Category: Uncategorized

Well, as the which blog was deemed useful (although most commentors did already know about it), how about the script Unix command? It’s very useful for keeping a record of an extended series of actions, like those a DBA will often encounter when implementing a complex change. It’s also useful for attaching a complex working… Continue reading Script

It’s so long now since the OUG Scotland Conference and I ended up leaving early because I wasn’t feeling too good so I’m not going to attempt a review of the day. I asked a few others what they thought afterwards and the general view was that the day was pretty good, if perhaps too… Continue reading The Reality Gap (1) – Software Maintenance

No, I don’t mean the UK consumer organisation, but a simple *nix command. It’s so simple that I’ve hesitated about blogging about it, but when I keep sharing a small snippet of information and people don’t know it and find it useful, it’s probably worth mentioning here. If you work on Unix servers, you’ll be… Continue reading Which?

I have so much to blog about after a couple of weeks of running around, but I’ll start off with an easy one. Check this out. My daughter is on her first ever work experience programme this week but I don’t think it’s going to be like that one 😉 Good luck, Jan!

Oh, well, perhaps you shouldn’t try a new presentation approach when you have less than a week to prepare it, you have a cold (sorry not meant to mention that) and you’re getting ready to go on holiday. I was really optimistic about how tomorrow’s presentation would go, because I like the material, until I… Continue reading Tomorrow’s Presentation

… or is it a Scottish Stunt Double? I’m not sure. I had originally planned to attend only the afternoon part of next week’s OUG Scotland conference. That way I would be able to spend the morning in work and still catch a few presentations I want to see. However, Mogens Norgaard is unable to… Continue reading I was a Danish Stunt Double

I think it’s interesting to see what other people are working with, so I thought I’d advertise a couple of online surveys. Kevin Closson’s RAC Survey has been kicking around for a while now and the only reason I haven’t participated is that we don’t use RAC at all at my current site. Jeff’s 11g… Continue reading A Couple of Surveys

Curioser and curioser …. I’ve been thinking about this on and off today and I really can’t understand the behaviour I’m seeing. In fact, it’s a good job it was a busy day or it might have sent me round the twist 😉 I’ve been playing around a little tonight, trying to find the obvious… Continue reading 11g and direct path reads

I’ve been playing around with 11g on and off this week, re-running some of the tests in this document (PDF file). The main edits required to the scripts were simple ones to correct the locations of trace files, for example (where $ORACLE_BASE is /ora on the 10g system) rm /ora/admin/TEST1020/udump/*.trc and $ORACLE_BASE is /u01/app/oracle on… Continue reading Parallel Query and 11g

Now, that’s weird. A little surprising might be more accurate and maybe I’m missing something. During the various tests with and without parallel hints and different parallel_io_cap_enabled settings, I expected the runs that didn’t use parallelism to show up “db file scattered read” events in the trace files. For example, here’s the explain plan and… Continue reading Parallel Query and 11g – Part 2