Farming out your application to a hosting service really has a lot of appeal. Let someone else worry about backups, performance and uptime Service Level Agreements (SLAs), upgrades, etc. But do you really know exactly what your hosting agreement includes? What you will have access to? What is and is not covered? Picture courtesy Public Domain Pictures.NET One of the most eye-opening conversations I’ve ever had was with %*#@(^* – you know where they are…
Is that an offensive question? Does it assume to much? I can’t imagine asking ‘Do you have a test plan?’ I was working with an Oracle group this week, and after hearing about a big application upgrade schedule to go in April, I had a few questions for them. I was most curious how they would ensure that no performance degradation would occur? This would be a major concern of mine for any major upgrade,…
Relational databases are powerful for many reasons, but you cannot deny the ‘relational’ part is pretty compelling. Rows or ‘tuples’ in a table are comprised of related data. So for one row in an Employee table, you can assume that each value or column pertains to that particular Employee. Of course you can’t – or rather shouldn’t – put everything about said employee in a single row or table. I hate using absolutes, but in…
Unscientific research and Twitter gossip reveals that fewer than 15% of folks out there take advantage of Oracle’s partitioning (Oracle Docs) support for tables and indexes. Folks that build their own solutions in-house are more likely to discover and use partitioning. If you use a packaged 3rd-party database solution and it uses partitioning, then I would love to hear about it! Do you use Oracle Partitioning (tables/indexes)?online surveys Disclaimer: Partitioning, like indexing, is a performance…
Assumptions can often get us in trouble. People don’t know what you think they know, and they know what you don’t think they know. I often present to small groups. I ask questions up front to gauge the experience level, but even so I am forced to make some assumptions. Then there are some basics that I assume any database user will have nailed down. I recently spent 90 minutes talking about writing queries and…
So 2010 is the year of social media. Time’s Person of the Year was the Facebook dude, so that kind of makes it official. I have so many identities spread across all of these communities. How do I manage them all? For now I am taking care of Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. I suppose those are the prime players. I say that based on the number of people using those sites. I use Facebook for…
My former boss, and current friend, bought an Android phone for himself and his wife last week and asked me for a list of my must-have apps. I’ll list them here for the morbidly curious, but that got me thinking – what are my must-have scripts for managing my Oracle database? I know we’re supposed to use they ‘tool’ things, but I seriously doubt any real DBA relies 100% on what a pretty console screen…
For me, it’s leading. If I have a code or syntax problem, I find it easier to see the line missing the comma if I can look at the first char position. Of course you may say that’s crazy, and any reasonable programmer would demand trailing commas. I’m guessing your IDE offers formatting options that allow you to choose what works best for you. A few minutes investing these could save you hours of searching…
Missed PT I?: Read Part I my favorite aspects of each RDBMS platform Update: Read PT III where I talk about monitoring indexes I had the pleasure of hanging out with @oraclenerd and @SQLChicken earlier this year in Tampa, FL. It was remarkable for a couple of reasons, but what I remember most is playing translator. When @SQLChicken would rave about one of the SQL experts on Twitter, I would relate to @oraclenerd how that…
Disclaimer: I wrote this before I started working at Oracle. I still believe what I wrote more than 10 years ago, how trippy is that? One of the most dangerous phrases to be uttered in an organization is ‘Oh, we have an Enterprise license.’ Once that gets out, everyone will think they can deploy/use as much as product X as they want. It does not take much of an imagination to realize where this can…