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Thanks for playing with us! You’re final rank in the World Cup 2006 APEX application is 92 out of 425. Some more info: – Played Games: 64 – Correct prediction of games: 41 – Wrong prediction of games: 23 – Correct prediction of score: 3 – Wrong prediction of score: 61 – Your points: 47

I’ve been doing some house-keeping on the blog lately which is part of the reason for fewer posts. I tidied up loads of old entries last night (still a few to go) and thought I’d come up with perfect code formatting in the current template (just the one for now). However it looks like the… Continue reading Blog-keeping

… than cleaning up old blogs and flooding Oracle News Aggregators (sorry Eddie!). I still have a few DBA-role rants up my sleeve but I’ve decided that I need to get out of the house a bit more. Expect a few days peace and quiet from me (if not for me). (Now I just have… Continue reading There’s more to life …

I’ve seen that question asked often in forums and mail groups. It’s easy to understand why there’s so much confusion because, for most DBAs, if you’ve seen one database, you’ve seen them all. Or rather, you haven’t seen any of them. What I mean is that every database that lands in your hands is new,… Continue reading What’s a ‘Data Warehouse DBA’?

One day I might write something about Oracle but, in the meantime, Sunday was a special day for The Rabbit. As I think I’ve mentioned before, he has a fierce ambition to become a famous rock drummer one day. He’s been pestering us for a drum kit for months and we do the Daily Record… Continue reading Rabbit Rocks

In an earlier blog I talked about saving optimiser statistics and suggested that there are a couple of approaches to viewing saved statistics. It’s not rocket science to view the contents of the stats table directly, but Oracle could change the format over time, so it’s probably best to use the supplied procedures for accessing… Continue reading stattab contents

“They’re coming home, they’re coming home ….” I missed England being knocked out of the World Cup. The tootache returned with a shocking vengeance on Friday night and although it had calmed down by Saturday afternoon, I obviously needed more recovery time. I did watch the match, but fell asleep as it became clear injury… Continue reading ‘England out of World Cup’ shocker!

Is it just me or is there an error in the Reference Manual? We were having a problem with enormous trace files being generated, so wanted to limit the size system-wide. Although I’m generally used to specifying this in blocks, I thought I would try specifying it in Mb. 920> show parameter max_dumpNAME TYPE VALUE————————————… Continue reading max_dump_file_size

I hate visiting the dentist. I hate strangers sticking needles into my gums in particular. It therefore seems obvious to me to visit once every four or five years, when I’m in serious pain. If pain-killers still work, it’s not serious enough. If those nearest to me threaten to kidnap me and drag me to… Continue reading Dentists

Eventually, you start to run out of titles to say ‘here are a few links I’ve been looking at this week’ 😉 I enjoyed the debate about the value and dangers of the Internet over on Tom Kyte’s blog. There are aspects of both sides of the argument I agree with but there has been… Continue reading What’s going on out there