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When discussing Cary Millsap and his work (for example during this week’s user group presentation or when teaching courses), I’ve often said that I wish he was more widely known for one of my favourite pieces of work – the various Optimal Flexible Architecture documents and standards. I think one of the benefits of having… Continue reading The importance of OFA

Don’t know how this first photo will work out, but I reckon it’s worth a try … That kilt! That beard! Those eyebrows (bit of a challenge that one – Mark Rittman’s possibly the only man who could give me a convincing eyebrow competition)

I’ve been having a good time over the past day or two. Yesterday I gave the PX presentation to the Scottish branch of the OUG. As usual, I ran way over so I’m going to have to stop trying to ‘do’ PX in 45 minutes. I wasn’t that happy with it (as usual). I should… Continue reading OUG Scotland

It’s sad that it takes a Bank Holiday weekend for me to get round to doing some more research on parallel execution. Anyway, I was on the verge of modifying the following line from the PX paper … The trace files for the slave processes may be created in background_dump_dest, rather than the standard user_dump_dest.… Continue reading PX Slave Trace Files

Well I’ve had a busy time recently. As well as moving house and starting a new contract, I decided that I should run my PX paper past a few trusted individuals for review before it’s published in Select magazine. (Sorry Tom, I do tend to trust *some* people.) Here’s a tip for you all –… Continue reading Getting it right

Almost immediately after posting my last comment on SMU, I noticed that the TAR for the original corruption issue has been updated with a root cause Oracle Development has found the root cause of the corruption problem which crippled your database. They have reproduced the problem on an in-house database, thereby confirming the problem and… Continue reading And there’s more … (SMU again)

In an earlier blog entry, I mentioned that we’d run into pretty severe undo segment corruption problems using SMU on a high-throughput database. Whilst looking for something else on Metalink, I noticed Note 301432.1 which says Symptoms Severe database performance slowdown. (Text snipped out here) Cause Large numbers of Undo Segment onlines are being performed.Undo… Continue reading More on System Managed Undo

I’d like to point you towards several articles around the ongoing Oracle bun-fights I mentioned in a previous posting. I don’t think I should add any comment other than I hope lots of people get to read these different thoughts and decide for themselves who they want to trust. First, what Tom Kyte suggested could… Continue reading Essential Reading

I’m extremely relieved that the ongoing problems with my daughter’s PC seem to have been rectified and haven’t appeared for a couple of weeks now. Here was the approach I ended up taking :- 1) Buy Zonealarm Security Suite on CD. 2) Reinstall Windows (The SP1 version that came with the PC) 3) Install Zonealarm.… Continue reading Tips for a ‘clean’ PC

Tired of trying to fix my daughter’s PC (that nightmare’s still ongoing) and dealing with the complex emotions of Oracle professionals (that’ll be me then), I thought I’d try to post something potentially useful. We use System Managed Undo (or Automatic Undo Management – your choice) on a large number of databases at our site,… Continue reading System Managed Undo Problem