Oracle related rants (and lots of off-topic stuff)…
I can’t get on to Friendfeed this morning.
I’m hoping this is going to start a rash of “Is the Friendfeed architecture flawed?” style posts like we always see about Twitter.
As everyone knows, the main reason to use social networks is to talk about how the architecture of the social networks are flawed. If all the social networks worked properly there would be nothing to say… 🙂
Cheers
Tim…
Update: It’s back now. 🙂
I’ve mentioned a couple of times recently that I’m in the process of installing and moving a whole bunch of servers from our current site to a new location. Well the first phase of this process was completed over the weekend. The move involved a change in platform from Alpha to Linux for a few projects, including some Oracle database servers.
I do pretty well all my Extraction Transformation Load (ETL) processes from within the database using SQL and PL/SQL, which by its nature is portable between Oracle supported platforms. As a result, everything just worked.
Some of the other non-Oracle projects use shell scripts and Perl (containing calls to OS commands), which can prove a little more problematic. I’ve just finished helping debug a Perl script that was failing due to the difference in output of the “ps -p <pid>” command on Alpha and RHEL. Imagine how big the impact would have been if the move had been between Windows and Linux!
This just reminds my how “keeping it in the database” has paid off for me again and again. When I treat Oracle as my platform life is easy. When I treat Oracle as a “bit bucket” and focus on external technologies I run into problems.
Just an observation by a biased PL/SQL junkie… Not flame bait… 🙂
Cheers
Tim…
Just before I left work yesterday I noticed a burning smell, kinda like the smell you get when you use a dusty old Scalextric. I couldn’t figure out where the smell was coming from so I went up stairs to ask a couple of the guys to help me sniff out the offending kit. By the time I came back downstairs the office stunk of burning and the lights had tripped out. Some sniffing and prodding later and we found a burned out transformer on one set of lights.
Not what you need on a Friday night when you’re late for Karate…
Well, I’m back in the office this morning, helping to move kit to the new site, and most of the lights are working. The offending transformer has been removed (not replaced). 🙂
Fun, fun, fun…
Cheers
Tim…