If I had a dollar for every time someone asked me to help them setup their database application or utility to not ‘let someone do something in the database they are not supposed to do’ over the past 10 years, I would literally have about $347. This is generally how it goes: Them: We want your tool, but we don’t like that it lets user do X. Me: Awesome! I want to give you our…
I know you can read, you’re here. But maybe you’re a functioning illiterate. Here’s what I mean. You spend a lot of time in the database writing queries, analyzing data, doing important stuff. Most of the time, things go great for you. You can answer questions for people. You make things happen. The wheels of the business bus go round-and-round. But there’s one thing that really, really scares you. Execution/Explain/Access Plans. Those things that describe…
Wait a sec, we don’t let developers even look at Production, much less touch it! There’s no way they can break anything over there. Whew! Jeff was just pulling our chains! I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but it’s even worse than you think. The code that those developers wrote? Guess where it runs everyday? That’s right – in production. So instead of them fat-fingering in production, a bad piece of code…
So you’re on Twitter. An interesting blog post rolls by. You click on it. You love it. You reward the author with a RT or even better, a Follow, or a reply on Twitter. The blog author, sees said Twitter response, and is like ‘Awesome!’ But secretly, they are disappointed. Why? Because what they really wanted was a RT AND for you to leave your comment on their blog. Because comments on a blog let…
“Look for things that make them go!” – from ST:TNG, “Samaritan Snare” (Wiki) I have a tendency to relate everything in life back to a Star Trek or South Park episode – it’s a personal problem and I’m currently in therapy, courtesy my DVR. But back to Oracle… How often have you been asked to help with a performance problem, but the person asking for help lacks the ability to describe the actual problem? The…
Did you know you can run Oracle RDBMS for free? Updated on 11/25/2011 – 11gR2 now available for Windows x32 and Linux x64 Yes, there are limitations (fine print), but just about anyone can take advantage of this offering. So, why should you care? Maybe you are a developer, and your DBA refuses to grant you privs you need to do your job. Well, if you can run your own local copy of Oracle, you…
Jealousy is not an emotion I generally feel for the SQL Server technology stack. I covet their Twitter camaraderie, but I ‘know’ that Oracle can counter just about anything thrown at it. People that Helped Me with this Post I was reminded that even old dogs can be taught new tricks while monitoring the #SQLSaturday conversation going on in Chicago this weekend. The subject of monitoring INDEXES came up, and it was casually mentioned that…
Do you take pleasure in killing peo…people’s sessions in the database? If so, you are not alone. If you have Blocking Locks, the easiest way to fix that is kill the offending session and free up the requested resource. But, who should win this battle? What transactions take precedence? Should the business analyst have his report kiboshed because a developer is testing a new feature? Should an ETL process be allowed to finish under any…
Question: How do I find the hour portion of the value between to timestamps? Answer: Use the EXTRACT() function! Thankfully @TheRealLewisC (twitter | blog) pointed us in the right direction! I was tempted to do a subtraction and then a substr() to pull out just the hour portion of the returned string – way more work than necessary for the Optimizer. EXTRACT (Oracle Docs) gives us just what we want! So there is not an…
After a year of tweeting my brains out for the past year, I have some data I could talk about Boring stuff, even meaningless one could argue. Number of followers, number of Re-Tweets, number of lists, my Klout (link) score – ALL BORING. When I try to convince someone to join Twitter, I never reference these slightly less than meaningless metrics. I talk about the REAL value of Twitter – the relationships I’ve cultivated or…