The climax of the football season is currently dominating my life somewhat. However, I feel obliged to inform the world of my exciting plans for the next fortnight. Following next week’s UK Bank Holiday, the scheduling goddess informs me me that I will be doing a ‘brown bag’. This means that next Tuesday will see me wandering aimlessly around the shopping precinct in Reading, spontaneously shouting at shoppers while clutching four cans of Special Brew in a brown bag....
Many years ago, I managed a set of Oracle databases for various clients. However, I was not an Oracle DBA. I was an Unix/C developer who happened to progress to Pro*C, PL/SQL and some ETL projects for data warehouses. I was an mediocre development DBA because I was a mediocre developer and I had a keen interest in performance tuning i.e. I was (am remain) a ‘glory hunter’. I was not a production DBA because I didn’t have the training, experience and discipline required for change controls and saying ‘No’....
‘Holy Father. It is almost 31 years since City’s last trophy. Since then, I have: Failed to install Oracle 10gR3 Grid Control to experiment with the Siebel Management Pack. Failed to configure bridged networking on my Siebel 8.0/Oracle 10g/RedHat VMware environment. Consequently, I have just deleted the complete 20GB environment in a fit of pique. Nearly exploded at the woeful response to a ticket with Bluehost asking why two functioning cron jobs were a) removed and b) failed to work when reinstated....
I am currently trying to assist with a couple of long standing Service Requests. This type of work is interesting because the issue is normally pretty deep rooted and complicated. These escalations are also very challenging because lots of very intelligent people have already spent a lot of man-hours investigating the problem. Anyway, one of the first steps is to review associated Service Requests and try to determine whether they are indeed related to the issue under investigation....
Oracle blogs I read by Technorati ranking. Cue Led Zeppelin’s ‘Whole Lotta Love’. Life After Coffee - Jon Emmons - Rank: 18,499 (405 links from 190 blogs) The Tom Kyte Blog - Tom Kyte - Rank: 24,521 (345 links from 145 blogs) Oracle BI and DW - Mark Rittman - Rank: 31,939 (458 links from 112 blogs) Oracle Scratchpad - Jonathan Lewis - Rank: 44,328 (242 links from 83 blogs) Eddie Awad’s Blog - Eddie Awad - Rank: 60,122 (175 links from 62 blogs) Doug’s Oracle Blog - Doug Burns - Rank: 83,319 (216 links from 46 blogs) Kevin Closson’s Oracle Blog - Kevin Closson - Rank: 87,506 (100 links from 44 blogs) The Oracle Sponge - David Aldridge - Rank: 102,376 (72 links from 38 blogs) The Oracle-Base Blog - Tim Hall - Rank: 112,139 (57 links from 35 blogs) 10 So What Co-Operative - Jeff Hunter - Rank: 154,372 (62 links from 26 blogs) Pete-s Random Notes - Peter Scott - Rank: 161,008 (92 links from 25 blogs) Radio Free Tooting - Andrew Clarke - Rank: 168,201 (70 links from 24 blogs) Oracle 10g Blog - Chris Foot - Rank: 168,201 (51 links from 24 blogs) Oracle WTF - William Robertson - Rank: 194,372 (70 links from 21 blogs) Dizwell Informatics - Howard Rogers - Rank: 194,372 (61 links from 21 blogs) OracleBlog - Robert Vollman - Rank: 194,372 (44 links from 21 blogs) Oracle Stuff I should have known - Andy Campbell - Rank TBD (55 links from X blogs) We Do Not Use Blogs - Mogens Norgaard - Rank: 259,194 (26 links from 16 blogs) Laurent Schneider OCM - Laurent Schneider - Rank: 322,022 (176 links from 13 blogs) Oracle Newbies Blog - Lisa Dobson - Rank: 322,022 (29 links from 13 blogs) OraMoss Oracle - Jeff Moss - Rank: 347,530 (150 links from 12 blogs) Confessions of a database geek - Beth - Rank: 347,530 (32 links from 12 blogs) Oracle Alchemist - Steve Karam - Rank: 413,015 (13 links from 10 blogs) The Eric S....
Siebel 8.0 is the first major release since the Oracle takeover and is now imminent. Oracle are planning a simultaneous launch of five different products (JD Edwards, E-Business, PeopleSoft and Siebel 8.0) on 31 January 2007. Ed Abbo (VP CRM products) will be chairing the Siebel session and SearchCRM has an interesting (albeit low quality) interview podcast with Ed where he talks about new features in Siebel 8.0, CRM OnDemand and the impact of the Oracle takeover on Siebel’s development and strategy....
My. How times change. In my day, the philosophy was simple: Always be sick in your own time. Ensure a newspaper is safely cached behind the toilet cistern. Arrive and leave the office 30 seconds before/after your manager. Get an urgent pager alert whenever your round is imminent. Be quick to claim credit and divert blame. But no. I have now finally discovered the true Oracle Contractors Philosophy.
Regularly refreshing Oracle statistics on all tables, indexes and column histograms flushes the shared pool and can occasionally lead to some unexpected and unpleasant surprises. Thankfully, Oracle 10g automatically maintains 31 days of statistics history which means it is trivial to revert to a previous set in order to restore service to the production environment while you investigate further. A perfectly valid strategy for statistics gathering is to gather, test, validate, save and leave well alone....
Jonathan Lewis poses a very interesting question: Have you ever wondered how hard the optimizer has to work to produce a plan ? Well actually Jonathan, curiously enough I have. Many times, in fact. Siebel 7.7 (released in 2004) was the first version of Siebel to support the Oracle cost based optimizer (CBO) and pleased a lot of demanding Oracle DBA’s who looked contemptuously on the 10 year old rule based optimizer (RBO) technology and had long petitioned Siebel to finally add support for CBO to improve performance, support table partitioning, parallel query, bitmap indexes and lots of other features they wanted to use (i....
Tighten security for all parties by addressing this issue: ‘The Password must contain only ASCII alphanumeric characters.’ The ‘Quick Links to the Latest Patchsets’ is a great idea spoilt only by the absurd complexity in navigating the resulting pull-down. If you possess the hand/eye co-ordination and reflexes to successfully navigate to the correct platform and the desired version first time, you could probably make a fortune playing those impossible ‘Win a cuddly lion with this crane like mechanism’ kiosks at the fun fair....