The ORACLE-BASE Blog

UKOUG: I’m now speaking on Monday…

A couple of slots opened up in the UKOUG schedule due to cancellations and a message came through the OakTable mailing list asking if anyone could fill them. Alex Gorbachev and myself stepped up to the plate.

This means I’m now speaking about Clonedb on Monday at 11:05 in the Media Suite. See here.

The downsides to this are:

I’m now up against Connor McDonald who is always brilliant, so I won’t get to see his talk and he’ll soak up all the attendees.
I’m also up against Greg Rahn‘s session on Real-Time SQL Monitoring. I saw this at OOW and it’s well worth seeing.
One of my Brummie mates wants to come and watch me present, which will make me nervous as hell, especially if he is the only person in the audience.

On the positive side:

It will be my first presentation at the UKOUG conference. Long story… 🙂
My Brummie mate will actually go to see Connor, which means there will be nobody in the room, so I can blog about how awesome I was.
The adrenalin rush associated with presenting will help to delay the inevitable illness I get at the end of the year when all my presentations are over. Maybe I will actually make it to the end of UKOUG this year…

So if you fancy coming along to heckle me on Monday morning, you know where I am. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Fasthosts : Your technical support isn’t technical or supportive..

The first draft of this post was rather explosive, containing many expletives and could probably have landed me in jail on some trumped up charges. This is the more moderate version.

To cut a long and boring story short, I made a change to my hosting package today, which suggested it was an administrative change, rather than something physical. The fact it transferred my whole site to another server is annoying, but if I had bothered to read the 3000 pages of T&Cs it would probably have become obvious.

The website was down for a little time, but the static pages came back pretty quickly. This made me think maybe my whole site had been moved to another server. OK. Brief glitch, but no major worries. Then I noticed my forum and blog were either giving “Server Error” or “Can’t connect to database” errors. A quick check with phpMyAdmin showed the mySQL databases were all fine and unchanged. So the pages were fine and the DBs were fine, but it wasn’t working? Now I started thinking it might be a network issue between the webserver and the DB server.

This is where I called Fasthosts technical support. I’m not going to go into the whole long an painful episode, but I would just like to list a few choice points that show how bad the “technical” support can get. The support person:

Didn’t seem to understand the difference between a web URL and an operating system path.
Told me I had just reset my SSH password when I had actually set up a new FTP user for her to use.
Told me that SSH doesn’t allow more than one connection attempt per hour.
Told me I had said FTP was unavailable, when in fact I had said it was fine all the time.
Wanted me to give them the FTP and the database passwords to “diagnose” the issue, when I told them the connections to these services were fine. Having dealt with them before I knew that in giving them these details they would just make a connection and say, “connection works fine”.
Told me the scale-up was administrative and didn’t affect my services, then later said it could affect my website for 24 hours because everything was being moved to a new server. When I suggested the OS file paths might have changed, she returned to the administrative-only stance. WTF?

At this point I had decided the only thing that could be a problem was if the OS path had changed (a few config files were referenced from a secure directory using the OS path, rather than a web URL). SSH was knackered also, so I asked if they could just connect to my account with SSH and do a “pwd”. This got escalated to an engineer????

In the mean time I did a reset of my SSH password, hoping that it might get me connected again. Trouble is the reset request can take up to 15 minutes to be processed. After about 10 minutes I was able to SSH the server again and did the “pwd” myself and sure enough, the OS paths had changed. I put the new paths in a couple of files and everything was working again. I rang back and closed the ticket…

I don’t mind that they use muppets to triage calls. I mind when they say things like, “Let me explain this to you”, in a patronizing tone, then proceed to talk complete garbage because they don’t understand the technology. I also mind when you ask a specific question, like “Can you just SSH to my account and tell me the result of the ‘pwd’ command”, you are bombarded with a whole bunch of crap and the sum total is the original question isn’t even placed on the ticket.

Support is a tough job, even when you know what you are doing, so why do these companies insist on using total dumb-asses? I know the answer. No need to tell me… 🙁

Cheers

Tim…

Mike Carey: Thicker Than Water…

“Thicker Than Water” is book 4 in the Felix Castor series by Mike Carey.

I’m not even going to try and summarize this bad-boy. It’s just a crazy-paced page turner. We find out more about Felix’s life before he became a freelance exorcist. More about his brother, the Catholic Priest. More about the Anathemata, the excommunicated millitant arm of the Catholic Church. Juliet, the succubus, gets involved in the action again. It’s just bam, bam, bam. Love it. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1…

I’ve been looking forward to seeing The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1 for a while. If you follow my blog you will know I pretty much hated all the previous films.

So why was I so keen to watch it? Basically so I could wax lyrical about how bad a film it is…

Well, now I’ve seen it and I’m a little disappointed because it wasn’t as bad as I wanted it to be. Don’t let that get your hopes up. It was terrible, but I wanted it to be worse. Since the last outing the main characters have learned a couple of extra expressions. I wouldn’t call it acting, but it is not so wooden as the previous films. It starts off with a sickly saccharin story line, then descends into something a little darker. It was at this point that for a fleeting moment I thought I might actually… like this film (insert gasp)… But no, it just dragged on and every time there was a scene that could have been developed into something cool, it either petered out, or turned into something from a My Little Pony story. It was just anti-climax after anti-climax.

So in conclusion, it was moderately less toilet than the other films, but not by much!

