Author: user

I’ve finally made it home and have some time to catch up on the blog (though in truth I could do without thinking about Oracle for a few hours). Anyway, here’s a summary of my day two. I went to see Julian Dyke’s ‘Forgotten Features’ after Mogens. I learnt something new, which is always good… Continue reading UKOUG 2005 – Day 2

Like Frankenstein and his monster, I’ve let the Dane out of the bag. Yes, I admit it, I helped Mogens Norgaard set up his new blog today. Although I’ve made sure he knows that there are other blogging options out there, he was happy to go for the most straightforward option of Blogger, which I… Continue reading My Latest Apology

I was up early, skipped breakfast and ready to go on my busiest day of the conference. I’d volunteered to chair a few sessions to do my bit for the UKOUG but they’d all fallen on the last day! First, Connor McDonald’s ‘Evolution of SQL and PL/SQL’, which was the usual top-notch, energetic presentation. He… Continue reading UKOUG 2005 – Day 3

I just wanted to add my thanks to the UKOUG for the funding and Mark Rittman for the organisation. Like some others I felt it was a bit of a shame that, with 20 or so people on two different tables, I didn’t get to meet everyone properly. In fact, I ended up sitting between… Continue reading Blogger Dinner

Well, that’s the first day done. I arrived at about lunchtime and managed to attend a couple of the Oak Table presentations. The first was Anjo Kolk’s – ‘IO and SANS’. I’ve never had the pleasure of hearing Anjo present and I’m glad I made it. As well as hearing an engaging speaker, I managed… Continue reading UKOUG 2005 – Day 0

Well, after a power cut in Central Birmingham that delayed the start of the conference by about an hour, things are moving along nicely. The presentations that I’ve attended so far are :- Tom Kyte’s SQL techniques. As excellent as I expected and I preferred Tom’s presentation technique to last years keynote that he delivered.… Continue reading UKOUG 2005 – Day 1

I’m packed and ready to fly down to Birmingham in the morning to attend UKOUG 2005. After a long debate, we’ve decided that The Dog is going to stay behind and keep working on the server build. The wireless adaptor has turned up (thanks to Network Ned for excellent service), we have White Box, Centos… Continue reading UKOUG – Ready to go

When I was putting the finishing touches to the CASE paper, Andy Campbell (one of the reviewers) pointed out that he preferred the DBMS_XPLAN output when looking at execution plans for SQL statements. I do too, but I wanted to use Autotrace, partly for consistency with the original DECODE paper, partly because I don�t like… Continue reading DBMS_XPLAN, 10gR2 Autotrace and the CASE paper

I’ve wanted to carry on investigating parallel execution for a while but, unless you happen to be working on a reasonably large data warehouse with a few spare test environments kicking around, it’s difficult. Without wishing to reopen the whole debate about the value of single user test scripts (which work brilliantly for most things,… Continue reading Intel ISP4400

When you’re teaching, a personal introduction is almost mandatory to help people get to know you, establish a little credibility and just get everyone talking to each other. Whenever I did mine, I’d explain what I’d done with Oracle, teaching and IT in general, talk about a couple of personal interests but the one thing… Continue reading Competely OT – ZX Spectrum Games