Author: user

I wanted to highlight a couple of blogs that I’ve added to the links on the right of the page. Yas’ blog was already familiar to me because of a couple of posts I particularly enjoyed, including his SQL*Net Message from Client idle event blog. I just hadn’t got round to adding the link. I… Continue reading The Embarassingly High Quality of other Oracle Blogs

Look what I found! (or was pointed to, to be more accurate). This is a copy of a BBC documentary called ‘Commercial Breaks’ that had earned somewhat mythical status in the Spectrum fan scene. I do have a copy of it on VHS in my house and had been planning to get it online at… Continue reading One for the ZX Spectrum Fans

Just when I was about to hit the Hotsos submission deadline (or rather, it was about to hit me), I managed to catch a cold from my other half, so I’ve been laid up in bed for the past couple of days. It hasn’t been too bad actually – thank goodness for laptop computers and… Continue reading Typical Timing

I just heard some rather unfortunate news. Andy Campbell from Sun, who I’ve relied on for material now and again (and is a trusted technical reviewer from time to time) has gone and started his own blog. Expect to get much more useful information there than from me because Andy’s one of the best (among… Continue reading What am I going to do for material now?

Just a couple of small updates on some previous blogs. The database that was suffering from network latency problems between it and the app servers was moved down South last week. It all went very smoothly and that particular problem has been resolved. The 20+ hour job runs over night very easily and other areas… Continue reading Updates

I noticed on Oracle-L that Oracle have a response to the David Litchfield Oracle PL/SQL Gateway Security Issue workaround.

I had an interesting day at work yesterday. We’ve run into major performance problems when upgrading a number of Production databases from 8i to 9i. How could that happen, when we’ve performed regression tests to ensure that the applications perform as well as or better than they did on 8i? Probably because we didn’t! In… Continue reading We Never Learn, Do We?

I’ve just been informed that there is a tribute to Lex de Haan on the Oak Table website. If you are logged into the site, it is possible to add personal comments to the article.

I’m sure some will think this is inappropriately personal, but it’s my blog and I’ll write what I want to. Looking at Howard’s and Niall’s blogs, I was sad to hear the news that Lex de Haan’s illness has worsened. I knew he was ill because he couldn’t make the Scottish OUG Conference and was… Continue reading It comes to us all in the end

At work today we had a trouble ticket generated by BMC Patrol that complained of a ‘Locking Conflict’. Having no idea what this might mean, one of my colleagues (who is learning Oracle) asked how we’d detect a locking problem. Because we were in a hurry, I fell back on a very old, clunky, but… Continue reading Basic Blocking Lock Detection