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Here’s an early version of the speaker list for next year’s Hotsos Symposium. Given the fact that I’m going to have an unusually busy January, I’d better start work 😉

Looking back at the three blogs (and hopefully the comments, where others have made some very useful contributions), it’s all quite unsatisfactory, isn’t it? We haven’t solved the problem. All we’ve proved is that the tests aren’t equivalent, although I think there’s value in that negative result because I was asked to investigate ‘what is… Continue reading A More Complex Statspack Example – Summary

The more I compare these two reports, the more the workload looks different. In particular, as Gary pointed out in his comment to the last blog, our environment is committing a lot more transactions than the vendor’s. (Remember those log file sync waits? The extra redo per second?) Let’s take a look at the various… Continue reading A More Complex Statspack Example – Part 3

So far we’re barely into the comparison of the Statspack reports from the two different test environments and they look quite different already. Next up, the Instance Efficiency Percentages. I have to confess that I rarely find these very useful because the numbers are always near 100% on most databases I look at and, even… Continue reading A More Complex Statspack Example – Part 2

Following on from the last Statspack example, up popped an example at work this week of another common reason I use Statspack – comparing the performance of different environments. It’s also a nice illustration of some of Statspack’s limitations. Because a Statspack report contains a lot of information and this particular exercise threw up a… Continue reading A More Complex Statspack Example – Part 1

I’ll warn you up front that this is going to be spectacularly lacking in detail but it’s a simple and true example from the other week of the kind of thing I find Statspack useful for. One of the developers scuttled round to my desk one late shift very concerned about a production feed that… Continue reading A Small Statspack Success

I’ve decided to move on to a fresh challenge in the new year. My contract at my current site ends on 3rd January and I’ve decided not to accept the offer of an extension. I’ve enjoyed my time there, my colleagues have been good fun and some of the work has been very interesting but… Continue reading Reverse Job Advert

A special gift deserves a special blog Here is the present Alex Gorbachev gave me at UKOUG Normally it takes a while to name new arrivals while we suss out their personality and see what name suits but, in this case, we decided he should be named Alex, to remind us of how he came… Continue reading Our New Additions

So having dashed out of Peter Scott’s analytics presentation, I headed back to my hotel to drop my laptop off and find some food! At least when your conference is in Brum, you can find a chippy! There are some strange moments at these conferences, you know. As I walked back to the Blogger Meet-up,… Continue reading UKOUG – Day 1.6

It’s been a very mini-series but I hope I’ve highlighted some of the challenges when designing systems that need to recover from failures quickly. Here are a few ideas and I’m sure others could add their own. Careful planning is essential. Ask tough questions and imagine the worst. Always be aware of the requirements. The… Continue reading Recovery Design Part 5 – Wrap-up