Author: user

I had an interesting day at work yesterday. We’ve run into major performance problems when upgrading a number of Production databases from 8i to 9i. How could that happen, when we’ve performed regression tests to ensure that the applications perform as well as or better than they did on 8i? Probably because we didn’t! In… Continue reading We Never Learn, Do We?

I’ve just been informed that there is a tribute to Lex de Haan on the Oak Table website. If you are logged into the site, it is possible to add personal comments to the article.

I’m sure some will think this is inappropriately personal, but it’s my blog and I’ll write what I want to. Looking at Howard’s and Niall’s blogs, I was sad to hear the news that Lex de Haan’s illness has worsened. I knew he was ill because he couldn’t make the Scottish OUG Conference and was… Continue reading It comes to us all in the end

At work today we had a trouble ticket generated by BMC Patrol that complained of a ‘Locking Conflict’. Having no idea what this might mean, one of my colleagues (who is learning Oracle) asked how we’d detect a locking problem. Because we were in a hurry, I fell back on a very old, clunky, but… Continue reading Basic Blocking Lock Detection

Here’s a slightly bizarre story. Towards the end of May last year, I noticed an incoming link to my parallel execution paper http://www.pythian.com/news/industryNews/ParallelExecution.html I visited the site and decided that ‘this Pythian bunch look pretty good’. At the time I was finding my work pretty unrewarding and looking back longingly on my days at Sun… Continue reading Now That’s What I Call An Interview!

Having finally finished work for the day, I have some bits and pieces before I get back to the Hotsos tests. Mike ScottI mentioned that Mike Scott has been been really helpful with preparing test environments and offering intelligent argument. Mike’s a Unix System Administrator and has some really interesting articles on his web site… Continue reading Bits and Pieces

It’s only a matter of time before someone brings it up, so I’d best get in there first. Some of you might be aware that tonight is Burns Night and, yet again, I’m a disgrace to my nation. A Polish colleague had to remind me today, even though someone mentioned it in an email to… Continue reading Burns Night

Some conversations are a recurring experience of DBA life. DBA [to software vendor] – ‘So why does the application schema owner need to have the DBA role privilege?’ Vendor – ‘The installation procedure requires it’ DBA – ‘So can we revoke it after the installation?’ Vendor – ‘It hasn’t been tested so we couldn’t support… Continue reading Application Security

Peter Robson, one of the directors of the UKOUG asked if I’d post the following … “You will remember the CD that was made of some of the presentations atOUG last autumn. Could you ask, via your blog, if anyone brought a copy of this CD, andif they would be prepared to contact me with… Continue reading UKOUG 2005 Presentations CD

Well, well, well … there has certainly been a lot of chat about Eddie’s new OraQA site over the past couple of days, to a degree that I wanted to clarify some of my own thoughts after reading other blogs. In no order at all (other than the order they fall out of my head… Continue reading OraQA (part two)