Author: user

Well, after a power cut in Central Birmingham that delayed the start of the conference by about an hour, things are moving along nicely. The presentations that I’ve attended so far are :- Tom Kyte’s SQL techniques. As excellent as I expected and I preferred Tom’s presentation technique to last years keynote that he delivered.… Continue reading UKOUG 2005 – Day 1

Well, that’s the first day done. I arrived at about lunchtime and managed to attend a couple of the Oak Table presentations. The first was Anjo Kolk’s – ‘IO and SANS’. I’ve never had the pleasure of hearing Anjo present and I’m glad I made it. As well as hearing an engaging speaker, I managed… Continue reading UKOUG 2005 – Day 0

I’m packed and ready to fly down to Birmingham in the morning to attend UKOUG 2005. After a long debate, we’ve decided that The Dog is going to stay behind and keep working on the server build. The wireless adaptor has turned up (thanks to Network Ned for excellent service), we have White Box, Centos… Continue reading UKOUG – Ready to go

When I was putting the finishing touches to the CASE paper, Andy Campbell (one of the reviewers) pointed out that he preferred the DBMS_XPLAN output when looking at execution plans for SQL statements. I do too, but I wanted to use Autotrace, partly for consistency with the original DECODE paper, partly because I don�t like… Continue reading DBMS_XPLAN, 10gR2 Autotrace and the CASE paper

I’ve wanted to carry on investigating parallel execution for a while but, unless you happen to be working on a reasonably large data warehouse with a few spare test environments kicking around, it’s difficult. Without wishing to reopen the whole debate about the value of single user test scripts (which work brilliantly for most things,… Continue reading Intel ISP4400

When you’re teaching, a personal introduction is almost mandatory to help people get to know you, establish a little credibility and just get everyone talking to each other. Whenever I did mine, I’d explain what I’d done with Oracle, teaching and IT in general, talk about a couple of personal interests but the one thing… Continue reading Competely OT – ZX Spectrum Games

I’ve been looking for something to read about Oracle recently and couldn’t wait until Jonathan Lewis’ CBO book arrived. I knew of TOTOT (as Mogens N�rgaard has referred to it) and planned to buy it at some stage because I’ve loved past work by some of the authors, but didn’t rush to buy it because… Continue reading Book Review: Oracle Insights, Tales of the Oak Table

What’s good enough for Niall is good enough for me … Here’s my agenda for the UKOUG conference Sunday – Oak Table day. Like Niall, I won’t be there at the start, but even half a day of this standard will add a lot to the conference for me. Then onto the volunteers meeting (apparently… Continue reading UKOUG Agenda

The Dog has had his run for now. Although I find the prevalence of portrait photos on the internet faintly amusing and embarassing, with the conference coming up, it might be worth people being able to put a name to a face prior to the bloggers dinner, for example. I have lots of interesting photos… Continue reading RIP Dog

Well, that’s the HTML version of the CASE paper available. It would have been quicker if I didn’t have such an archaic approach to HTML development for the site. I’d rather not talk about it at the moment, immediately after finishing, but Wordpad is in there somewhere 🙁 I like the boxes though – let… Continue reading CASE Article – HTML version