LewisC’s An Expert’s Guide To Oracle Technology
I love this. Is Oracle the official sponsor of…Ironman? Check out this site: Oracle Presents Two Worlds
I have to admit, I haven’t had time to read the last couple of Oracle Magazines. Did I miss something?
I plan to take my son to see the movie as soon as the crowds mellow out a bit. Every time Ironman shows up i
An enjoyable day, but it flew by. Having not had much sleep last night through worrying about the first time I was giving this particular presentation, I’m glad I was able to present in the second slot of the day because I knew I’d be flagging later on.
The most enjoyable aspect of Scottish events is that I’m bound to see a few friendly faces from previous sites that I haven’t seen for a while and today was no exception. Unfortunately I had even less time to say hello than normal so it was nice to get a quick chat and a coffee before proceedings started with Thomas Presslie’s introduction and the usual Support Update from Oracle. That contained a few issues that are quite relevant at my current site and I could see one of my colleagues taking the occasional note. We’re at the start of a project to implement Grid Control and Audit Vault, so I was hoping we might find when some 10.2.0.4 database and GC components might be out for AIX, but still no word. On a related note, it was very useful to be able to talk to those from other sites who’d been through successful GC implementations - just what a User Group event is for - sharing ideas and experiences. I’d already heard that GC 10.2.0.4 is a significant improvement on 10.2.0.3, but hearing someone else who had lived through some pain until they upgraded to 10.2.0.4 was a very useful conversation indeed.
I was in the next slot and I was surprised I was worried about the presentation before-hand. I know I’m often worried, but I’ve spent so much time with these tools lately. I suppose it was because I planned to spend most of the time on demonstrations, which are always likely to go wrong 
I was aware that I was trying to cram a lot in, too, even though it was a longer-than-usual one hour slot. I wasn’t very happy with it in the sense that there were things that I planned to cover but didn’t, so it could definitely use more work, but I definitely felt in a presenting mood, enjoy the subject and so I think my enthusiasm carried the presentation. I certainly heard some very encouraging comments from a few trusted reviewers afterwards and had a couple of fascinating questions and later conversations, which is generally a good sign. I suppose it was a relief it went well, but I can see definite scope for improvement. I’ve subsequently heard from a couple of people that they feel inspired to download some software and play around with some of the tools for themselves, which is probably my favourite reaction.
After what seemed like a very short coffee break, we were into the first of Joel Goodman’s two presentations of the day, on Database Vault. This is likely to be part of our overall implementation but we’ve yet to decide the for certain. Even in the unlikely event that we don’t use DV, Audit Vault uses DV itself, so we need to know about it in any case. I’ve seen quite a few of Joel’s presentations in the past and because he teaches so many courses, he’s always got a deep knowledge of the subject and this was no exception, but you can only really touch on things in an hour. Useful, though.
Then it was a shot lunch break of two cigarettes and a chat with a colleague and suddenly it was time for Joel’s next presentation, on Audit Vault. That was one of my main reasons for attending, but I’d agreed I’d get some time with Peter Robson to talk a few things over, so I asked my colleague to check it out for me and settled down for a long interesting chat with Peter and Thomas P and someone else who likes the OEM Performance Pages too.
That was it, though, because I had to get away by 2:30. A short, tiring but fun day and a few slides to look through this evening. Back to normal work tomorrow.
I blogged about TripIt and Dopplr a while back; both services collect your travel plans, allow you to share them with people, and alert you when people in your network are nearby your stated location.
Until recently, you had to tell them both where you were. Then Yahoo released Fire Eagle into private beta in early [...]
Some days… Some days the questions just make me scratch my head….
ROW TO COLUMN CONVERSION April 30, 2008 - 5am US/Eastern Reviewer: ROOPA from india HOW TO CONVERT YEARLY DATA INTO MONTHLY DATA? Followup April 30, 2008 - 10am US/Eastern: BY MAKING IT UP I GUESS?
Could it be more ambiguous? I have yearly data (one presumes that is data aggregated to the level of a year). How do I convert that into monthly data. Short of "making it up", I have no idea… do you?
Now, they did followup later with
table1 formatMONTH AMOUNT_PAID01.12.2006 00:00:00 539501.11.2006 00:00:00 56701.11.2006 00:00:00 197401.04.2007 00:00:00 246201.04.2007 00:00:00 197401.11.2006 00:00:00 539501.02.2008 00:00:00 5395 table2 formatMONTH JAN FEB MAR APR MAY JUN JUL AUG SEP OCT NOV DEC01-DEC-2006 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 539501-FEB-2007 0 5395 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 001-NOV-2006 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 5395 0 how to convert table1 format into table2 format i.e yearly data to monthly data.
Now, I don’t know about you - but table1 looks suspiciously like "discrete observations with an associated date - the date consisting of year, month and day". I certainly do not see "yearly data".
I also like how they used 5,395 three times, just to make it as ambiguous as possible (wonder what happened to 567, 1,974 and so on?) They skipped what are likely the interesting output examples - their "yearly data that is not yearly" that has more than one observation in a month.
I guess, I GUESS, their date format is DAY-MONTH-YEAR now, that changes table1 to look suspiciously like "discrete observations with an associate date - the date consisting solely of year and month". But, we’d be GUESSSING.
And I see a 01-FEB-2007 in table2, but I see 01.02.2008 in table1. I have to presume that is a "typo"
sigh, and there wasn’t even a create table, insert into table supplied - they want me to do that.
And the output looks utterly useless. If column 1 is "01-dec-2006", why bother having a DEC column in the output? We already KNOW what month this is for - every row will have 11 zeros, every single one. Seems a bit "silly".
Asking good, well formed questions is not an art, not magic. It is however a skill. And I find many times that when I frame my question for someone else - I find my answer.
Goes back to yesterdays post. Writing software requires some things - a plan being one of them. Until you can phrase your requirements in a detailed fashion - I’m not sure you know what they are or why you are doing something…..
entire question is:
Record level Audit Old\New value same Error April 30, 2008 - 9am US/Eastern
Reviewer: sasirekha from India
I have some problem using Audit Record.
Generally if we map a record to the audit Record, it will track the details of
the table insert, update, delete.
While I update the record, it will insert two different row in audit record
like Audit Action K and N.
But both are contain the same values..
I need the old and new value.
Can any one please give me the solution with this !
questions from me:
How to speed up the insert and update in a partion table of more than 60 millions Rows ?
Best regards,
Sam.
I don’t get it some days, just do not get it.
Oracle-L has been hosting an interesting thread on migrating to another (cheaper) DBMS. It seems like the company in question has not targeted a specific product yet, they just want a cheaper one. The entire thread has much to recommend it but I would like to highlight Mark Brinsmead’s analysis of the definition of ‘processor’ in the Oracle License and Services Agreement, because it complements my post on licensing multi-core servers.
“[The OLSA] certainly adds a new wrinkle to SE licensing that I had not noticed until just now. Probably a lot of IT professionals, few IT managers, and even fewer lawyers, know the difference between a ‘chip’ and a ‘carrier’. What’s more, how many people *know* when they are purchasing a system with quad-core X86 ‘CPUs’ whether the carriers in that system contain a single chip with 4 cores, 2 chips with two cores each, or four single-core chips. It makes little difference when purchasing the hardware (well, okay, it might make more than you think), but it can make a *huge* difference to your license costs and compliance.”
After yet another post by someone whose database has crashed without running in archivelog mode and without having multiplexed redo logs, it makes me think it’s about time Oracle changed the default installation to include both these things.
Over the last few versions, Oracle have consistently made the database easier to install and use, but they [...]