I love books. I remember when my local school system had a partnership (evil plan) with Pizza Hut. For every six books I read, I earned a free personal pizza. I was reading upwards of 10-20 books a month when I was in elementary school. This may have been partly due to me living in a rural area with no local kids my age to play with, but I’ll pretend it was because I was…
For most couples, ‘date night’ is something to look forward to, but unfortunately does not come around often enough. For others, even the word ‘date’ sends a chill down their spine. It’s not an adverse reaction to their partner, but rather a unpleasant reminder to the daily toil that is working with DATE formatted data in their relational database. Wow, that opening segue was more awkward than my first date with my wife…which is another…
Many moons ago, this was a pretty straightforward question. It also had a very easy answer, the DBA owned performance. By that I mean if the database or it’s applications did not perform as expected, it was the DBA who would step in and fix it. Several years ago this began to change. More and more shops started to expect the developers to have more than a passing awareness that their applications relied on a…
Someone suggested I document where, who, and what I use to get things done in my day-to-day dealings with all things Oracle RDBMS. Since I am very open to suggestion, here it is: Official Stuff Unofficial Stuff Twitter Folks Updated Dec 14, 2014 Oracle Docs Official Link Oracle’s official online documentation. I generally just ‘Google’ the term I’m interested in alongside the keyword ‘Oracle.’ Nine times out of 10 (unscientific gut feeling), the Oracle Docs…
I am continuously chiding my customers to upgrade their software, particularly the software they bought from Quest. Why? Well, for starters it’s in my financial best interest to do so. But, I have no problems sleeping at night because it’s also in their best interest. Why? Companies spend a lot of money on software maintenance renewals. Anywhere from 10-25% of the list price every year goes to this. Software companies love that revenue stream. It’s…
So this was my 3rd Oracle Open World, and not much has changed in terms of my experience as a ‘booth boy’ in the Vendor Exhibition Hall. However a few things definitely got my attention. I will need to re-evaluate how I treat the opportunity to attend this conference going forward. I should get registered as a blogger I should attend the blogger meet-up I should meet @jpiwowar in-the-flesh I should wrangle my way into…
Don’t you just love managing your 3,247 accounts and passwords in cyberspace? Imagine being a DBA who manages several hundred databases and requires a password for each of those. And of course said passwords expire after X days, right? Password rules, which cover things like limit of failed login attempts password lifetime reuse max password expiration grace time are defined by Profiles. You can view profile information by querying SYS.DBA_PROFILES. I was approached for help…
Microsoft has a lot to be proud of. They helped pioneer desktop computing. They have very successful platforms like SQL Server and Sharepoint. They are even working on a new mobile phone that doesn’t support copy and paste. But, I would argue their most popular product in use today is Excel. Mayhaps ‘popular’ isn’t the best word here. Most reasonable people will probably agree that Excel is the predominant number crunching tool in the marketplace.…
Updated for 2015! If I were attending as a developer/DBA, here are the things I would be doing: Take notes, collect materials. Come back to work, put on a lunch seminar sharing the biggest things you learned during the week – make it EASY for your boss to approve #OOW16. Put Twitter handle on name badge. Plan for sessions in advance using the Schedule Builder Only pack in carry-ons. You won’t want to be waiting…
I spend a lot of time speaking to PL/SQL development teams. A conservative estimate would break down to about 200 presentations a year and 2,000 developers. I have several stock presentations, but I prefer to have conversations with my audience rather than just start throwing slides up on the projector. If we find a topic of interest, then I can jump into presentation mode. When I get desperate for audience participation, I’ll start throwing concepts…