Good evening. My name is ‘Google Bot’. It was a difficult (N-P complete) and very time consuming task to decide on the precise content for this article. After all, I have crawled 2.6 billion pages in the last seven days so I am a little tired. However, here is the pick of the blogosphere for November.

Oracle release 10.2.0.3 patch set (currently available on Linux only). This release includes several fixes related to the cost based optimizer. Siebel 7.8 customers using Oracle 10g should note the following bug fixes:

  • 4370351 - High parse CPU (in qksfroInit) for large queries
  • 4573396 - CBO does not account for chained rows
  • 4711525 - Parsing of bitmapped plans can be slow
  • 4772145 - Gathering statistics on large indexes is slow

Tom Kyte quietly releases a revamped version of the popular AskTom site. The new version is written in Apex and has a clean, fresh interface and looks very professional.

Over on his blog, Tom also writes an interesting article that really should have been titled ‘YCNMIU’.

Doug Burns takes steps to re-establish his technical credentials by ejecting the cuddly toys from his blog and ceaselessly networking at UKOUG in an attempt to win friends and influence people. Inside sources confirm that Doug took this radical action after the soft toys were attracting more comments than Doug’s technical white papers on parallelism.

Brian the Footballer emailed to say the toys were very upset and annoyed. Worse, Doug sentenced them to using Blogger Beta when he had a beautiful WordPress placeholder blog ready and waiting. Or he did, until he spitefully went and deleted it.

This sequence of developments all makes sense when Doug announces he has spurned a lucrative contract renewal and will be looking for a new role in 2007. Neighbours report hammering and expletives emanating from Doug’s shed. Our spies in Scotland claim Burns is preparing for a spell on the bench by carving one by hand. Made of solid oak.

Tim Hall has started a bulc-koob. This is like a book club but works in reverse. Most book clubs have 12 members and read 1 book a month. Tim’s variation has 1 member and reads 12 books a month - all about vampires. Oracle sources are a little worried about Tim. Apparently at UKOUG, he was always dressed in black and only came out at night. He also looked a little pale and was never seen without a glass of cranberry juice.

At last. An Oracle blogger with taste in music. Unfortunately, Andrew Clarke spoiled the article with some dry technical content but never mind. Enquiring minds still want to know whether Andrew ever did get reunited with his lost socks and underpants though.

Ever noticed how plumbers always have horrible, dated, unfashionable bathrooms with dripping taps. Well Mark Rittman is a well respected consultant on all things to do with Oracle and Business Intelligence. However, Mark naively assumed his hosting provider might actually backup his data for 10 quid a month but no. Unbelievably, they managed to lose his data. All of it. 700 articles. And no, he didn’t have a backup. Thankfully, all articles was restored from various sources. Some people would do anything (12 hours of mindless cut/paste) to get back on his blog roll.

And finally, Jeff Hunter inadvertently starts a frank exchange of views with Sheeri Kritzer over the pros and cons of mySQL. Ah - just like the good old days. The flame wars on Usenet, watered down and transferred to the blogosphere.

Peace, love, empathy.