Tag: Oracle

Oracle 10gR2 on Fedora 7…

I had a quick go at this installation and it worked OK. I had to load a bunch of FC6 packages to get Oracle to install, link and run properly. It looks like lots of the “compat_*” packages have been removed from Fedora 7, which is a problem as Oracle 10g needs them. The “libaio” package is no longer present. I’m sure the functionality is there somewhere, but I couldn’t get the listener to work without loading the old package. Also, the “libXP” package is necessary to get the installer to run. It has also been removed, along with some deprecated X11 packages that were present in FC6.

I’m sure the cleanup makes sense going forward, and 10g is getting a little old in Fedora timescales, but I wonder how many other applications will be broken by this.

Of course, I’m no Linux expert, so maybe I’ve missed something and these extra packages are not really needed.

Cheers

Tim…

Schema Owners and Application Users…

I was trying to explain to a colleague the concept of using application users, rather than logging directly into the schema owner. Although it’s a very basic point, it seemed worthy of a write-up, especially because it’s been a long time since I’ve written anything about Oracle. So here is it:

Schema Owners and Application Users

Cheers

Tim…

It’s not simple, so don’t claim it is!

Rant Alert. The following is an unreasoned attack on the IT community in order to vent my frustration. I’m not claiming it makes any sense or it’s factually correct. It’s just how I feel today. Maybe I’ll feel different tomorrow…

I can’t help feeling that companies like Oracle are doing the IT world a major disservice by trying to make out that their products are easy to use. I have a quick newsflash… They are not!

This post is really a response to two things:

  1. My current work situation.
  2. Some of the questions I field on my forum.

From a work perspective, the mass exodus of people from my current company has left me having to deal with bits of technology that aren’t really my bag. It gets doubly annoying when I’m having to use bad support services to help me do really basic tasks. If software and hardware vendors were honest and made customers aware that they would need trained professionals to deal with this crap, perhaps people like me wouldn’t be left fumbling in the dark, trying to pick up the pieces.

From the Oracle forum side of things, I’ve really noticed a shift over the last few years and I’ve written about it before. The same type of questions are being asked as they always were. The difference is that in the past these questions were being asked by people trying to learn the technology. Now they seem to come from people who are employed as DBAs and developers by companies. I don’t believe the intellectual capacities of people have dropped over the years. I just think companies are employing under-skilled people to save money, or expecting people to cover roles they are not qualified to do. You wouldn’t let an electrician fix your plumbing, so why would you let this happen?

I don’t claim to know the answers, but I can see that the constant barrage of “point-and-click”, “intuitive” and “self-tuning” marketing messages are leading people to believe they don’t need qualified staff, and the result is a whole bunch of people asking how to recover their production databases from incomplete backups.

IT is getting more complicated and the range of skills needed in a company is getting bigger by the year. Companies need to be made to understand this or they will constantly be finding themselves in the shit!

Cheers

Tim…

Oracle Database 10g for Windows Vista…

I’ve been on holiday for a few days, so this latest release passed me by.

Oracle Database 10g Downloads

Cheers

Tim…

PS. Please don’t ask me for help installing Oracle on Vista. I’ve never done it and I don’t plan on trying. Instead I would advise you use VMware Server or Virtual Box to run Oracle on Oracle Enterprise Linux. A much neater solution in my opinion.

Struggling for inspiration…

I need a new version of Oracle, and I need it now!

I’ve been using Oracle 10g since it was released, and although I wouldn’t claim to know everything about it, I feel like I’ve already investigated everything in it that interests me. I really need a new version of the database to re-ignite my interest and get me writing articles again.

I know the release date is “second half of 2007”, but I really hope this means July 1st, rather than December 31st. Like a true Oracle junky, I need my new features fix… 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

UKOUG – SIG Talk…

A few months ago, Andrew Clarke invited me to speak about PL/SQL tuning at a UKOUG Special Interests Group (SIG). I accepted, and today was the day. I woke up ridiculously early this morning and set off for Slough. I was totally knackered by the time I got there, so I spent most of the first two presentations yawning, nothing to do with the content. Then it was my turn…

I started off feeling a little nervous, but nothing major. About 5 minutes into the presentation I was meant to start talking about baselines, but all I could think about was code instrumentation. This threw me completely and my mind went totally blank. I mean completely! I must have looked like a rabbit in the headlights, because a lady in the audience (Seema) tried to prompt me. Anyway, the batteries in my brain must have reconnected because I remembered who I was and what I was doing and continued with the rest of the talk. As usual, once I got going there was no shutting me up.

When I finished the presentation I closed down Powerpoint and revealed the note I left on my desktop that read, “Don’t Choke!”. 🙂

It’s quite difficult to know what level to pitch these talks at. After-all, 45 minutes is not long to talk about detecting and tuning PL/SQL performance problems. Fortunately, Andrew gave me some good advice on that point, and apart from the brain-fade incident, the presentation seemed to go down well.

I’m not sure I’m a natural presenter, but I do think it’s fun. Although the preparation side of it is a bit painful.

Anyway, thanks to Andrew for giving me this opportunity. Thanks to the audience for coming to hear me speak. And finally, thanks to Seema for helping to kickstart my brain. I’ll drop a book off at your office tomorrow morning!

