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(* Inspired by Cary Millsap, although the story isn’t as elegant as one of his …) It’s 3 weeks, 4 weeks, 2 months since I disembarked from my second boat cruise in a week but it already seems longer. Perhaps it’s because my client had thoughtfully waited until I got back into the office for… Continue reading The Story of Two Boats and Why Justin Bieber Owes Me £120* (Part 1)

I’d bet regular readers might have guessed I’d never get back to the stats series, particularly given my extremely limited output this year Well, here goes … The theme of this post is already covered in the paper and the presentation, so if you’ve read either of those, then you might want to skip this.… Continue reading Statistics on Partitioned Tables – Part 6e – COPY_TABLE_STATS – Bug

Before getting into the contents of a 10053 trace file and looking at any useful stuff, you need to know what the files are for and how and where they are created. Essentially, setting event 10053 causes the Cost Based Optimizer to write information to a trace file describing the information it is using and… Continue reading 10053 Trace Files – Getting Started

Sometimes I’m really not sure whether a blog post is a good idea or not. This is one of those times. I remember a while ago that Neil Chandler wrote a blog post about why you probably don’t need 10046 trace files that I didn’t completely agree with and I kept thinking I must comment… Continue reading 10053 Trace Files

I’ve blogged about deadlocks in Oracle at least once before. I said then that although the following message in deadlock trace files is usually true, it isn’t always. The following deadlock is not an Oracle error. Deadlocks of  this type can be expected if certain SQL statements are      issued. The following information may aid in… Continue reading Not all Deadlocks are created the same

I’ve recently spent quite a while working in a performance team that supported Production performance incidents and worked with developers on application performance before the code hit Production. Whenever a developer asked me to look at the execution plan for their poorly performing statement, they would send over some evidence of the poor plan and in the… Continue reading TOAD Ambulance Button (and a little Google)

OK, so there’s a 365/1 chance of this happening (actually, I suppose Leap Years change the odds slightly) but when I decided to have a quick look at just how atrocious my blogging frequency has been over the past year, I thought I’d take a quick look back at old entries. It’s not something I… Continue reading That is just *weird*

I’ve been doing a lot of work around large volume data loads into an Oracle 11.2 database recently using External Tables and Parallelism and, despite the fact it’s all used well-known techniques, I think it’s probably worth a couple of posts to re-emphasise how successful using the right tools for the right job can be.… Continue reading Parallel DML and ODP.Net

It was long but seemed to pass me by somehow. My presentation didn’t go as well as it has in the past. Oak Table World was great fun and impressively organised. It was great seeing so many friends again but I’d need a month-long conference to accommodate all the time I want to spend with… Continue reading Openworld Summary

… well it is for me, anyway. I know this isn’t a universal feeling, but I always look forward to going over to San Francisco for Openworld. There are so many people I’ll see that I don’t see often enough, lots of cool presentations (if you know where to look) and I expect this year… Continue reading OOW is 13 days away …