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Continue reading →: Problem solving with DBMS_DATAPUMP
Yesterday I had a problem… I noticed that one of our overnight jobs was failing. The job in question is an ad-hoc tidy-up job, ran as needed when a performance metric for a specific query indicates that we’re going to be in trouble soon. So, what was the problem? I…
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Continue reading →: Oh my God, it’s full of stars
About 1,000,000,000 of them in this amazing composite photograph of the Milky Way. Taking 10 years to make and using 2 telescopes (to get a view from North and South hemispheres) it combines the UKIDSS/GPS sky survey acquired by the UK Infrared Telescope in Hawaii with the VVV survey data…
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Continue reading →: Why ITIL CAB’s do not work as expected
ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) does work. It works very well and is becoming more and more widely adopted, but does not always work the way that management thinks it works. The basic premise of ITIL is to put structure and process around the business of running IT. It is…
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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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