Month: July 2015

Oracle Midlands : Event #10 Summary

oracle-midlands Last night was Oracle Midlands Event #10 with Jonathan Lewis.

The first session was on “Five Hints for Optimizing SQL”. The emphasis was very much on “shaping the query plan” to help the optimizer make the right decisions, not trying to determine every single join and access structure etc.

In the past I’ve seen Jonathan do sessions on hints, which made me realise how badly I was using them. As a result of that I found myself a little scared by them and gravitating to this “shaping” approach, but my version was not anywhere near as well thought out and reasoned as Jonathan’s approach. It’s kind-of nice to see I was on the right path, even if my approach was the mildly pathetic, infantile version of it. 🙂

red-stack-tech-swagThe break consisted of food, chatting and loads of prizes. It’s worth coming even if you don’t want to see the sessions, just to get a chance of winning some swag. 🙂 Everyone also got to take home a Red Stack Tech mug, stress bulb and some sweets as well.

The second session was on “Creating Test Data to Model Production”. I sat there smugly thinking I knew what was coming, only to realise I had only considered a fraction of the issues. I think “eye opening” would be the phrase I would use for this one. Lots of lessons learned!

I must say, after nearly 20 years (19 years and 11 months) in the game, it’s rather disconcerting to feel like such a newbie. It seems to be happening quite a lot recently. 🙂

redstacktechSo that was another great event! Many thanks to Jonathan for taking the time to come and speak to us. Hopefully we’ll get another visit next year? Well done to Mike for keeping this train rolling. Wonderful job! Thanks to all the sponsors of the prize draw and of course, thanks to Red Stack Tech for their support, allowing the event to remain free! Big thanks to all the members of the Oracle Midlands family that came out to support the event. Without your asses on seats it wouldn’t happen!

The next event will be on the 1st September with Christian Antognini, so put it in your diary!

Cheers

Tim…

Upgrade Cloud Control 12cR4 to 12cR5

em-12cA couple of weeks ago I wrote a post about doing a Cloud Control 12cR5 installation and said I would be testing the upgrade from 12cR4. I’ve now done that.

The upgrade documentation is quite extensive and the prerequisites are going to be different depending on the database and cloud control versions you are starting with, so this is no way a “recommended” way to do the upgrade. Each one will need to be approached on a case-by-case basis. It’s just meant to give a flavour of what you have to do.

Suffice to say, it worked fine for me. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Happy Birthday to oracle-base.com (sort-of)

birthday-cake-clipartToday is another anniversary, but this time it’s the website, which is 15 years old.

OK. This is a bit of a cheat because:

  • The website originally had a different name, so you could say the website with it’s current name is 13 months younger, but it’s the same site, so whatever.
  • I don’t actually know the exact day the first page went online, but I do know the date I bought the original domain name (before the rename to oracle-base.com), so I know the first page was put up about now.

Anyway, July 3rd is from now on the official birthday of the website. Makes it easy to remember, because it’s the day after my birthday.

Cheers

Tim…

PS. For those that are interested, the blog was 10 years old last month. I do know the exact date for that because the posts are dated and you can read the first post. 🙂