Month: January 2006

Why do I publish on the web?

Reading a post by Doug Burns that referred to multiple comments about fragmentation of the Oracle community made me think about my own motives for publishing material.

My site (oracle-base.com) started many years ago as a means of collating information for me to use. As a freelance DBA/Developer, it was easier to keep information on a website than carry it from company to company on floppies or CDs. How-To articles allowed me to quickly remember how features worked if I hadn’t used them for a while. In addition, these articles allowed me to answer common questions with one URL, rather than repeating the same conversation or email. It all started as a means of making my life easier.

The site started to get a bit more popular when I wrote some Oracle 9i OCP DBA upgrade notes and put them on the site. I did the beta exam so there were no upgrade exam guides available. Since I had to write my own notes anyway, putting them on the site was no effort. The process for the 10g OCP upgrade was similar.

On occasion I write specific articles to answer questions, but for the most part I write about whatever I’m currently doing. So it’s still very much a site for me. The fact that others find the site useful is nice for my ego, but not essential for its existence.

Regarding the community fragmentation issue, I don’t see this as a problem. I agree with Eddie Awad’s view in Dougs comments:

I believe that the Internet is not a Pizza pie, it is an open and vast medium, only the useful and the reliable will surface in this medium, the rest will sink into the black whole of the web.

Q: So why do I publish on the web?
A: I do it for me. If others like it that’s fine. If the don’t they should go elsewhere.

Q: Should other people of varying abilities publish on the net?
A: Too right they should! If I think it’s rubbish I won’t read it. If it’s good I will.

Q: Does it matter if they make their mistakes in public?
A: If they can live with it I can 🙂

Q: Is this bad for the community?
A: I’m sure there will be occasional bum-steers, but for the most part it won’t matter too much. We’ve all given bad advice on more than one occasion, and we all will again. Does this mean we should stop? I don’t think so.

Q: Is there anymore to say on this matter?
A: I’m sure there is, but I’m a little bored now 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Change of email address…

The time has come to clean up my act. I’ve got loads of domains and loads of email addresses and it’s a complete waste of time and money, so I’m going to ditch the lot. As a result, I’m starting the arduous task of changing my email address. If anyone has my former email address and they want the new one, contact me on the old address and I’ll send it through.

Cheers

Tim…

My NSLU2 experience…

I mentioned in my previous post that I had bought a NSLU2 network storage solution. It’s a Linux appliance, but it only supports samba, not NFS. When using it from Windows it worked fine, but mounting it from Linux left me with loads of permission issues, to the point where I could only really use it as the root user. After surfing on the net is seemed that this was pretty standard. Then I found the Unslung project, which changed everything.

Unslung is another version of the NSLU2 firmware, that allows you to install additional packages. I downloaded Upslug2, used it to flash my NSLU2 with Unslung-5.5, ran the unsling command and added NFS and OpenSSH support.

Now I have a NSLU2 running both samba and NFS. What’s more, I have SSH access so I can interact with Linux on the appliance directly, making it much easier to work with.

If you’re using Windows, chances are you won’t need to do this, but for Linux users I think this is a really good move.

Now I am really happy with my NSLU2, and all my storage is secure. I guess that means I can get back to Oracle for a while 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Security article, SQL/XML and my PC…

I wrote a summary of some of the recent security posts (Basic Security Measures for Oracle). If I’ve missed something out feel free to drop me a line.

I’ve been doing some SQL/XML again today. It’s really quite simple, but when I’m away from it for a while I manage to convince myself it’s going to be a pain. Well the XML generation was no problem, pity defining the XML Schema wasn’t as easy. It looks like I’m going to get to play with this a bit more in the next few days.

I’ve just bought another 1G of RAM for my machine at home. It makes playing DVDs at the same time as running Oracle10g on a VMware virtual machine much easier 🙂 In the next few days I should receive my NSLU2. After my recent Windows fiasco I decided to get a bit more storage and a NAS to connect them to. It seemed like a much better idea than plugging some disks into the back of my machines. Time will tell 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

jEdit…

I have no problem using vi or gedit, but it’s really handy to edit remote files directly, rather than constantly FTPing files around.

When I’m working on Windows I tend to use UltraEdit as my main text editor, but I use Windows less and less these days, so I’m starting to use jEdit much more. It’s multi-platform, it’s open source and it has loads of plugins, including an FTP plugin to allow editing of remote files.

Just thought I’d mention it 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Raptor SQL Formatter Issue…

It looks like there are some outstanding issues with the Raptor SQL formatter. It doesn’t appear to work at all when editing a package, but it will work for a procedure or an SQL statement. When it does work it appears to have some odd ideas about how PL/SQL variables should be defined. This example shows one case:

-- Before
CREATE OR REPLACE PROCEDURE dummy_proc AS
l_dummy_1 dual.dummy%type;
l_dummy_2 dual.dummy%type;
BEGIN
l_dummy_1 := 'x';
DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE('l_dummy_1=' || l_dummy_1);
l_dummy_2 := 'x';
DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE('l_dummy_2=' || l_dummy_2);
END;

-- After
CREATE OR REPLACE PROCEDURE dummy_proc AS l_dummy_1 dual.dummy % type;
l_dummy_2 dual.dummy % type;
BEGIN
l_dummy_1 := 'x';
DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE('l_dummy_1=' || l_dummy_1);
l_dummy_2 := 'x';
DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE('l_dummy_2=' || l_dummy_2);
END;

It seems to be a little confused by the declaration section of the procedure. I’ve posted this on the support forum. I hope this gets fixed before the production release.

In addition to this, the SQL formatter is a little lacking in configuration options.

Cheers

Tim…