I’ve been following a number of threads on forums.oracle.com recently - the quality of discussion seems to have improved markedly there since I gave up on it in 2001. Anyway there was a thread about interpreting the AWR report that Oracle provides (at extra cost) and which is very smilar to the Statspack report. The report in question comes from a siebel system and there were some interesting snippets of information from Joe Coffey about the specifics of working with SIEBEL which would likely trap the unwary (like me) when using sqlplus to investigate an application performance problem. The specifics are in this post but are that siebel specifically alters the standard oracle environment on login with 4 ALTER SESSION statements - namely
- alter session set optimizer_mode = first_rows_10;
- alter session set hash_join_enabled = false;
- alter session set "_optimizer_sortmerge_join_enabled" = false;=
- alter session set "_optimizer_join_sel_sanity_check" = true;
Now first_rows_10 is rather sensible for a reporting application where the end user is going to look at pages of results - I’m rather less convinced about the wisdom of avoiding hash_joins and sortmerge joins altogether, but the base point to remember here - for myself as much as any reader - is that when conducting tests using sqlplus (or toad or any other query environment ) it matters that you ensure that your session mimics effectively the one the users will be using.
As previewed by Kurt on his blog, I’ll be giving the 10g Performance seminar for Oracle Belgium on the 16th and 17th October (Oh, and thanks for the kind words, Kurt). The reason I didn’t mention it before now was because I needed to update the agenda to reflect the course a little better. The previous version was cut short but it’s been fixed now with Ramona’s help. Let’s face it, it’s not the greatest sales pitch, but will hopefully give people some idea of the topics covered. (Actually, it looks like the link in Kurt’s blog is broken as a result.)
I discovered the updated agenda had been posted because a little Belgian bird told me that he’d spotted a Google Ads link for the course. If you go to a Google Belgium search page for Doug Burns, there it is. I hasten to add I’m not in the habit of searching for myself on Google Belgium 
I’ll also be presenting the same seminar in Austria on 15th and 16th December and the registration page for that one should be available shortly.
But, for now, I’m going to use some much needed time at home to implement some improvement ideas I had after the Prague seminar. There might be a technical blog or two after that, because I have a few of those outstanding too.
I read this yesterday…
Got me thinking about Q&A sites…
I believe the author there has something - if you introduce a barrier to entry, it will have it so that only those that really want in - are in. I don’t know that metafilter is better/worse/same as reddit and digg - I do know that I used to follow digg, then it became a “not as good place” for me. I follow reddit - but it is becoming very much the same. I’ve never used metafilter (on my todo list now) so cannot compare it. But the *idea* proposed, the concept - it does seem to have merit.
It would be neat to know if this has ever been studied before - does anyone know? Thoughts?
ps: I’m not thinking about doing this in asktom. I was asking in general for “social sites” like digg, reddit and the like. Sites that start off nicely with a small focused community but then turn into a bit mess when they become ‘cool’.