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I’ve submitted two abstracts for the UKOUG 2006 conference in Birmingham. The first is just the paper that I presented in Dallas in March, Manchester last week and Edinburgh next week. It’ll be a bit like a tour for this one 😉 “How Many Slaves – Parallel Execution and the Magic of 2 Several sources… Continue reading UKOUG 2006 Papers

I’ve been the owner of a few personal organisers over the years, particularly a Hewlett Packard 200LX and a Psion Series 5MX that lasted for several years each. Although I preferred the HP as a pure organiser, the Psion carried the distinct advantage that I could play Ping Pong for the ZX Spectrum on it,… Continue reading I swore I wouldn’t do this

Over the past week, I noticed a couple of interesting Oracle-related articles. The first is Tom Kyte’s regular column in Oracle magazine. Tom’s stuff is invariably good, but I particularly liked this column because it discusses one fundamental topic – joins and the different approaches and query plans and a slightly more esoteric topic –… Continue reading A Couple of Articles

It’s taken a while to blog about Thursday’s event for two main reasons 1) Sadly and quite annoyingly, I managed to lose my bag whilst collecting my car from the MOT test centre. It had all of my notes from the day, bills to be paid and important work notes in it. It’s a bit… Continue reading UKOUG Northern Server Technology Day

Doug, I got the problem with my presentation sorted out. Here’s the story … 🙂 ‘Readers will recall that I had a bit of trouble with my presentation on Tuesday. I got to the room in good time, set the laptop up correctly, so it was displaying on the screen, then walked out of the… Continue reading Collaborate ’06 – Presentation Update II – by Peter Robson

Back to some semblance of normality, able to attend several presentations without being preoccupied with having to do the same. Attended an interesting talk on rule based applications in SQL. Some food for thought here, but once again the slides were stuffed full of text, and code text at that. It’s complex, and no way… Continue reading Collaborate ’06 – Day 3 – by Peter Robson

I was deliberately low key over reporting my own presentation on Tuesday. The truth is, there was a bit of trouble, which I’m still trying to sort out. I think things are under control, but it will take another day or so before the full story can be told.

Whilst partaking of a pre-dinner aperitif with a lady who speaks Geordie, always leave the establishment a couple of paces behind her in case you need to pick up the bill she’s running away from. If the Chinese restaurant menu contains several ‘lung’ options, you may have picked up the one for the grown-ups by… Continue reading Advice for Gentlemen

People in our industry like to talk about ‘Real-world Systems’ or sometimes say, of course in the real world. Yeah, right. If computer systems were the real world, they would have to visit a bank on three seperate occasions just to get some old statement reprints; have to spend a couple of hundred quid on… Continue reading Real-world Systems

[doug] This is Peter’s posting from day 2. However, because he had a presentation of his own to do, he didn’t get a chance to attend so many presentations (try it for yourself some time, you’ll see what I mean). He’s also, in typically modest Peter style, completely neglected to mention his own presentation, which… Continue reading Collaborate ’06 – Day 2 – by Peter Robson