Category: Archive

I can’t promise this means I’ll be quiet until January, but The Boys (and Girl) insisted on wishing everyone happy holidays and a hopefully peaceful New Year. Have a good one …

Now I realise that some of you may think that this is Treelo (I think he’s called) from children’s TV, but bear with me. Bill turned up in the post one day. He was parcelled a bit tightly so he’s looked a bit strange ever since, but he was a present from my mate Dave… Continue reading Bill

We’re implementing a new packaged application at work. It includes a history import job that takes data in a flat-file and loads it into database tables. It performs some degree of data transformation but, in essence it inserts about 500,000 rows into one table and thousands in to a few others. During the testing, the… Continue reading Another 10046 Success

I’ve been thinking about training versus DBA work recently since it’s been a while since I did any training work. I noticed an entry on Chris Foot’s blog that mentions training which got me thinking even more. There was a time in the late 90s when recruitment agencies would look at my cv, notice that… Continue reading In Praise of Good Trainers

First of all, let me be clear that I’m not a fan of GUI tools. That’s not based on a misguided macho opinion that somehow you need to be able to struggle with a command line interface to prove that you’re a good DBA but because :- I’m a contractor who works at a large… Continue reading Oracle Enterprise Manager 10gR2

What’s more, there’s a solid logical argument. So that’s that, then!

five SCSI disks.” I had hoped I’d be able to put off installing more disks into my recently acquired server. I can, because the single-drive tests are going well, but not for much longer. The last time I bought hardware on eBay – the server itself – Peter Scott commented that his company had recently… Continue reading “On the fifth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me ….

Prompted by Jeff Moss’ blog, I’ve been trying out Orion on a couple of servers. I’ve blogged about it over on the ISP4400 blog. (Actually, I’ve only just realised that hosting the blog html myself probably means I can’t use permalinks to individual blog entries. Hopefully the ISP4400 blog has a pretty limited shelf-life anyway)… Continue reading Orion Numbers and other bits and pieces

I decided to visit amazon.co.uk to see if they’d published the replacement review and all I can reach is this. Can I just point out I’m not *that* upset about the review!! Amazon.co.uk We’re sorryAn error occurred when we tried to process your request.We’re working on the problem and expect to resolve it shortly. Please… Continue reading Amazon – nothing to do with me!

I found out today why my review of the new Jonathan Lewis book hadn’t appeared on Amazon. Apparently it violated their review guidelines and they didn’t want to publish it. I’ve resubmitted a shorter review, removing everything I thought might be a problem, so I have my own ideas, but I’d be interested to hear… Continue reading Amazon