bits and large pieces

Oracle have an interesting collaborative project (MegaGrid) to develop a very large grid database designed to stretch technical and infrastructure resources to the absolute limit. I also gathered from the informative US news media that a cat had been trapped up a tree in a Seattle suburb and that (shock, horror, gasp) the US Government has secretly been tracking all phone calls since 9/11. This appeared to be a big, breaking news story but seeing as US immigration took the trouble to take my fingerprints and photograph on entry to (and departure from) the US, I honestly didn’t think that the Homeland Security department would simply discard this data....

May 14, 2006

further afield

I am going on a training course about Oracle RAC at Microsoft’s offices in Redmond (near America) so I get to wear chinos and a polo shirt and play with an Xbox in reception. In fact, it’s even better than that. This course is actually described as a ‘Technical Hands-On Workshop’. My only previous exposure to RAC was a few years ago, rote learning the Oracle manuals parrot fashion for an interview at a large UK Telco....

May 2, 2006

axe murderer

A couple of years ago, I was working in Amsterdam (near Holland) chasing world records for loading lots of data into a Siebel database. It wasn’t working very well. The client was unhappy so long hours were called for. The Unix team said the expensive SAN was performing optimally. The DBA team said Oracle was performing optimally. The Siebel team said Siebel was performing optimally. Alex Ferguson unexpectedly joined a conference call and said the Manchester United team were performing optimally....

April 4, 2006

new month, new job

I now work for Oracle based in Thames Valley Park, Reading in the UK. I am usually the last to hear any news about corporate takeovers. Does this mean I will have an Oracle sanctioned blog named ‘Siebel Evangelist’ ? Probably not.

March 1, 2006

out of the closet

My name is Norman Brightside. I work for Siebel Systems based in Egham in the UK. I am a Senior Architecture Specialist in Expert Services. Expert Services provide a range of consulting services from architecture workshops to performance troubleshooting. My work is technical (usually includes Oracle), varied, includes travel to Siebel customers located within the UK and Europe and perhaps, most importantly, involves meeting interesting people and learning.

February 28, 2006

how bind variables made me a demigod

In a previous life, I was a development DBA. Sorry that’s not quite true. My job title was ‘Persistence Architect’ for a J2EE application. The Oracle database wasn’t really considered to be a database. In fact, it wasn’t even considered to be a repository either. The database was merely a means of persisting objects. There was a swear box for the terms ‘Table’, ‘Column’, ‘Database’, ‘record, ‘schema’, ‘SELECT’ and bizarrely, ‘PMON’....

February 23, 2006

introduction to ETL for Oracle

There are a variety of methods to extract, transform and load (ETL) data in and out of an Oracle database. This short article provides an overview of some of the basic options that are supplied with Oracle. L is for Load Firstly, we need a table to load data into. This SQL script creates a table called PERSON. create table person (person_id number(12), forename varchar2(200), surname varchar2(200), title varchar2(10), email varchar2(100), gender varchar2(1), ni_number varchar(30), address1 varchar2(100), address2 varchar2(100), town varchar2(100), county varchar2(100), postcode varchar2(10), country varchar2(100), phone varchar2(100), mobile varchar2(100), salary number(12), date_of_birth date); The following PL/SQL procedure may be used to populate this table with an arbitrary amount of data....

February 20, 2006

interviewing stories #3

A few years ago, I worked for a small internet company and was a successful dot com millionaire. Then the confounded Italians went and devalued the Lira. We spent (wasted) lots of time interviewing Oracle developers. Interviewing was time consuming and we had a fairly rapid turnover of people with varying technical abilities and personality disorders. After a while, we decided to set a short technical test in an effort to save time and improve the quality of the technical people we hired....

February 2, 2006

a short history of Oracle blogging

I was just reviewing the list of Oracle related blogs I subscribe to. Here they are in approximate chronological order with the blogging platform. Apologies for any inaccuracies. Mark Rittman - June 2003 - Movable Type 3.2 Niall Litchfield - March 2004 - Blogger - recent convert to Joomla. Howard Rogers December 2004 - Originally Blogger, Opera, now Joomla. You name a blogging platform or CMS and Howard’s probably used it....

February 1, 2006

curious case of the missing spool file

Bit of a ghostly theme today. One great aspect of my job is that I write SQL scripts that are reviewed and executed by other people. This suits me just fine. The less work for me, the better. Obviously, I never add ‘spool off’ to the tail of a SQL*Plus script. This is a whole ten characters to type (including newline). Multiply this by all the SQL scripts you might produce in a lifetime and just think of how much time that would waste....

January 27, 2006