Cheers

Tim…

Fame, Fortune and Random Things…

Fame and Fortune

Someone just mailed me to say I’m in the Peer-to-Peer section of the latest Oracle Magazine, with two guys nobody has ever heard of… 🙂

I’ll use this as a stepping stone to get my first movie role, then branch out into a music career, quickly followed by a clothing line and a his/hers aftershave/perfume line. Then, after becoming a billionare I’ll start to doubt my own ability and turn to drugs as a way of hiding my insecurities. During this time, I’ll probably do a little shoplifting, just as a cry for help. Finally, after making a number of failed attempts at rehab, I’ll clean up my act, do a comeback tour and win an Oscar for playing a has-been star who’s trying to kick a drug habit. And to think, it all started with one mention in the Peer-to-Peer section of Oracle Magazine…

Random Things (Like it could get any more random than the last paragraph…)

I nearly got wasted by a big white van this morning. On my way to work I have to drive through Spaghetti Junction and at one point, a sliproad merges into the main carraigeway on a curve. The white van driver obviously wasn’t looking, because he pulled right across and nearly smashed me into a concrete wall. Fortunately, I slammed on my anchors, and just before we were going to hit he noticed me and jerked back onto the sliproad. I felt like I needed a defibrilator for the next few minutes. They say you should do something that scares you every day. That’s today sorted! 🙂

I got the Checkpoint Secure Remote beta software installed on my Vista laptop. It seems to work fine, so that’s a relief.

I’ve bought Parallels as a replacement VMware Server, which currently doesn’t work with Vista. There are a couple of cosmetic things I don’t like about Parallels, but it works and it’s cheap. I don’t know if I’ll stick with it, or switch back when VMware get their act together.

I’m having a love-hate relationship with Vista so far. I’ve not spent that much time using it yet, but I can tell you a couple of things:

  • The searchable menu is great. It doesn’t just search the menu, it displays executables and sub-options of groups like Control Panel or Computer Management. Once you start using it there’s no turning back.
  • The amount of confirmation dialogs required for simple tasks is nuts. I use a login with an account type of Administrator, yet when I want to delete a folder I get the regular confirmation message, followed by one telling me I need Administrator privileges to perform this action, and asking me if I want to proceed. Finally, I get the User Access Control (UAC) confirmation, which blanks the screen when it pops up the dialog. This last one looks a bit like the machine has crashed at first. I tried turning off the UAC, but this makes the red shield appears in the task bar and bubbles constantly pop up saying “Danger Will Robinson”, so I turned it back on. It seems a little over the top. Perhaps I will figure all of this out once I use it a bit more. 🙂
  • The networking on Vista seems a little funky. Connections to Samba shares and other windows machines seem eratic, or impossible. I’ve seen some posts on the net about it, so I’ll have to spend some time reading and playing. So far, I’ve not got a connection to my NAS, which is a pain.

Cheers

Tim…

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (RHEL5)…

I’ve been having a play with the beta 2 of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (RHEL5).

Having seen the various Fedora Core versions released since RHEL4, I knew what to expect from RHEL5, but somehow I hoped for a bit more. If just feels like RHEL4 with a different theme.

I can see why Microsoft always add a bunch fancy new gizmos to every Windows release. They need something to differentiate the product, regardless of its usefulness, and people like me fall for it every time… 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Middle-tier diet…

Tom Kyte has written a nice piece on How to scale.. Suffice to say, I agree entirely with him, as previous posts on this blog will testify, but I wanted to look at this from a different, maybe cynical, angle…

For a hardware manufacturer, doing more work in the middle tier is a dream come true. Sure, J2EE can scale well, mostly because it has to! You need a server room like a Google data-center to run the Pet Store demo application. 🙂 Encouraging companies to invest in middle-tier processing is a massive win for the hardware manufacturers, especially the Intel/AMD based guys.

From the software licensing perspective, this is a massive win also. Scale out in your middle tier and pay us lots of money for licenses. No wonder Oracle are laughing all the way to the bank. In my company, we probably pay more for our application server licenses than we do for our database licenses, yet I’ve worked on far more complicated projects that manage with a single Apache server. We’ve been encouraged to believe that if it doesn’t need 10 clustered application servers, it’s not worth having, when the reality is, it needs 10 clustered application servers because the middle tier stinks!

We seem to be a society that relies on quick fixes. If we want to lose weight we go on a fad diet, get our stomachs stapled or have cosmetic surgery. Middle-tier processing and scaling is the cosmetic surgery of the IT industry. It doesn’t matter about fixing the root cause, just brush over the surface and everybody’s happy… Right?

Wrong! Put your fat-ass application on a middle-tier diet!

Cheers

Tim…

Database Change Notification…

I’ve recently been playing around with Database Change Notification, which is basically an asynchronous triggering mechanism. I’m not really sure why I would use it in an application, but it’s always nice to know about this stuff, just in case. I suppose it’s not drastically dissimilar to the the use of a handler module in Fine Grained Auditing…

I really need 11g to be released, then I can look at some cool new features… 🙂

Cheers

Tim…