Tag: Oracle

Post-Conference Lull…

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…

ODTUG 2009 Update

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…

Fedora 11 and Oracle 11g…

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…

Compulsive Tuning Disorder…

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…

Swingbench 2.3…

Swingbench is a pretty useful load generator and I can’t say I really had any issue with version 2.2, but this morning I downloaded the 2.3 candidate and it has a lot of neat new features. Sometimes it’s the little things that make all the difference, like now it can take AWR snapshots before and after runs, which saves me from doing it manually and sometimes forgetting. 🙂

If you’re interested check out the screencasts and viewlets.

Cheers

Tim…

SQL Server to Oracle for developers…

I get a number of questions from developers who are used to working with SQL Server, but have recently moved to Oracle. The top 2 issues are:

  • Lack of AutoNumber/Identity columns in Oracle (solution).
  • How to return recordsets from stored procedures (solution).

Recently I had a question about how you return the value assigned by a sequence during a DML statement, either directly or when using a trigger to populate the sequence value. The one option is the RETURNING INTO clause, but I checked my site and couldn’t find an example of it to direct them too, so I wrote one (here). 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

OUGF Conference

In my last post I mentioned the technical difficulties I was facing before the OUGF conference in Helsinki. I managed to get my demos working again and got the laptop fully charged, so I was ready for the conference to start…

I was one of the first speakers up on the Round Table track, so I turned on my laptop and everything was working fine. About 3/4 of the way through my presentation my laptop powered off and I was forced to switch to an alternative one, running everything off my memory stick. I guess this time I was expecting a disaster, so when it came I think I coped quite well.

Next, I went for the first hour of Pete Finnigan’s security masterclass. Pete is a really cool guy and I really enjoyed the session. Unfortunately I had to miss the second hour because I was presenting. I think every DBA should at least see Pete present at a conference, or preferably go to one of his 2 day workshops. Security is an important topic and I guess we all think we know all about it, but occasionally you need a reminder that there is more there than meets the eye. 🙂

So my next presentation was… interesting… I decided not to bother with my own laptop and use the one provided. Unfortunately there was a problem with that, so the start was delayed for a few minutes. When I started things looked OK, but then the projector kinda froze, so the slides were changing on my screen, but not on the big screen. That was fixed then I rushed to the end in what little time was left…

It’s like every technical problem I could have faced over the last 2 years of presenting was crammed into a single week, which happened to be the ORCAN and OUGF conferences. I hope people got something useful out of the talks. If nothing else, it should have provided some comic relief watching me destroy every bit of electronic equipment I touched. 🙂

The conference was held at an amusement park, so when it was over I got to go on a couple of roller coasters. Then it was off to the dinner, where I got to sit next to Milena from BGOUG, which was cool. After that there were a few informal round tables, which degenerated into drinking (not me), eating nuts and rather random conversations about life the universe and everything. Good fun.

The OUGF event is like a whirlwind. It’s only a single day so it seems to shoot straight past. Even with all my technical issues, it was really enjoyable.

The next day I woke up feeling a little under the weather. I had a bit of a sore throat, but figured that was down to the presentations and general socializing. In the morning I met up with Julian Dontcheff who took me to speak to his DBA team at Nokia. It was an interesting meeting because all the guys sat down, plugged in their laptops and continued to work through the meeting. That was a little unusual at first. 🙂 Anyway, we spent about 90 minutes just talking about RAC, performance, operating systems, networking etc. I like this sort of thing. No agenda, just a group of people sharing opinions on technology.

After that I was supposed to be doing some sightseeing, but after about an hour I felt a bit rough so I headed back to the hotel and spent the rest of the day in bed. Tuomas Pystynen from Miracle had invited me to a beer festival and I was meant to be meeting up with some of the people from the OUGF conference there, but unfortunately I stayed in bed and slept through it. Sorry people. 🙁

Next morning it was the flight home. I really don’t like flying when I feel ill, especially when it involves a 5 hour connection. 🙂

So now I’m home. I bought a new power adapter and the laptop is behaving itself.

This whole week emphasizes the difference between backup and recovery and disaster recovery. I had backups of my VMs, slides and even expected output from the demos, but I didn’t have a disaster recovery plan. I think I’m going to start carrying two laptops from now on. 🙂

I have a few photos from the ORCAN and OUGF conferences, but not many.

Cheers

Tim…

More technical problems…

OK. I’m in Helsinki. My laptop is behaving eratically and my power supply is broken. I’ve borrowed one off the reception and I’m desperately trying to come up with some alternatives for tomorrow. There is always a chance it will all work fine, but just in case I want a couple of fallbacks, including several memory sticks. I’ve been pretty lucky with technology up until now, but I guess that’s all catching up with me on this trip.

It’s a little frustrating because you only get one chance to make a first impression, and I fear I’m not going to make a good one. 🙁

Cheers

Tim…

ORCAN Day 1 & 2…

Day 1 started with a bit of a shock. My demo VM would start. It was completely wasted, so I sat through 2 Steve Feuerstein talks trying to fix it. Fortunately I had a backup of the VM, so eventually I gave up and switched to the backup. It was a little old, but good enough to do all the demos. Panic over… Later I went to presentations by Anjo Kolk (SAN Stories) and Arup Nanda (RAC case study). My talk was the last session of the day. The combination of the mornings antics and the vibration of the boats engines made me feel a little jittery. I wasn’t totally happy with my performance, but I got through it with no major hitches.

Day 2 had new delights in store. I was first speaker on. I started up my VM and all looked well. Started the presentation and bang… No Oracle. I had a quick play but decided to continue without the demos. Fortunately, good advice by Andrew Clark meant that I always bring examples of what the demos “should” do, so I was able to continue without the database. I guess I should have been a little more distracted in this session because of the problems, but the result was I actually relaxed and felt a bit more focussed. I guess it had got so bad it could only get better. 🙂 I felt like this presentation, despite the technical problems, went a lot better.

Later in the day I got to see Sten Vesterli present “What’s hot and what’s not” in the development world. It was a neat summary of the technologies out there and seemed to go down well with the audience. He speaks really well and looks very natural in front of an audience.

So now I’m in the airport on the way to the OUGF conference in Finland and I really don’t know if I have functioning demos. Joy… 🙂

Cheers

Tim…