I sell software for a living. Just in case you forgot, or never knew, my job is to present our software solutions to a customer and make sure there are no technical objects preventing them from buying it. Does this make me a weasel? Relatively, maybe a little bit. But, I sleep very well at night – and it’s not because of my $10,000 Dodo down pillows. Our tools are actually very good and are…
Someone asked me yesterday where do I get my blog topics and ideas from. Usually it’s from watching too much TV, but often it’s an actual question or topic that is raised by a co-worker or customer. Yesterday I was asked by my boss about how to find out when TRUNCATEs have been issued because I know that truncates cannot be rollbacked from so they wouldn’t be in the redo logs Now, in my boss’…
It turns out that everyone online isn’t as nice as you. Some people are online to prove how smart and funny they are. Unfortunately, a sizable minority of these people also just happen to be jerks. On Twitter yesterday, Karen suggested it might be because of a lack of women participants or moderators. While I can’t offer evidence to support or reject Karen’s jibe regarding lack of women, I do have some experience with moderators.…
Disclosure: I manage a blog syndication site, OraDBPedia. Part of my job involves looking for compelling bloggers in the Oracle database space and convincing them to let us syndicate their content. Syndicate: (Communication Arts / Journalism & Publishing) (tr) to sell (articles, photographs, etc.) to several newspapers for simultaneous publication — from FreeDictionary.com The general idea for a blogger is to get their content to as many different sets of eyes as possible. The more…
How much time to do you spend debugging database application problems? Probably more time than you want. How much of that time is spent capturing the SQL that is being submitted by your application to the database? I’m going to guess that it’s a significant amount. Asssuming you have access to production (or a test environment that adequately replicates production), then you probably want to check out V$SQLTEXT_WITH_NEWLINES. Before I talk about V$SQLTEXT_WITH_NEWLINES, let’s talk…
We moved a few years ago, to a wonderful home in the heart of Cary, NC. Lots of things to love about the house, but the geek in me has been eyeing these sets of in-ceiling speakers littered throughout the house. The previous owner was a huge fan of classical music and NPR, and wanted to be able to listen in the bath, the yard, the garage, even the kitchen. When we moved in, I…
Post Updated on November 10, 2011. 11gR2 was supposed to be 12g..or so the story goes. You can read tons of posts on OTN from several years ago where 12g is referenced. Nothing recent though. So… Oracle Open World 2011 is coming soon, and you know the Big Red Machine will want to have a big splash. Will it be a new version of their RDBMS solution? And for all those people who just got…
Sometimes I get a little preachy in my presentations. OK, maybe I get a LOT preachy. In exchange for being stuck with me for 90 minutes, I promise every person will receive at least one new technique or trick that will greatly affect their productivity when working with the database. Fortunately for me, most agree that this is a fair trade! Things generally go at a pretty rapid pace until I bring up one of…
Apologies to Wynonna Judd for borrowing and mangling her lyrics and song title, but I just had a really interesting conversation with a fellow Oracle tools guru. We we’re discussing just how much functionality an end-user really takes advantage of in a software product. He had mentioned that users maybe exercises about 20% of a tool’s feature-set and I countered with 10%. Maybe we’re both wrong, but I think we are on the right side…
Disclaimer: When I wrote this I was not an employee of Oracle, a RDBMS vendor. I am now, and you should know that. First, please go read Karen Lopez’s rant on Normalization Myths here. Now, a bit of my experience with relational database theory, design, and practice. As a senior Computer Science undergraduate I took a 200 level course on ‘Databases.’ We were taught set theory, a bit of algebra, Boyce-Codd, what it means to…