Author: user

In my previous blog entry I highlighted a few of the reasons that integrity constraint checking should not be deferred, stated by Date in his recent book (and by him and others in other papers). At the time and while looking at an entry over on Jeff Hunter’s Blog I felt that functions might be… Continue reading Deferred Constraint Checking

I attended a day long seminar in Edinburgh last year with Chris Date lecturing and it was a rare treat. Thanks again to Peter Robson for organising this. Although I’m not the most academically-inclined techie, which I’m always honest about, I found what Chris had to say enlightening and mostly entertaining. There was one part… Continue reading The Multiple Assignment Operator and Deferred Constraints

I’ve just started reading Chris Date’s new book and I can recommend it very strongly if, like me, you’re a bit lacking in relational theory. It was originally recommended to me by my friend Peter Robson, who was one of the reviewers. Although I’ve read a number of Chris’ articles on dbdebunk and I had… Continue reading Chris Date’s new book

(Switch humour on …)Many thanks to Pete Finnegan for making sure that my embarassing mistakes kick around on recent entries at Orablogs! (and off) To quote Pete … Doug seems embarrassed a little by this but this is common mistake Make that very embarassed, if you don’t mind! Here are the reasons 1) I’ve got… Continue reading dba_registry (again)

It’s true I learn something new all the time. Is it just me? Did everyone know about this? I was talking to one of the other DBAs at work on Friday who was telling me that one of the dbs we’ve taken over looks like it wasn’t upgraded properly. I connected okay, v$version looked okay,… Continue reading dba_registry

When discussing Cary Millsap and his work (for example during this week’s user group presentation or when teaching courses), I’ve often said that I wish he was more widely known for one of my favourite pieces of work – the various Optimal Flexible Architecture documents and standards. I think one of the benefits of having… Continue reading The importance of OFA

Don’t know how this first photo will work out, but I reckon it’s worth a try … That kilt! That beard! Those eyebrows (bit of a challenge that one – Mark Rittman’s possibly the only man who could give me a convincing eyebrow competition)

I’ve been having a good time over the past day or two. Yesterday I gave the PX presentation to the Scottish branch of the OUG. As usual, I ran way over so I’m going to have to stop trying to ‘do’ PX in 45 minutes. I wasn’t that happy with it (as usual). I should… Continue reading OUG Scotland

It’s sad that it takes a Bank Holiday weekend for me to get round to doing some more research on parallel execution. Anyway, I was on the verge of modifying the following line from the PX paper … The trace files for the slave processes may be created in background_dump_dest, rather than the standard user_dump_dest.… Continue reading PX Slave Trace Files

Well I’ve had a busy time recently. As well as moving house and starting a new contract, I decided that I should run my PX paper past a few trusted individuals for review before it’s published in Select magazine. (Sorry Tom, I do tend to trust *some* people.) Here’s a tip for you all –… Continue reading Getting it right