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Continue reading →: Exposing the Oracle Alert Log to SQL
I’ve been spending some time working in Apex recently, building a small app to draw together the monitoring of application and infrastructure components into a single easy-to-visualise tool. As part of that, I wanted to be able to read and report on the alert log. Traditionally, that would have meant…
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Continue reading →: DROP DATABASE command
I have been DBA-ing for a while now, and I today I used a “new” command which I have never used in the previous 20+ years I have worked with Oracle: DROP DATABASE. It’s amazing what you miss sometimes! So, what does it do? As the name implies, it drops…
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Continue reading →: UKOUG 2011
Well, I’m back at work today missing the excellent final day of the UKOUG 2011 (@UKOUG #UKOUG2011), but frankly I’m worn out. After watching some of the most fantastic presentations by the likes of Doug Burns, Jonathan Lewis, Greg Rahn, Tanel Poder and many others**, my brain is full. I…
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Continue reading →: Industry Experience
I don’t get it. Why do so many jobs and contracts seem to insist upon having experience in a particular industry when, in the overwhelming majority of cases, the specific industry in which we work has no bearing upon the nature of our work. I have worked across many industries,…
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Continue reading →: Implicit Conversion Errors
Summary: Implicit conversion is bad. It can lead to error, sorting issues, inability to use indexes and cardinality calculation problems causing performance issues. And it can be very hard to spot! A while ago, I failed over a database (as planned) to it’s Dataguard copy, and of course everything worked…
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Continue reading →: The 10046 trace. Largely useless, isn’t it?
The other night I was sat in the pub with some like-minded individuals discussing the relative merits of the 10046 trace (we Rock! in the pub, dudes!) and somebody asked me how often I has actually used it in anger? A well-respected DBA / Architect maintained it was a pretty…
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Continue reading →: Oracle Timestamp Processing – mildly annoying
I was writing a small piece of SQL this morning which I needed to account for daylight savings time correctly. All of my databases run in UTC, so a quick foray into using TIMESTAMP AS TIME ZONE seemed the easiest way to accomplish this. So, I code it up and…
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Continue reading →: Dennis Ritchie RIP
There can be few scientists who have contributed so much to the world as Dennis Ritchie. Completely anonymous to the world at large, and to far too much of the computing fraternity too, his involvement in the development of C – the first portable programming language, and Unix cannot be…
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Continue reading →: Management and Infrastructure SIG – Thank You
Well, we had the final Management and Infrastructure SIG last week, and whilst the attendance wasn’t huge, the content was simply excellent. Two great presentations about Enterprise Manager from Niall Litchfield of Maxima, and from Mark Westwood and Carl Holmes of Morrissons. We also had an insightful and revealing presentation…
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Continue reading →: UKOUG Management & Infrastructure SIG – New Date
To blatantly steal this post from Martin Widlake, as I’m Deputy Chairman of the SIG, and I’m also presenting: I ought to just mention that the UKOUG Management and Infrastructure SIG has moved from Tuesday September 20th to Tuesday September 27th (so two weeks from today). It had to be…
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Continue reading →: My alert.log is broken
Well, not mine, but a recent post on the oracle-l mailing list which I thought was worth linking to and repeating. Firstly, because it’s interesting, and secondly, because it shows some good problem solving skills by both the poster and the wider Oracle community. The poster in question was experiencing…
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Continue reading →: So how big is that disk?
I’m doing a fair bit of SAN-based work at the moment, migrating a bunch of Oracle databases from EMC to HP (posts to follow regarding Orion testing and other related topics). One thing that annoys me is the way SAN Manufacturers have changed the meaning of technical terms over time…
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Continue reading →: A little rant about DBA’s
Well, a while ago I was doing some interviews for a client for a Production support DBA. This was for a short term contract to look after a few systems while the incumbent was off doing more interesting project work. The thing I discovered was the absolutely dire level of…
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