Did you know you can run Oracle RDBMS for free? Updated on 11/25/2011 – 11gR2 now available for Windows x32 and Linux x64 Yes, there are limitations (fine print), but just about anyone can take advantage of this offering. So, why should you care? Maybe you are a developer, and your DBA refuses to grant you privs you need to do your job. Well, if you can run your own local copy of Oracle, you…
A lot of folks contact me off-line, asking if I really do hate Chet, or do I just like kidding him. Mostly, it’s me forgetting that Chet hates it when I InitCap his Twitter handle, @oraclenerd. Or am I remembering that he hates that? Hmmmm… Anyways, I needed to write this post so people would know, that, ‘yes’, I really do like picking on Chet. He refuses to wear my Toad t-shirts, and more importantly,…
Do you take pleasure in killing peo…people’s sessions in the database? If so, you are not alone. If you have Blocking Locks, the easiest way to fix that is kill the offending session and free up the requested resource. But, who should win this battle? What transactions take precedence? Should the business analyst have his report kiboshed because a developer is testing a new feature? Should an ETL process be allowed to finish under any…
Database developers and DBAs often play the role of gunslinger, or a hired gunman. Someone brought in to ‘kill’ the bad guy, in this case, an under-performing database. Our tools of the trade are not as dramatic as firearms, but we can do just as much damage. Ever heard of Angry Birds? In this mobile game, users get various weapons (in the form of Angry Birds) to launch at the naughty piggies. What are your…
After a year of tweeting my brains out for the past year, I have some data I could talk about Boring stuff, even meaningless one could argue. Number of followers, number of Re-Tweets, number of lists, my Klout (link) score – ALL BORING. When I try to convince someone to join Twitter, I never reference these slightly less than meaningless metrics. I talk about the REAL value of Twitter – the relationships I’ve cultivated or…
Do you run a 3rd party application that uses Oracle RDBMS under-the-hood? Do you experience performance issues? Frustrated that you do not own the application SQL that is causing the issues? Maybe an upcoming upgrade to 11g might give you some relief. Many of the customers I speak with are unaware of a new 11g feature called ‘SQL Plan Management’ (docs.) A big bonus here is that a majority of the functionality is available without…
Farming out your application to a hosting service really has a lot of appeal. Let someone else worry about backups, performance and uptime Service Level Agreements (SLAs), upgrades, etc. But do you really know exactly what your hosting agreement includes? What you will have access to? What is and is not covered? Picture courtesy Public Domain Pictures.NET One of the most eye-opening conversations I’ve ever had was with %*#@(^* – you know where they are…
Is that an offensive question? Does it assume to much? I can’t imagine asking ‘Do you have a test plan?’ I was working with an Oracle group this week, and after hearing about a big application upgrade schedule to go in April, I had a few questions for them. I was most curious how they would ensure that no performance degradation would occur? This would be a major concern of mine for any major upgrade,…
Relational databases are powerful for many reasons, but you cannot deny the ‘relational’ part is pretty compelling. Rows or ‘tuples’ in a table are comprised of related data. So for one row in an Employee table, you can assume that each value or column pertains to that particular Employee. Of course you can’t – or rather shouldn’t – put everything about said employee in a single row or table. I hate using absolutes, but in…
Unscientific research and Twitter gossip reveals that fewer than 15% of folks out there take advantage of Oracle’s partitioning (Oracle Docs) support for tables and indexes. Folks that build their own solutions in-house are more likely to discover and use partitioning. If you use a packaged 3rd-party database solution and it uses partitioning, then I would love to hear about it! Do you use Oracle Partitioning (tables/indexes)?online surveys Disclaimer: Partitioning, like indexing, is a performance…