It’s still me! That dude that spends a lot of time talking technology, databases, software, and the occasional bad joke. I screwed up. @BrentO told me 2 years ago that it’s better to use your real name on Twitter. And I didn’t listen to him. So now I get to take my medicine and go switch everything over to my new account – ThatJeffSmith. It’s not a coincidence that my new Twitter handle matches the…
Yes, a post about something other than Toad or Oracle! I hope you folks don’t mind, but I need to brag a little bit 🙂 My wife and I welcomed our son to this world on Tuesday night! My wife was extremely brave and did the whole thing without any sort of pain medication. Not that she had much choice – the labor process was so fast that any epidural wouldn’t have had time to…
Two quick apologies – 1)This post may ramble a bit more than usual, and B)It’s not my intent to insult or degrade any of the folks I help online. This blog serves as my conscience and my therapist, and I’m not in the mood to cover technical topics today. First off, you may wonder what I mean by ‘user.’ Surely that is synonymous with the term ‘customer?’ You might be surprised how many people actually…
I stumbled upon an interesting discussion in the ODTUG group on LinkedIn this weekend. A vendor is doing some research I suppose and wanted to know who enjoyed using what IDE and why. Here’s the original question: In your opinion which is the best IDE for PL/SQL programming and why? e.g. PL/SQL Developer, Toad, Oracle SQL Developer. To participate in the conversation, you’ll need to join the group on LinkedIn. My only input was to…
I love Lisa Barone. She helps me understand things like Search Engine Optimization (SEO). So when she posted today an article called ’10 Things EVERYONE Should Know about SEO In 2011′, I read it right away. Please take a second now to read it, as I’m going to help you fix problem #7. 7. [Click Here] is never suitable anchor text Ok, so we should never use the words ‘Click Here’ to anchor tags, like…
In yesterday’s post, I posed a question: What Hint Do You See Over or Misused? Gary (Twitter) responded with With APPEND the rows are written directly to the datafiles and are not logged. If the DBA doesn’t know that unlogged changes are being made then whatever recovery plans they have may be useless when it comes to restoring from a backup. In theory they can set FORCE LOGGING on individual tablespaces so they can’t be…
Sit back and relax as I take you through one of my favorite Toad features: Data Compare. In less than five minutes see how to: Set your data comparison target and source Configure which columns to compare Use WHERE clause filters to limit data compared View the results Synchronize the data (optional)
My employer has a freeware utility you can run on your network to find and document instances of SQL Server. One of SQL Server’s primary advantages is also one of its primary disadvantages – you can spin one up in a manner of minutes. To grow deals at a company buying our SQL Server software, we’d offer to document their servers for them. They would claim they only had 10-15 instances of SQL running. We’d…
It’s one of the most iconic scenes in American film – Roy Schneider’s character is chumming the water and sees the shark they are hunting. The massive size of the fish causes him to comment, “We’re gonna need a bigger boat!” It’s shark week, and I was struggling with inspiration for blog posts, so apologies if this metaphor is stretched beyond your imagination. When Oracle (and SQL Server) need to do some expensive math operations,…
I sell software for a living. Just in case you forgot, or never knew, my job is to present our software solutions to a customer and make sure there are no technical objects preventing them from buying it. Does this make me a weasel? Relatively, maybe a little bit. But, I sleep very well at night – and it’s not because of my $10,000 Dodo down pillows. Our tools are actually very good and are…