Category: Archive

Some of you will have noticed that I�ve finally added a photo to my profile. This young man is called The Dog and lives on the comfy seat in my house along with various other strange animals (notably Flatcat, Tiggs and Bill, who I might post a photo of later. The Dog has a keen… Continue reading The Dog

When I was writing about the ? shortcut in sqlplus, I half-remembered that I’d discovered this while some time ago while looking at Oracle-supplied scripts (always a useful learning experience). So I went to check that I was right that Oracle uses this and couldn’t find an example. Annoying, because I was sure I’d seen… Continue reading More on ? and catpatch.sql

It’s good to see that Orablogs and Pete Finnigan are both back in business

Some of you will have noticed that http://orablogs.com has been hitting DNS problems again. I emailed Brian Duff yesterday and Pete Finnegan mentioned it in his blog. Brian got back to me to let me know that he’s changing DNS providers to avoid future problems. There might be some interruptions as the service changes but… Continue reading Orablogs

I received an email from Andy Campbell, one of my ex-colleagues at Sun “Just came across the following web page thatseems to contain a lot of well presented whitepapers etc on oracle and a lot of other technologiesMay be worth bookmarking …http://www.akadia.com/html/publications.html The one on locking is particularly good …http://www.akadia.com/services/ora_locks_survival_guide.html“

I’ve enjoyed quite a few of the tips in other people’s Oracle-related blogs (see the links in the right hand pane) so thought I’d chuck in a few as well. This one’s an old one, so many of you will know about it already, but for those that don’t … In sqlplus, you can use… Continue reading A shortcut for ORACLE_HOME

I know this isn’t a breathtakingly original sentiment, but the new styles of communication facilitated by the Internet throw up new situations, or are they just the same old human quirks magnified? I’ve come across a few examples recently. On the down-side, there have been a few times when I’ve felt like staying uninvolved and… Continue reading The Internet

Sick of the various problems with Tripod’s blog tool, I’m trying to set up an alternative at blogger.com

One of the most satisfying aspects of my job is helping people. My customers aren’t necessarily IT literate so I get the satisfaction of helping them achieve something they otherwise wouldn’t. For a long time I felt that IT consultants, developers, DBAs and the rest didn’t show enough respect for or understanding of their customers… Continue reading Customer-driven IT

Cool. When I used to teach courses, I liked to point attendees at the free online copy of chapter 1 of Expert One-on-one, the Tom Kyte book. I always thought that chapter was particularly inspiring and would encourage people to buy it once they’d read the sampler. Happily, I just noticed today that you can… Continue reading Database In Depth – free chapter 1