Category: Archive

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

Almost immediately after posting my last comment on SMU, I noticed that the TAR for the original corruption issue has been updated with a root cause Oracle Development has found the root cause of the corruption problem which crippled your database. They have reproduced the problem on an in-house database, thereby confirming the problem and… Continue reading And there’s more … (SMU again)

In an earlier blog entry, I mentioned that we’d run into pretty severe undo segment corruption problems using SMU on a high-throughput database. Whilst looking for something else on Metalink, I noticed Note 301432.1 which says Symptoms Severe database performance slowdown. (Text snipped out here) Cause Large numbers of Undo Segment onlines are being performed.Undo… Continue reading More on System Managed Undo

I’d like to point you towards several articles around the ongoing Oracle bun-fights I mentioned in a previous posting. I don’t think I should add any comment other than I hope lots of people get to read these different thoughts and decide for themselves who they want to trust. First, what Tom Kyte suggested could… Continue reading Essential Reading

I’m extremely relieved that the ongoing problems with my daughter’s PC seem to have been rectified and haven’t appeared for a couple of weeks now. Here was the approach I ended up taking :- 1) Buy Zonealarm Security Suite on CD. 2) Reinstall Windows (The SP1 version that came with the PC) 3) Install Zonealarm.… Continue reading Tips for a ‘clean’ PC

Tired of trying to fix my daughter’s PC (that nightmare’s still ongoing) and dealing with the complex emotions of Oracle professionals (that’ll be me then), I thought I’d try to post something potentially useful. We use System Managed Undo (or Automatic Undo Management – your choice) on a large number of databases at our site,… Continue reading System Managed Undo Problem

The thing is, I’ve read all of the articles about viruses, worms, adware and so on (and I’ve had my browser redirected a few times) but you never really think the worst will happen to you.Today I spent 5 hours trying to fix my daughters PC, which has become seriously infected in the very brief… Continue reading The Dangers of Windows

Well, there you go, I’ve been doing this 5 minutes and I manage to make a bit of an *rse of myself already. The posting below initially described some of Jonathan Lewis’ newsgroup postings as ‘incredibly obnoxious’ (although I was pretty complimentary afterwards). Jonathan queried this and so I tried to find a simple example.… Continue reading The Science of Blogging?

Oh, how could I have forgotten this one!

Ha, so much for curing my laziness! Anyway … Not long after I first started working with computers, I would regularly be involved in discussions about whether programming was an art or not. At the time I was working for a games company, writing ZX Spectrum games in Z80 Assembly Language and there was little… Continue reading Art, science and DBA craft