Oracle related rants (and lots of off-topic stuff)…
What is this years big OpenWorld announcement?
It’s not Oracle Database 11g Release 2, that’s already been announced and released. It’s not Exadata 2, that’s already announced.
So what can be so important it has relegated 11gR2 and Exadata to pre-OOW announcements, so as not to detract from the real message?
The Oracle Games Console. Working title OBox-720…
Get your first hands-on at OOW 2009…
Cheers
Tim…
I’ve been running through my demos before my PL/SQL workshop in Utrecht and I noticed a change in the behaviour of the PL/SQL Function Result Cache. In 11gR1 it was necessary to specify dependencies using the RELIES ON clause, but now Oracle 11gR2 takes care of Detection of Sources for you. Neat. 🙂
Cheers
Tim…
I’ve had my first play with 11gR2 today:
Nothing too unpredictable really.
I guess the most noticeable change is the new installer. I didn’t have an issue with the old installer, but a few friends from the Microsoft world had pointed out how dated it looked. The new is much cleaner, and although it will take some getting used to, I think it is a step in the right direction.
I’ve decided that I’m only going to do 64-bit installations from now on. I see little point doing the 32-bit installations, as I hope I will never work on one again. 🙂
Cheers
Tim…
A certain something has been released today, so like any self respecting DBA/Developer I went straight for the manuals…
At the time of writing there are none listed on OTN or Tahiti. I tried cunningly altering existing URLs to match the new version, but to no avail.
I’m sure they will appear soon. 🙂
Cheers
Tim…
Update: Thank you to Mathew Buttler for pointing out the documentation is available here:
In September I’m teaching two PL/SQL seminars for Miracle Benelux.
See you there. 🙂
Cheers
Tim…
The conference finished yesterday at about midday, so I went into town with Chris Muir and Marcel Kratochvil to check out the aquarium. I managed not to get sunburnt this time. Later we met up for some food and basically chilled out.
I leave for San Francisco airport in a few minutes, then I have to look forward to an 11 hour flight, 2 hour wait, then a 1 hour flight. Lovely. 🙂
Thanks to the ladies and gents from OTN and the ACE program for getting me here and thanks to ODTUG for putting on a cracking conference. Not surprisingly, there was no mention of the new Oracle games console, which we are not allowed to mention…
Doing conferences is always a strange experience. They are a little daunting before you start, quite exciting while they are happening, then I get a post-conference lull. It’s like your brain says, “enough is enough”, and you close down for a few days. Having to travel home doesn’t help much.
Cheers
Tim…
I decided fairly early on that ODTUG would be an APEX conference for me. I’m trying to go to as many APEX talks as possible as a fact-finding exercise.
I’m a DBA and PL/SQL developer, so I don’t have a foot in either the APEX or ADF camp. I was expecting this conference to help me formulate some opinions on the relative merits of the technologies, but in actual fact it’s kinda confused me more. Why? Well, I’ve seen some really cool enterprise developments done in APEX, which look good and perform well. I guess I didn’t expect that and it certainly places a tick in the APEX box.
But then talking to some of the guys from the ADF camp, it seems the barriers to entry have been lowered substantially over the last few verisons, which makes that sound interesting too.
I think OpenWorld this year will be my ADF conference. Maybe at the end of that I will have a clear, but newbie, picture of both technologies and be able to say something intelligent about them. 🙂
All I know is, whatever method you choose for your developments you really need a PL/SQL API layer. Not that I’m biased of course. 🙂
Cheers
Tim…
I spent the day in the Oracle ACE director’s briefing at the Oracle head office in Redwood Shores. We had to sign none disclosure agreements, so I can’t tell you all the “secrets” we were told.
Don’t tell anyone I said anything, but Oracle are releasing a games console. It looks amazing and will blow the competition out of the water. A hand-held version of the console is on the roadmap, but details are pretty sketchy.
Graphics and sound are “no-cost options”. The games controllers are shipped by default, but they are an Enterprise Edition option, so check your licensing before you attempt to play a game.
Remember, it’s a secret!
Cheers
Tim…
It’s that time again where I check to see if Oracle installs on the latest version of Fedora. The result once again is yes, it does. The main website has the links to the articles. I would add links here only the browser on this internet cafe machine doesn’t support cut & pates. 🙂
When I get on a real computer I’ll put the links in this post as well. 🙂
This release of Fedora is probably quite significant as it is likely to be the base for RHEL6.
Cheers
Tim…
I can’t remember where I first heard the phrase “Compulsive Tuning Disorder”, but it was mentioned again at ORCAN recently. I guess my approach to the database is almost the opposite of that. Maybe “Compulsive Non-Tuning Disorder”.
When you’re reading the blog posts on the internet you could be forgiven for thinking that every Oracle database is a massive, high performance, 24X7, mission critical system. We all tend to write about interesting systems and issues, but these don’t necessarily reflect the reality of most DBAs day to day jobs.
I would hazzard a guess that most installations out there would run just fine with default settings and very little intervention.
Why do I mention this? I get lots of questions from people who are running very ordinary systems but are expending massive amounts of energy on pointless tuning because they read the latest article by person X, Y and Z.
Am I saying you don’t need to know about more detailed stuff? Of course not. The more you know, the easier it is to deal with a real performance problem when it occurs. The trick to being a good DBA is knowing how to focus your effort. Don’t obsess about minute details on humdrum systems. Your time would probably be better spent teaching the developers how to write better SQL and PL/SQL. That would probably have a more profound impact on database performance than the constant pointless tweaking.
Enough of my random ramblings for today… 🙂
Cheers
Tim…