Category: Uncategorized

five SCSI disks.” I had hoped I’d be able to put off installing more disks into my recently acquired server. I can, because the single-drive tests are going well, but not for much longer. The last time I bought hardware on eBay – the server itself – Peter Scott commented that his company had recently… Continue reading “On the fifth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me ….

Prompted by Jeff Moss’ blog, I’ve been trying out Orion on a couple of servers. I’ve blogged about it over on the ISP4400 blog. (Actually, I’ve only just realised that hosting the blog html myself probably means I can’t use permalinks to individual blog entries. Hopefully the ISP4400 blog has a pretty limited shelf-life anyway)… Continue reading Orion Numbers and other bits and pieces

I decided to visit amazon.co.uk to see if they’d published the replacement review and all I can reach is this. Can I just point out I’m not *that* upset about the review!! Amazon.co.uk We’re sorryAn error occurred when we tried to process your request.We’re working on the problem and expect to resolve it shortly. Please… Continue reading Amazon – nothing to do with me!

I found out today why my review of the new Jonathan Lewis book hadn’t appeared on Amazon. Apparently it violated their review guidelines and they didn’t want to publish it. I’ve resubmitted a shorter review, removing everything I thought might be a problem, so I have my own ideas, but I’d be interested to hear… Continue reading Amazon

Updated 24th November 2005I wouldn’t normally update an existing entry but there are some very interesting and important comments on this entry, particularly from Jonathan Lewis and Howard Rogers, that I’d recommend you take the time to read. Jonathan also mentions it on his website. There’s much more in the book of course 😉 My… Continue reading Another Interesting Lewis Tip

My goodness, nearly a week without a blog posting and my review of Jonathan’s book still hasn’t appeared. It’s been a crazy week at work and what little spare time I’ve had has been spent on getting my server installed. It looks like I won’t be able to get wireless access working but otherwise it’s… Continue reading Hotsos Symposium 2006

Here’s a review of Jonathan Lewis’ new book that I’ve just posted on amazon.co.uk Here is your review the way it will appear: An Exceptional BookReviewer: Doug Burns from EDINBURGH, Lothians United Kingdom It’s my favourite Oracle book of the many I’ve read (apologies to Tom Kyte) and I’m not expecting it to be surpassed… Continue reading Book Review: Cost-Based Oracle – Fundamentals

Code instrumentation is a subject that’s discussed constantly in Oracle-land, probably because Oracle’s server is instrumented pretty well. Once you’ve debugged or tuned an application with embedded instrumentation code you can never go back to just guessing – it’s too frustrating. Every now and again it occurs to me that there are some aspects of… Continue reading Speccy Instrumentation

I’ve had quite a few problems recently – lack of internet access for a while; difficulty in formatting some postings; my RSS feed broke yesterday and I had to be in work at 4am today for some production changes. On the formatting, I’ve decided to change the template to make the main content wider which… Continue reading The State of this Blog

More problems with my RSS feed today – those damn Microsoft apps! Hopefully everything’s sorted now and I’ll need to stop using Word or maybe user Blogger for Word …