Author: user

So what can I do? I’ve messed around with templates, updated the back-end database and I’m going round in circles. My problem? Well <pre> tags are what I’m looking for so that the output of queries are spaced correctly, but IE doesn’t like <br> tags inside <pre> tags and ignores them. Firefox doesn’t. So maybe… Continue reading Grrrrrr!

Six years ago I started playing around with XML, XSL and WML/WAP using an early version of the Oracle XML Developer’s Toolkit as an interesting little change from DBA work. I ended up presenting ‘Developing Dynamic WAP-Enabled Websites using Oracle’s XML Tools’ at Openworld in San Francisco, EOUG in Madrid and UKOUG in Birmingham. You… Continue reading Technology Pioneer!

Howard Rogers left a comment on my last blog, showing an example of using alter table … move on a 10gR2 database on Linux. In his example, unlike mine, the table rebuild did not nullify the table’s statistics. I admit I was surprised myself when I ran my example yesterday so I was concerned that… Continue reading alter table … move and table stats

While working on the ITL deadlock problem (which looks like it’s been fixed by the initrans increase and table rebuild), the developers highlighted another table as hitting this problem in the past. When I investigated, I found that initrans had already been set to 6 so this had obviously happened in the past on the… Continue reading Table reorgs and statistics

I think that one of the most important skills of a good DBA and one of the most difficult to maintain as your experience grows is to stay open-minded. When I got into work this morning, there was an email waiting for me from a frustrated developer who wanted to know why one of the… Continue reading Being Open-minded

Thanks for playing with us! You’re final rank in the World Cup 2006 APEX application is 92 out of 425. Some more info: – Played Games: 64 – Correct prediction of games: 41 – Wrong prediction of games: 23 – Correct prediction of score: 3 – Wrong prediction of score: 61 – Your points: 47

I’ve been doing some house-keeping on the blog lately which is part of the reason for fewer posts. I tidied up loads of old entries last night (still a few to go) and thought I’d come up with perfect code formatting in the current template (just the one for now). However it looks like the… Continue reading Blog-keeping

… than cleaning up old blogs and flooding Oracle News Aggregators (sorry Eddie!). I still have a few DBA-role rants up my sleeve but I’ve decided that I need to get out of the house a bit more. Expect a few days peace and quiet from me (if not for me). (Now I just have… Continue reading There’s more to life …

I’ve seen that question asked often in forums and mail groups. It’s easy to understand why there’s so much confusion because, for most DBAs, if you’ve seen one database, you’ve seen them all. Or rather, you haven’t seen any of them. What I mean is that every database that lands in your hands is new,… Continue reading What’s a ‘Data Warehouse DBA’?

In an earlier blog I talked about saving optimiser statistics and suggested that there are a couple of approaches to viewing saved statistics. It’s not rocket science to view the contents of the stats table directly, but Oracle could change the format over time, so it’s probably best to use the supplied procedures for accessing… Continue reading stattab contents