No. For several years now I have been an Oracle database dude who eavesdropped on the SQL community. I hoped to pick up the lingo and become savvy enough that I could say “Yes, I do SQL Server.” If I’m being honest, then I must admit I have largely failed. Yes, I understand what people are talking about, I can read the blogs and get what they are saying. But as Robert Heinlein coined in…
Missed PT I?: Read Part I my favorite aspects of each RDBMS platform Update: Read PT III where I talk about monitoring indexes I had the pleasure of hanging out with @oraclenerd and @SQLChicken earlier this year in Tampa, FL. It was remarkable for a couple of reasons, but what I remember most is playing translator. When @SQLChicken would rave about one of the SQL experts on Twitter, I would relate to @oraclenerd how that…
I love books. I remember when my local school system had a partnership (evil plan) with Pizza Hut. For every six books I read, I earned a free personal pizza. I was reading upwards of 10-20 books a month when I was in elementary school. This may have been partly due to me living in a rural area with no local kids my age to play with, but I’ll pretend it was because I was…
For most couples, ‘date night’ is something to look forward to, but unfortunately does not come around often enough. For others, even the word ‘date’ sends a chill down their spine. It’s not an adverse reaction to their partner, but rather a unpleasant reminder to the daily toil that is working with DATE formatted data in their relational database. Wow, that opening segue was more awkward than my first date with my wife…which is another…
Many moons ago, this was a pretty straightforward question. It also had a very easy answer, the DBA owned performance. By that I mean if the database or it’s applications did not perform as expected, it was the DBA who would step in and fix it. Several years ago this began to change. More and more shops started to expect the developers to have more than a passing awareness that their applications relied on a…
Someone suggested I document where, who, and what I use to get things done in my day-to-day dealings with all things Oracle RDBMS. Since I am very open to suggestion, here it is: Official Stuff Unofficial Stuff Twitter Folks Updated Dec 14, 2014 Oracle Docs Official Link Oracle’s official online documentation. I generally just ‘Google’ the term I’m interested in alongside the keyword ‘Oracle.’ Nine times out of 10 (unscientific gut feeling), the Oracle Docs…
I am continuously chiding my customers to upgrade their software, particularly the software they bought from Quest. Why? Well, for starters it’s in my financial best interest to do so. But, I have no problems sleeping at night because it’s also in their best interest. Why? Companies spend a lot of money on software maintenance renewals. Anywhere from 10-25% of the list price every year goes to this. Software companies love that revenue stream. It’s…
So this was my 3rd Oracle Open World, and not much has changed in terms of my experience as a ‘booth boy’ in the Vendor Exhibition Hall. However a few things definitely got my attention. I will need to re-evaluate how I treat the opportunity to attend this conference going forward. I should get registered as a blogger I should attend the blogger meet-up I should meet @jpiwowar in-the-flesh I should wrangle my way into…
Don’t you just love managing your 3,247 accounts and passwords in cyberspace? Imagine being a DBA who manages several hundred databases and requires a password for each of those. And of course said passwords expire after X days, right? Password rules, which cover things like limit of failed login attempts password lifetime reuse max password expiration grace time are defined by Profiles. You can view profile information by querying SYS.DBA_PROFILES. I was approached for help…
Microsoft has a lot to be proud of. They helped pioneer desktop computing. They have very successful platforms like SQL Server and Sharepoint. They are even working on a new mobile phone that doesn’t support copy and paste. But, I would argue their most popular product in use today is Excel. Mayhaps ‘popular’ isn’t the best word here. Most reasonable people will probably agree that Excel is the predominant number crunching tool in the marketplace.…