Author: user

I’ll warn you up front that this is going to be spectacularly lacking in detail but it’s a simple and true example from the other week of the kind of thing I find Statspack useful for. One of the developers scuttled round to my desk one late shift very concerned about a production feed that… Continue reading A Small Statspack Success

I’ve decided to move on to a fresh challenge in the new year. My contract at my current site ends on 3rd January and I’ve decided not to accept the offer of an extension. I’ve enjoyed my time there, my colleagues have been good fun and some of the work has been very interesting but… Continue reading Reverse Job Advert

A special gift deserves a special blog Here is the present Alex Gorbachev gave me at UKOUG Normally it takes a while to name new arrivals while we suss out their personality and see what name suits but, in this case, we decided he should be named Alex, to remind us of how he came… Continue reading Our New Additions

So having dashed out of Peter Scott’s analytics presentation, I headed back to my hotel to drop my laptop off and find some food! At least when your conference is in Brum, you can find a chippy! There are some strange moments at these conferences, you know. As I walked back to the Blogger Meet-up,… Continue reading UKOUG – Day 1.6

It’s been a very mini-series but I hope I’ve highlighted some of the challenges when designing systems that need to recover from failures quickly. Here are a few ideas and I’m sure others could add their own. Careful planning is essential. Ask tough questions and imagine the worst. Always be aware of the requirements. The… Continue reading Recovery Design Part 5 – Wrap-up

Another late shift today followed a busy weekend attending an evening wedding reception on Friday and a friend’s 40th birthday party in Newcastle on Saturday night, so that closing part of the Recovery Design series might have to wait for a day or two. I’m also in a growing panic about next Tuesday’s presentations as… Continue reading UKOUG Agenda

There was a good reaction to part 3 with sensible comments from people who’ve obviously ‘been there, seen it, done it, bought the t-shirt’ and handled their share of tricky system failures, so thanks to all. The comments are interesting reading for other perspectives and ideas. Although the sub-title to this part is ‘you need… Continue reading Recovery Design part 4 – You need more than one database

For the next few parts of this mini-series, I’m going to start looking at the initial high level design for the system and how well it meets the requirements. First of all I’m going to talk about the most critical database from the business perspective. I’ll call it the User Session database. It’s the most… Continue reading Recovery Design part 3 – What is it with RAC?

I sometimes think that a blog seems incomplete unless the author whines about how busy they’ve been recently. It would be easy to miscontrue that as a plea for sympathy. Maybe it is sometimes but another strong possibility is that it arises from mild feelings of guilt about posting frequency. There’s no reason to feel… Continue reading Recovery Design

I’ve certainly hinted at it before, but if there’s one good reason for Oracle techies to run Solaris 10 (or OpenSolaris) on their home equipment, it’s this. As far as I’m aware, there is nothing available on Linux which is within a million miles of DTrace in helping you see what’s happening at the operating… Continue reading DTrace