Performance problems concatenating LOBs

Greg Pike talks about some potential performance pitfalls with LOBs; I would comment on his blog, but it's a login only. Anyway, I posted on these problems last year (specifically with DBMS_LOB.APPEND), and posted some code to deal with it. Batching up appends makes a big difference - a 15-20 fold improvement, in the example shown (against 9.2.0.5).

MS subpoenas Oracle in Juxtacomm ETL patent case

Vincent McBurney summarises the latest developments in the Juxtacomm "we invented ETL, yeah really, give us all your money" patent case, which I have mentioned before. Dang, don't these "obvious" cases take a lot of time and effort to clear up.