Author: user

(Because an opportunity to use an ABBA album title as a blog title should never be missed 😉) The usual East-to-West jetlag has kicked in and, despite being in bed and asleep at 10:30 pm and being due a decent sleep, I woke up at 1:30, then 2:30, then 3:30 and although my eyes wouldn’t… Continue reading Arrival

I mentioned previously that I’ll be spending January in Canada – Ottawa, to be precise. After I mentioned here that I was looking for a job, Paul Vallee of the Pythian Group contacted me to ask if I’d be interested in working for Pythian if I was able to work from Edinburgh. The only reason… Continue reading A Fresh Start

Well, I wish that were true, but at least a short term seasonal truce has broken out in the Burns household. Past disagreements have been put aside and there’ll be no mention of the Cuddly Toy Front from The Boys and Polly and no whinging and moaning from my side. Well, I can’t really guarantee… Continue reading Merry Christmas (War is Over)

I’d planned a little blogging this weekend but my niece gave birth at 4:43 am today and it looks like I’ll spend tomorrow driving to Aberdeen to visit her. It’s only about 100 miles each way, but they’re among the worst 100 miles I’ve ever driven 🙁 (Anyone who’s commuted to Aberdeen will know what… Continue reading coComment and Oprofile

Here’s a top tip for anyone who I might interview for a DBA job in future, based on three consecutive interviews for my replacement I just overheard. If you really don’t know the name of the package you use to collect object statistics for the cost based optimiser in 9i, you’re really *not* a DBA… Continue reading Despicable

Here’s an early version of the speaker list for next year’s Hotsos Symposium. Given the fact that I’m going to have an unusually busy January, I’d better start work 😉

Looking back at the three blogs (and hopefully the comments, where others have made some very useful contributions), it’s all quite unsatisfactory, isn’t it? We haven’t solved the problem. All we’ve proved is that the tests aren’t equivalent, although I think there’s value in that negative result because I was asked to investigate ‘what is… Continue reading A More Complex Statspack Example – Summary

The more I compare these two reports, the more the workload looks different. In particular, as Gary pointed out in his comment to the last blog, our environment is committing a lot more transactions than the vendor’s. (Remember those log file sync waits? The extra redo per second?) Let’s take a look at the various… Continue reading A More Complex Statspack Example – Part 3

So far we’re barely into the comparison of the Statspack reports from the two different test environments and they look quite different already. Next up, the Instance Efficiency Percentages. I have to confess that I rarely find these very useful because the numbers are always near 100% on most databases I look at and, even… Continue reading A More Complex Statspack Example – Part 2

Following on from the last Statspack example, up popped an example at work this week of another common reason I use Statspack – comparing the performance of different environments. It’s also a nice illustration of some of Statspack’s limitations. Because a Statspack report contains a lot of information and this particular exercise threw up a… Continue reading A More Complex Statspack Example – Part 1