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Well, to start with, it was a great venue. Perfect size, perfectly ‘Edinburgh’ and a nice coffee/bar area. I understand some people were freezing cold, but I think I got lucky. It was also nice to see quite a few familiar faces, including the entire Edinburgh University IT posse! (At least you can get a… Continue reading OUG Scotland

I’m looking forward to tomorrow’s event. As well as seeing my colleague, Simon Kelsey, present for the first time (after I talked him into it), I’ll get to catch up with some of the usual suspects and I won’t have to go through any airports to get there 😉 It’s a top line-up and a… Continue reading OUG Scotland – Perspectives on Server Performance

One of the problems in working with Parallel Execution is that you tend to work on it in bursts, usually when a data warehouse is running into problems, and then don’t work on it for months. I’m in the middle of one of those bursts and there are a couple of related issues that I… Continue reading PX Issues Continued

One of my highlights of the Hotsos Symposium 2006 was meeting Kurt Van Meerbeeck. There are some people I think I’m going to be friends with as soon as I meet them. Kurt is one of the those guys. It turns out we have quite a lot of tastes and views in common (and I… Continue reading DUDE, Where’s My Data?

I’ve reached a decision and thanks for the advice. The most significant factor in my decision was a friendly taxi driver who turned up at my door this afternoon with this Back to pen and paper, then 😉

In today’s Daily Record. A fine paper. Not.

After so many people voting for their favourites, I thought I should summarise the results. Don’t expect this to be deadly accurate – so no fighting amongst yourselves, authors 😉 I’ve also kept things shorter by excluding most single votes in the results and discounting people’s 4th, 5th and 6th votes. However, your recommendations are… Continue reading Your Top Three books

We have a problem on one of the data warehouse databases at work. There is an overnight resource profile in place that is designed to stop any users from running long-running queries while other activities are happening. The main limit is on logical_reads_per_call, for example (and this is just a simple example I’ve been playing… Continue reading A Minor Parallel Execution Problem

Peter Robson has asked me to help him out with something via my blog. Our user group is looking at the possibility of having a books section on their website. To help them choose which books to include, Peter was interested to find what readers of this blog would list as their top three Oracle-related… Continue reading Request – What are your top three Oracle books?

I received the following note from Peter Robson :- Hi Doug, A quick quote – “Blogging has replaced the journalism of verification with the journalism of assertion” A statement lifted from a programme on political blogs, but nevertheless relevant to blogs in general. This could give you a starting point for a blog discussion, as… Continue reading The Journalism of Assertion