Prince of Persia and Darwin Awards Wannabe…

I’ve just got back from watching Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. It’s a lightweight action adventure, which I found quite entertaining. Jake Gyllenhaal manages to maintain a pretty good English accent throughout the film. Quite why a Prince of Persia needs an English accent is beyond me though. 🙂

On the way back I came close to witnessing a contenstant for this years Darwin Awards. A young lady wearing a skirt that most parents would describe as a belt and a pair of heels that must have been at least six inches high decided to run across a dual carraigeway in an attempt to get a taxi. What’s more, this run took her right in front of a speeding ambulance, lights flashing and sirens going. She managed to survive and will no doubt be polluting the gene pool later tonight. The fate of mankind is assured… 🙁

Cheers

Tim…

DBMS_XA…

A few weeks ago someone asked me some general questions about the XA/Open interface in Oracle. Oracle has been XA compliant since Oracle 7, but I kinda excused myself from the conversation as that was just about all I knew about it. During that exchange I was reminded that Oracle Database 11gR1 included the DBMS_XA package to allow PL/SQL to make calls to the XA interface. That made me put DBMS_XA on my to-do list.

Fast forward several weeks and I’ve finally had a look at it. You can see an example of it being used here.

Off the top of my head I can’t think of any situations I’ve encountered that lend themselves to this, but it’s always good to know a little about these things just in case. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…