BGOUG 2011: Day 2…

Day 2 started with a very tired Doug Burns presenting “Performance and Stability with Oracle Database 11g’s SQL Plan Management”. As with his previous talk, this was firmly rooted in his practical experience of the feature and as such contained a mixture of positive and negative results. Essentially it boiled down to, this works great for some applications and not so great for others, so you’ve really got to suck it and see.

Next it was my Clonedb talk, which seemed to go pretty well.

After that it was Joze Senegacnik talking about “To Index or Not to Index, That is the Question”. Having seen Richard Foot‘s presentation at InSync11, I was pretty confident about the answers to some of the questions Joze asked the audience. 🙂

Next up it was me again, this time giving my Edition-Based Redefinition talk. Once again, this seemed to generate a good number of questions.

Then it was back to Joze for “Getting the Best from the Cost Based Optimizer”. This was a mixed bag of tips and features relating to the optimizer. These style of presentations always contain gems that either you didn’t know already, or had forgotten you know. 🙂

After a short break it was off to the evening meal. This was a more sedate affair than the previous evening. I don’t think any of us could have coped with another full-on night. After the food we moved down to the bowling alley in the hotel, where I was spectacularly rubbish. 🙂

This morning we had plans to do some sight-seeing, but everyone was so tired we’re giving it a miss and being lazy in the hotel spa. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

BGOUG 2011: Day 1…

Day 1 was a packed affair. I went to 6 hours of presentations and my brain hurt by the end of it.

First up was Dimitri Gielis presenting “APEX 4.1 Charts Inside Out”. The talk included a whole bunch of ways to do charting in APEX, from the simple and declarative all the way to the custom and complex. There’s some really cool eye candy!

Second was Dimitri again, this time presenting “Oracle Application Express and Locator/Spatial Features: A Success Story”. The title gives away most of the technical content, but add in some maps and buses as well and you know the score. 🙂 Once again, some nice functionality on display in this talk.

Next was Julian Dontcheff presenting “Tuning Toolkits for advanced DBAs: Oracle Cloud Management with OEM 12c”. I’ve known Julian a long time and I know he has worked in companies that deal with thousands of instances, so his approach is very much, “What gives me the best result for the least effort?” I am a fan of this approach. 🙂 Most of your time should be spent on the few systems that people really care about, not obsessing about every detail on systems hardly anybody uses.

Toon Koppelaars came next with “”Triggers Considered Harmful”, Considered Harmful”. The premise of this talk was, just because people abuse triggers, that’s no reason to develop an irrational hatred of them. He gave a good balance of why triggers are bad, but then moved on to cases where they are really useful. I must admit to being stung by dodgy triggers so many times in my life that I would rather avoid them. That’s not to say I never use them, but they give me a nervous tick. 🙂 Technically I am completely with him. In practice I’m still cautious.

Toon followed up with “Fat Databases, a Layered Approach”. This was based on The Helsinki Declaration. I think Toon and I share almost exactly the same opinions on many things in this respect, but then we are both PL/SQL guys (amongst other things), so I guess we would. Definitely read his blog from start to finish.

The final presentation of the day was Doug Burns with “Statistics on Partitioned Objects”. This was cool because it wasn’t just syntax and obsessive analysis of statistics, but more of the process he went through and lessons learned when dealing with large partitioned tables. It was like a theoretical vs practical comparison.

From there it was off to the evening dinner. Lots of food and lots of dancing and lots of talking about Oracle towards the end of the evening. It was a very late night… 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

BGOUG: I’m on my way…

I’m at the airport waiting for my flight to Sofia (via Munich), on my way to the BGOUG conference in Hissarya.

It’s early and I’m totally knackered. I had a killer tabata-style circuits class last night and a nightmare tabata-style kettlebell class the night before. I still have bruises from the latter. If only I could stop eating rubbish I would look quite buff. 🙂

This is my last overseas event of the year and I’m glad it is the BGOUG event. Anything else and I think I would be looking for an excuse not to go. It will be great to get back amongst my Bulgarian buddies again.

Cheers

Tim…

Mike Carey: Dead Men’s Boots…

Number 3 in the Felix Castor series from Mike Carey, Dead Men’s Boots is about ghosts of criminals possessing humans to effectively allow them to live forever. I got about 2/3 the way through this book then left it on a plane and was stuck for a couple of weeks. As soon as I got home I bought another copy and continued.

I am now totally invested in Felix Castor. I’ve got two more books to read (and another due out at the end of the year) and I’m already starting to get separation anxiety at the thought of finishing the series. This is exactly how I felt about Harry Dresden when I was reading The Dresden Files.

