Category: Uncategorized

I know this isn’t a breathtakingly original sentiment, but the new styles of communication facilitated by the Internet throw up new situations, or are they just the same old human quirks magnified? I’ve come across a few examples recently. On the down-side, there have been a few times when I’ve felt like staying uninvolved and… Continue reading The Internet

Sick of the various problems with Tripod’s blog tool, I’m trying to set up an alternative at blogger.com

One of the most satisfying aspects of my job is helping people. My customers aren’t necessarily IT literate so I get the satisfaction of helping them achieve something they otherwise wouldn’t. For a long time I felt that IT consultants, developers, DBAs and the rest didn’t show enough respect for or understanding of their customers… Continue reading Customer-driven IT

Cool. When I used to teach courses, I liked to point attendees at the free online copy of chapter 1 of Expert One-on-one, the Tom Kyte book. I always thought that chapter was particularly inspiring and would encourage people to buy it once they’d read the sampler. Happily, I just noticed today that you can… Continue reading Database In Depth – free chapter 1

From a previous blog entry :- “… I noticed that the slave trace files are appearing in user_dump_dest. This is with 9.2.0.1.0 on Windows XP Home. I’m using 9.2 because I want to see the discrete SQL statements that the slaves are processing. So, just an interesting anomaly from what I’ve seen previously. I’ll check… Continue reading A small follow-up

In my previous blog entry I highlighted a few of the reasons that integrity constraint checking should not be deferred, stated by Date in his recent book (and by him and others in other papers). At the time and while looking at an entry over on Jeff Hunter’s Blog I felt that functions might be… Continue reading Deferred Constraint Checking

I attended a day long seminar in Edinburgh last year with Chris Date lecturing and it was a rare treat. Thanks again to Peter Robson for organising this. Although I’m not the most academically-inclined techie, which I’m always honest about, I found what Chris had to say enlightening and mostly entertaining. There was one part… Continue reading The Multiple Assignment Operator and Deferred Constraints

I’ve just started reading Chris Date’s new book and I can recommend it very strongly if, like me, you’re a bit lacking in relational theory. It was originally recommended to me by my friend Peter Robson, who was one of the reviewers. Although I’ve read a number of Chris’ articles on dbdebunk and I had… Continue reading Chris Date’s new book

(Switch humour on …)Many thanks to Pete Finnegan for making sure that my embarassing mistakes kick around on recent entries at Orablogs! (and off) To quote Pete … Doug seems embarrassed a little by this but this is common mistake Make that very embarassed, if you don’t mind! Here are the reasons 1) I’ve got… Continue reading dba_registry (again)

It’s true I learn something new all the time. Is it just me? Did everyone know about this? I was talking to one of the other DBAs at work on Friday who was telling me that one of the dbs we’ve taken over looks like it wasn’t upgraded properly. I connected okay, v$version looked okay,… Continue reading dba_registry