Category: Archive

[Clears throat …] Back in the old days, when I was teaching and consulting, I would have plenty of spare time to read books, muck around with Oracle, get the bills paid on time and so on. These days I’m working full time, catching up with friends when I can and have the usual family… Continue reading Thinking Time

Although I let Flatcat state his Loves and Hates for himself and he’s the new Housemate of the Month, I couldn’t leave it there. Flatcat is one of the most long-standing and valued members of the family although he’s far too modest to admit it. Tigger was first but Flatcat turned up on Christmas Day… Continue reading Flatcat

Well, if you can make it … Dear Doug, Thank you for submitting your abstract, “Tracing PX Slaves”, to present at UKOUG 2006, in Birmingham. I am delighted to confirm that you have been selected for inclusion within the programme to present on 14th November. Kind regards Rachel NewtonUKOUG Events Team

Thanks to David Aldridge or perhaps more important, his son Fred, for the monkey pictures. Good Monkey? Bad Monkey? I think he’s probably a good monkey.

Dozens of Teddy Bears have mysteriously appeared perched in trees at a beauty spot near Stackpole, Pembrokeshire, Wales. Now locals are trying to work out who is staging their aerial picnic. Source – Daily Record, 22nd July 2006

I promised Chris Muir I’d post this for anyone who’s interested in presenting in ‘Oz. I wish I could make it myself, but probably not this year. There is only 3 weeks left to submit abstracts for the AUSOUG/OAUG National Conference Series for 2006. The Call for Papers closes Monday 14th August. We are continuing… Continue reading Only 3 weeks left – AUSOUG/OAUG ’06 Conference “Call for Papers”

This blog was originally a summary of last week’s worth of on-call Production Support, but it went so crazy towards the end of the week (and we’re still working with Oracle to fix a corrupted online index rebuild) that it was becoming ridiculously long and a little negative 😉 There might be one or two… Continue reading Call-out

Yesterday I received the sad news that Steve Cain died from cancer. I worked with Steve at Imagine Software for a while and hung around him for a few years more. In some ways, he was one of a number of surrogate big brothers I picked up, because most of them were older than me.… Continue reading Steve Cain RIP

A common requirement cropped up this week. A new Data Warehouse has just gone live and is still in the ‘do we have the right indexes here’ phase. In this case, the suspicion is that there are too many indexes in a specific schema and that a number of them may just be a waste… Continue reading Monitoring Index Usage

That’s a shame. I was hoping that setting the event at the instance level might generate one trace file in the background_dump_dest but, like event 10046, it generates one trace file per session in user_dump_dest. I should have expected that, but I suppose my optimism blinded me. It doesn’t make event 10132 unusable though, but… Continue reading Monitoring Index Usage II – Event 10132