Cheers

Tim…

Configuring VNC Server on Fedora 16…

When Fedora 15 rocked up it brought with it a replacement for the old init-style startup called systemd. In Fedora 15, it was pretty easy to ignore this change as everything (including vncserver) ran pretty much the same as before.

Fedora 16 is a little more “aggressive” about it’s use of systemd. When you issue and old-style service command, you are in no doubt that things have changed.

[root@homer system]# service nfs stop
Redirecting to /bin/systemctl  stop nfs.service
[root@homer system]#

Once again, not a big deal in itself.

So that brings me to the reason for this post. The configuration of VNC Server has changed completely between Fedora 15 and Fedora 16. By default you can’t get away with editing the “/etc/sysconfig/vncservers” file anymore. That issue prompted me to knock up a quick article to remind myself how to do the systemd-style setup.

I included the old method for the sake of comparison.

Cheers

Tim…

Immortals…

Immortals is a lack-luster and truly forgettable film. So forgettable I’m already starting to doubt I went to see it.

Visually is it dark and grimy, similar to 300, which I was also not a big fan of. I imagined the film would be really big and epic, but instead most of the scenes were really small scale. Some of the sets looked positively “amateur dramatic” at times. I guess someone got a bit bored during the CGI touching up.

It’s not a really bad film, but it’s not good either. It’s just kinda meh, which has got to be one of the worst reactions a film can get. If I were to make a film I would hope it was either amazing or really terrible. Mediocre is so not worth it.

I’m still eagerly anticipating the new Twilight film, because I know it is going to be really terrible! Something I can really and truly hate with every fibre of my being! 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

DV8: Can we talk about this?

One of my friends is a drama teacher, so every once in a while I get invited to see productions that are touring locally. Last night I went to see some physical theatre by a company called DV8. The show was called “Can we talk about this?” and was about “freedom of speech, censorship and Islam”. I’m not a political or religious person, so the subject matter was not something I’m really into. Actually, I didn’t even know what the production was about before it started. If I had I would probably have thought, “sounds too heavy”, and avoided it. Added to that, I’m not really an arty kind of guy, so I guess these facts make me about the worst possible person to sit in a show like this. So what did I think?

The human body is totally amazing. The way some of the performers move is quite bizarre and the level of fitness they have is incredible. To put it into context, it’s like doing a conference presentation while taking part in a circuits class and not having to stop for breath or water breaks. Flipping amazing!

I can’t say I could totally appreciate all the aspects of the production. I’m just not that into it, but it is good to take yourself out of your comfort zone occasionally.

Hopefully I’ll be back to reviewing crappy movies soon… 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Browser Stats…

Website stats are an odd thing. If you look at them too often and you start to think they matter, which is why I avoid looking at them for months on end. 🙂

I’ve seen a couple of browser share articles recently, so I decided to check out the spread for my website (oracle-base.com). The top 3 were a little predictable.

On the 14th March 2011, the numbers were:

  • Internet Explorer: 42.32%
  • Firefox: 38.68%
  • Chrome: 15.19%

So IE and Firefox are declining while Chrome is on the rise.

The breakdown for IE is a little scary.

So there are about 9% of techies still using IE 6. 🙁

Look away from the stats… Look away from the stats…

Cheers

Tim…

Update: For Frits Hoogland, here is the Broswer-OS breakdown.

Fedora 16 and Oracle…

Fedora 16 came out yesterday and since it’s my main server OS it’s been upgrade crazy round here. All new installs and upgrades were straight forward. No real dramas at all (touch wood).

As usual, I’ve done the OS installation and Oracle installation articles.

Remember, installing Oracle on Fedora is just for fun. There is no real need to do it because you can use Oracle Linux for free and the latest version of VirtualBox has a Fedora 16 rpm, so there is no reason not to use Oracle Linux.

Cheers

Tim…

Film: In Time…

If you mixed up little bits of Logan’s Run, Bonnie and ClydeA life Less Ordinary and Robin Hood, you would probably end up with something like In Time. I don’t mean to suggest it is a ripoff, because it is one of the most original films I’ve seen in a long time. Just that little pieces looked familiar. I guess it’s correct that nothing is truly original. 🙂

Justin Timberlake is quite good, with the exception of when he tries to cry. He’s certainly less annoying than when he is singing and dancing. I find Amanda Seyfried‘s face really interesting. She turned the mediocre Red Riding Hood into something almost interesting.

Can’t really say too much without spoiling it, so I will just say I enjoyed it and think it is worth a go.

Cheers

Tim…

PS. Nearly time for the next Twilight film. I really hope it is as crappy as all the others. I can’t wait to see it so I can slag it off. 🙂