Author: user

There are still a few minor (I hope) issues with the blog. RSS Feed 1) Thomas Presslie mentioned that the success of the RSS feed is intermittent – it seems to miss posts or they appear late. I haven’t noticed any problems myself and then realised that my Thunderbird feed-reader is still pointing at Feedburner.… Continue reading Blog Issues

Welcome to the fourth edition of Log Buffer. Maybe it’s the summer holiday season and DBA-land is a little quiet, but navel-gazing seems popular this week. During a conference keynote speech by Ray Lane I attended earlier this year, he highlighted how much the software industry likes to talk about itself and DBAs are always… Continue reading Log Buffer #4

Yesterday someone asked me how to trace a session that selects from a view in a remote database via a link. If they activated the trace on the local instance, they wouldn’t see the bulk of the work which was happening on the remote instance – just a bunch of SQL*Net Message from dblink waits.… Continue reading Tracing session activity over a remote database link

[Clears throat …] Back in the old days, when I was teaching and consulting, I would have plenty of spare time to read books, muck around with Oracle, get the bills paid on time and so on. These days I’m working full time, catching up with friends when I can and have the usual family… Continue reading Thinking Time

Although I let Flatcat state his Loves and Hates for himself and he’s the new Housemate of the Month, I couldn’t leave it there. Flatcat is one of the most long-standing and valued members of the family although he’s far too modest to admit it. Tigger was first but Flatcat turned up on Christmas Day… Continue reading Flatcat

Well, if you can make it … Dear Doug, Thank you for submitting your abstract, “Tracing PX Slaves”, to present at UKOUG 2006, in Birmingham. I am delighted to confirm that you have been selected for inclusion within the programme to present on 14th November. Kind regards Rachel NewtonUKOUG Events Team

Thanks to David Aldridge or perhaps more important, his son Fred, for the monkey pictures. Good Monkey? Bad Monkey? I think he’s probably a good monkey.

I promised Chris Muir I’d post this for anyone who’s interested in presenting in ‘Oz. I wish I could make it myself, but probably not this year. There is only 3 weeks left to submit abstracts for the AUSOUG/OAUG National Conference Series for 2006. The Call for Papers closes Monday 14th August. We are continuing… Continue reading Only 3 weeks left – AUSOUG/OAUG ’06 Conference “Call for Papers”

Dozens of Teddy Bears have mysteriously appeared perched in trees at a beauty spot near Stackpole, Pembrokeshire, Wales. Now locals are trying to work out who is staging their aerial picnic. Source – Daily Record, 22nd July 2006

This blog was originally a summary of last week’s worth of on-call Production Support, but it went so crazy towards the end of the week (and we’re still working with Oracle to fix a corrupted online index rebuild) that it was becoming ridiculously long and a little negative 😉 There might be one or two… Continue reading Call-out