This has kinda ruined everything for me. I was looking forward to the last film in the series so I could hate that also, but now I feel rather apathetic about it all… 🙁

Cheers

Tim…

BGOUG 2011: Wrap-Up

So that’s another BGOUG finished and once again it was a great event. Every time I go I recognize more faces and my Bulgarian dancing gets a little better. 🙂 I’m already looking forward to the next one I get to attend. A big thanks to Milena and the gang for organizing everything. There was literally nothing I had to do for myself. 🙂 Also a big thank you goes out to the ACE program for funding my travel costs. It’s much appreciated.

For the first flight on my way home I had the pleasure of sitting next to Dimitri‘s wife Crystal (spelling?), which made the trip more interesting. Watching her play games on my iPad was funny. On the second flight I managed to completely screw up my demo database. Thank heavens for backups. 🙂

That’s my last international event for the year, so I guess it’s time for me to get ill and miss the whole of December, including the UKOUG conference. If that happens again this year I think I will never hear the last of it from Debra Lilley. 🙂

I’m going to hit the gym hard, clean up my diet again and take lots of vitamin C. I will be healthy for UKOUG!

Cheers

Tim…

BGOUG 2011: Day 2…

Day 2 started with a very tired Doug Burns presenting “Performance and Stability with Oracle Database 11g’s SQL Plan Management”. As with his previous talk, this was firmly rooted in his practical experience of the feature and as such contained a mixture of positive and negative results. Essentially it boiled down to, this works great for some applications and not so great for others, so you’ve really got to suck it and see.

Next it was my Clonedb talk, which seemed to go pretty well.

After that it was Joze Senegacnik talking about “To Index or Not to Index, That is the Question”. Having seen Richard Foot‘s presentation at InSync11, I was pretty confident about the answers to some of the questions Joze asked the audience. 🙂

Next up it was me again, this time giving my Edition-Based Redefinition talk. Once again, this seemed to generate a good number of questions.

Then it was back to Joze for “Getting the Best from the Cost Based Optimizer”. This was a mixed bag of tips and features relating to the optimizer. These style of presentations always contain gems that either you didn’t know already, or had forgotten you know. 🙂

After a short break it was off to the evening meal. This was a more sedate affair than the previous evening. I don’t think any of us could have coped with another full-on night. After the food we moved down to the bowling alley in the hotel, where I was spectacularly rubbish. 🙂

This morning we had plans to do some sight-seeing, but everyone was so tired we’re giving it a miss and being lazy in the hotel spa. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

BGOUG 2011: Day 1…

Day 1 was a packed affair. I went to 6 hours of presentations and my brain hurt by the end of it.

First up was Dimitri Gielis presenting “APEX 4.1 Charts Inside Out”. The talk included a whole bunch of ways to do charting in APEX, from the simple and declarative all the way to the custom and complex. There’s some really cool eye candy!

Second was Dimitri again, this time presenting “Oracle Application Express and Locator/Spatial Features: A Success Story”. The title gives away most of the technical content, but add in some maps and buses as well and you know the score. 🙂 Once again, some nice functionality on display in this talk.

Next was Julian Dontcheff presenting “Tuning Toolkits for advanced DBAs: Oracle Cloud Management with OEM 12c”. I’ve known Julian a long time and I know he has worked in companies that deal with thousands of instances, so his approach is very much, “What gives me the best result for the least effort?” I am a fan of this approach. 🙂 Most of your time should be spent on the few systems that people really care about, not obsessing about every detail on systems hardly anybody uses.

Toon Koppelaars came next with “”Triggers Considered Harmful”, Considered Harmful”. The premise of this talk was, just because people abuse triggers, that’s no reason to develop an irrational hatred of them. He gave a good balance of why triggers are bad, but then moved on to cases where they are really useful. I must admit to being stung by dodgy triggers so many times in my life that I would rather avoid them. That’s not to say I never use them, but they give me a nervous tick. 🙂 Technically I am completely with him. In practice I’m still cautious.

Toon followed up with “Fat Databases, a Layered Approach”. This was based on The Helsinki Declaration. I think Toon and I share almost exactly the same opinions on many things in this respect, but then we are both PL/SQL guys (amongst other things), so I guess we would. Definitely read his blog from start to finish.

The final presentation of the day was Doug Burns with “Statistics on Partitioned Objects”. This was cool because it wasn’t just syntax and obsessive analysis of statistics, but more of the process he went through and lessons learned when dealing with large partitioned tables. It was like a theoretical vs practical comparison.

From there it was off to the evening dinner. Lots of food and lots of dancing and lots of talking about Oracle towards the end of the evening. It was a very late night… 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

BGOUG: I’m on my way…

I’m at the airport waiting for my flight to Sofia (via Munich), on my way to the BGOUG conference in Hissarya.

It’s early and I’m totally knackered. I had a killer tabata-style circuits class last night and a nightmare tabata-style kettlebell class the night before. I still have bruises from the latter. If only I could stop eating rubbish I would look quite buff. 🙂

This is my last overseas event of the year and I’m glad it is the BGOUG event. Anything else and I think I would be looking for an excuse not to go. It will be great to get back amongst my Bulgarian buddies again.

Cheers

Tim…

Mike Carey: Dead Men’s Boots…

Number 3 in the Felix Castor series from Mike Carey, Dead Men’s Boots is about ghosts of criminals possessing humans to effectively allow them to live forever. I got about 2/3 the way through this book then left it on a plane and was stuck for a couple of weeks. As soon as I got home I bought another copy and continued.

I am now totally invested in Felix Castor. I’ve got two more books to read (and another due out at the end of the year) and I’m already starting to get separation anxiety at the thought of finishing the series. This is exactly how I felt about Harry Dresden when I was reading The Dresden Files.

Cheers

Tim…