Category: Archive

I’ve reached a decision and thanks for the advice. The most significant factor in my decision was a friendly taxi driver who turned up at my door this afternoon with this Back to pen and paper, then 😉

In today’s Daily Record. A fine paper. Not.

After so many people voting for their favourites, I thought I should summarise the results. Don’t expect this to be deadly accurate – so no fighting amongst yourselves, authors 😉 I’ve also kept things shorter by excluding most single votes in the results and discounting people’s 4th, 5th and 6th votes. However, your recommendations are… Continue reading Your Top Three books

We have a problem on one of the data warehouse databases at work. There is an overnight resource profile in place that is designed to stop any users from running long-running queries while other activities are happening. The main limit is on logical_reads_per_call, for example (and this is just a simple example I’ve been playing… Continue reading A Minor Parallel Execution Problem

Peter Robson has asked me to help him out with something via my blog. Our user group is looking at the possibility of having a books section on their website. To help them choose which books to include, Peter was interested to find what readers of this blog would list as their top three Oracle-related… Continue reading Request – What are your top three Oracle books?

I received the following note from Peter Robson :- Hi Doug, A quick quote – “Blogging has replaced the journalism of verification with the journalism of assertion” A statement lifted from a programme on political blogs, but nevertheless relevant to blogs in general. This could give you a starting point for a blog discussion, as… Continue reading The Journalism of Assertion

I’ve submitted two abstracts for the UKOUG 2006 conference in Birmingham. The first is just the paper that I presented in Dallas in March, Manchester last week and Edinburgh next week. It’ll be a bit like a tour for this one 😉 “How Many Slaves – Parallel Execution and the Magic of 2 Several sources… Continue reading UKOUG 2006 Papers

I’ve been the owner of a few personal organisers over the years, particularly a Hewlett Packard 200LX and a Psion Series 5MX that lasted for several years each. Although I preferred the HP as a pure organiser, the Psion carried the distinct advantage that I could play Ping Pong for the ZX Spectrum on it,… Continue reading I swore I wouldn’t do this

Over the past week, I noticed a couple of interesting Oracle-related articles. The first is Tom Kyte’s regular column in Oracle magazine. Tom’s stuff is invariably good, but I particularly liked this column because it discusses one fundamental topic – joins and the different approaches and query plans and a slightly more esoteric topic –… Continue reading A Couple of Articles

It’s taken a while to blog about Thursday’s event for two main reasons 1) Sadly and quite annoyingly, I managed to lose my bag whilst collecting my car from the MOT test centre. It had all of my notes from the day, bills to be paid and important work notes in it. It’s a bit… Continue reading UKOUG Northern Server Technology Day