Oracle related rants (and lots of off-topic stuff)…
Howard Rogers made a point about colour scheme selection in reply to my Website Design post. My site is already CSS compliant, so I thought I might as well add a colour selector on the bottom-right of the homepage.
I’m not the most artistic of people, so if anyone has any good colour combinations feel free to post them 🙂
Cheers
Tim…
I’ve been having a play with the latest version of the Grid Control:
Oracle 10g Release 2 Grid Control Installation On Red Hat Enterprise Linux and CentOS
It installed no problem and appears to be working right out of the box.
The big question is, does it soak up all the CPU and memory on my servers?
The first version of the Grid Control was a complete nightmare for me. The agents worked fine on the database nodes, but they gobbled up loads of memory and CPU on the application servers, making them unusable. I raised a TAR and was told it was a bug that was fixed in the next release.
I’ve only installed an agent on one development application server at the moment. I’ll add a few more to non-critical servers tomorrow and see how it gets on. Fingers crossed! I’ll post the outcome of this test in a few days.
Cheers
Tim…
In my previous post (Support goes on, and on, and on…) I mentioned that the latest version of the patch in question was issued with some missing directories. Infact, this was incorrect.
I don’t know how, but I was able to see the new directory structure with the old readme file. I can only assume they my text editor, which has remote editing via FTP, was having a bad day. I hear a chorus of, “You should have used vi!”, coming.
Anyway, the latest version of the patch applied successfully to both the development and test environments, so I’m going to schedule it for production some time soon.
My sentiments over the last post remain unchanged, but certainly the last incident was in no way the fault of Oracle Support. I thought it was only fair to set the record straight!
Cheers
Tim…
Just to set the scene:
04-APR-05 – I opened a TAR because the RACGIMON process was taking 20-40% of the CPU on the cluster root node of our Tru64 production RAC (10.1).
05-SEP-05 – A backport of a fix in 10.1.0.5.0 was produced. Note. 10.1.0.4.0 is still not released for Tru64. The patch failed to install on either the development or test systems, so I didn’t go near the production one.
24-OCT-05 – It was decided that the installation documentation was incorrect and the patch was reissued.
12-NOV-05 – The reissued patch is missing some directories. As a result the installation is impossible. (Update: Not Oracle’s fault. See Setting the record straight…)
Conclusion:
So far it’s been 7 months, during which time we’ve been loosing between one tenth an one fifth of our total processing power on our production system, and still no resolution. Great to know that Oracle are on top of their game… NOT!
Cheers
Tim…
The subject of website design has come up in conversation a few times recently. Whilst searching on the net I came across this site:
http://usability.gov/guidelines/ (link now broken)
The nice thing about this site is it bases its statements on research and rates the strength of the research that backs the statements. There’s very little you haven’t already heard, but it seems people are still making the same mistakes after all these years.
The things that stuck out for me were:
For anyone still convinced, take a look at all the really big IT company websites and you’ll see most of very plain and simple:
Personally I find the whole design thing very difficult. I’m not very artistic and I don’t have a great eye for colours, but that may be my saving grace 🙂
Cheers
Tim…
Whilst playing with the search plugins I came across this Firefox extention:
http://www.maltekraus.de/Firefox/Search-Engine-Ordering/
By default the plugins are ordered alphabetically, which can be annoying. This extension allows you for order them any way you want. It also allows you to delete them easily, which is quite handy as different versions of Firefox store the plugins in different locations.
Cheers
Tim…
I decided to create a Firefox search plugin for my website, but I got carried away and replicated all the searches available from my website toolbar. If you are interested you can get them from:
https://oracle-base.com/misc/firefox.php
They’re pretty simple to create, so if you want to make some of your own, follow the Mozilla-Search Plugin Documentation.
Eddie Awad has some search plugins available on his blog. His install page is here:
http://awads.net/firefox/plugins/oradocs.htm
Happy searching…
Cheers
Tim…
I had last week off work, so today I’m playing catch-up. I had big plans for last week, but I spent most of the week on my bed watching daytime shows like Diagnosis Murder and Quincey. It’s like putting your brain in a blender…
Not long until the Christmas holidays 🙂
Cheers
Tim…
On the right-hand side of this page you will see a list of favourite blogs. Well, to say that list is out of date is an understatement. The “real” list is getting a little too long to fit on the toolbar so I’m just going to add a link to a page on my website that lists all of them:
https://oracle-base.com/links/NewsAndBlogs.php
Thank heavens for bloglines!
Cheers
Tim…
I’m currently on holiday and I promised myself I would stay away from the UK OUG, except for the bloggers dinner. Well, I’m rubbish at keeping promises so I agreed to meet up with a friend and do a quick tour of the exhibition stands, and I’m glad I did. It was fun, in a geeky way…
The first person I bumped into was Tom Kyte. I didn’t get to speak with him at the bloggers dinner, so it was cool to hook up and have a quick chat. I got to speak to Peter Scott and Mark Rittman again, which was cool.
Whilst walking around the exhibition I noticed the Net 2000 Ltd stand. A few years ago I received an email asking me to add DataBee to the tools page of my website. At the time it was the only product they had and it was free. It also came at a time when I was trying to get referentially intact subsets of data. Bingo! Since then they’ve created DDL Wizard for extracting DDL from export files and Data Masker for sanitizing production data for use in test and development environments. I spoke to Dale Edgar at the stand and he gave me a demo of the DDL Wizard. It’s pretty cool and the real bonus is that it’s free 🙂 The thing I like about this company is that they have specific tools for specific jobs. They’re not throwing out the one-size-fits-all type of stuff that everyone else is doing. Nice ideas, well executed products. I hope they continue to do well and keep coming up with good ideas. I’ve also just noticed that they are based in Bromsgrove, just down the road from me.
There were numerous consultancy companies around, but my friend pointed out that JoraPh Consulting Ltd were based in Shropshire. It turns out they’re based quite close to my home town. For no reason other than that, I had a quick chat with Jane McCulloch, a director of the company. They do performance tuning, remote DBA work and training, amonst other things. A couple of the staff presented at UK OUG, which is a good sign. The UK economy is still very much centered around the south, so midlands-based companies tend to stand out when I notice them. Us midlanders have to show a bit of solidarity. Keep up the good work 🙂
The Quest stand was very slick, and they were giving away some cool freebies, but I didn’t get hold of any 🙁 I was interested to see the new Spotlight on RAC stuff. I nearly bought Spotlight recently, but backed out when I found that alot of the graphs and alerts had not been revised to recognize the renamed wait states in 10g. Not very useful to have a performance monitoring tool that says everything is OK when it’s actually falling apart. This has been rectified in the latest version and the RAC stuff looks really nice. I think I may have to re-demo it.
The funniest thing I saw was a guy walking out with a bean-bag. The registration area was full of black bean-bags for people to sit on and I guess some people decided they were fair game. One lady was carrying three. As I walked out I heard one of the security guards say they weren’t supposed to be taken off site, but it was too much hassle to stop everyone. I guess next year I’ll hire a truck and furnish my house 🙂
I got a free OK OUG bag containing a folder and a notepad. Free notepads are what I live for. If anyone wants a plug, just send me a notepad… Just kidding 🙂
Cheers
Tim…