases, using Powershell and the Invoke-SqlCmd cmdlet. I was faced with unexpected errors. After quick workaround on the code, I was able to get things done. However, recently I got to redo the batch resulting on a more performant solution. The key to this was the Invoke-DbaQuery Cmdlet.

As you might have read, I’m a fan of GTD. Having to develop a quick batch solution for some data copying between different SQL Server databases, I chose to use Powershell scripting and the Invoke-SqlCmd cmdlet. However I was faced with unexpected errors for something as trivial as an export/import job.

Now and then you’ll face some important task that needs to be done on the spot, with no delays. Usually single-shot operations. For that, the key performance indicator is GTD.